The title of Leonard Cohen’s new Old Ideas is, predictably, multifaceted. Upon the influential singer/songwriter’s debut in the late 1960s, a Canadian making his music in the United States while being embraced mostly in England, Cohen has been defined by his dualities, the shadows of meaning lingering behind the corners of his notes and in the spaces between his words.

He’s a man of contradictions. His atonal groan of a wheeze would never be mistaken for a poor singing voice. His songs have entered the popular vernacular in a manner that most singers would kill for, but chances are you’ve never heard his music – Jeff Buckley turned “Hallelujah” from a seething breakup song into a romantic croon fit for Shrek, another contradiction in and of itself. When he was younger, it never felt like he was writing songs from the perspective of a young man, and now that he’s 77 years old, his themes of love and loss seem out of place and time, though they’re identifiably from an old man’s perspective. It’s just that no old man should be going through what Leonard Cohen seems to.

His voice barely more than a whisper now – one so low that it’s possible at the end of “Show Me the Place” to make out the brief gap in the audio mix when Cohen’s incredibly sensitive mic feed was cut to avoid white noise – Cohen’s bitterness hasn’t subsided, his inherently Jewish sense of mythologized self-loathing firmly intact. “Show me the place / Where you want your slave to go,” he sings, invoking Hebrew Biblical history as he did with “Hallelujah’s” references to David and Samson.

As with other Cohen releases, the connection between faith and consciousness is firm, as it is with disappointment, personal apocalypse and tragedy. In that regard, the ideas are as old as his career. These are the same themes and principles on which Cohen has dwelled with his famous obsessiveness for five decades, and it seems not much has changed. His women still mistreat him (“I know you have to hate me / But could you hate me less?”), the Lord is still vengeful (“Tell me again / When the filth of the butcher / Is washed in the blood of the lamb”) and he is still meek in the presence of uncaring beauty and sex (“By virtue of suffering I claim to have won”). His poetry is still gracefully fixated on the physical form of a once-loved woman, constantly at odds with the more guiltily orthodox shades of his consciousness. It’s why so often visions of apocalypse enter his mind’s eye, as they do on “Banjo.”

But if Cohen seemed too tired, too acidic for a man his age when he was still on the better side of 50, here his indiscretions, lovers and woeful self-loathing seem better suited for a man half his age, a man who still contradictorily had both the time and impatience for such things. And perhaps that’s the point. Because Old Ideas is also in reference to the ideas of an old man, one even more starkly aware of his own mortality than he was when he wrote “Death of a Ladies’ Man” at the age of 24; the subject of “Darkness” is as much the emptiness of death as it is the pain of a hateful woman. He’s also a man grappling with the idea of being Leonard Cohen (the album’s opener, “Going Home,” is innately about this conundrum) perhaps the young and ruthless and dogged Cohen that has become the principle subject of the song rather than its author, especially when his lyrics are so often recited by other artists.

There lies the contradiction: The old, worn-out ideas of a man who uses those same ideas now as a measurement of his own age. It’s beautiful and tragic, like Leonard Cohen, the idea and the man.