with Sharon Robinson (co-writer of "Everybody Knows" and "Waiting for the Miracle") on what would become Ten New Songs. Recording and composition Robinson produced, co-arranged, co-wrote and sang on Ten New Songs, making it a true collaboration. Cohen gave Robinson some lyrics he had written and she built the music around them. Cohen was so impressed with Robinson's demos that she ended up singing all the songs with him, including several leads. "At his insistence", Robinson clarified to Mojos Sylvie Simmons. "It's ironic, isn't it, that the man who's got this voice that women swoon over just wants to hide it away?" The album was recorded by Robinson and Cohen in near isolation, with Leanne Ungar engineering and Bob Metzger adding guitar to the LP's first single, "In My Secret Life". In 2010, Robinson spoke about the recording with Cohen biographer Anthony Reynolds: The way the album came about is linked to the actual sound of it. The album had a unique path and it wasn't done in the way an album is normally done. It was also recorded pretty much in the order it plays in...The recording was some kind of extension of his time at Mount Baldy. He was still very reclusive during this time...I would initially sing and play everything, at the time not knowing if we were bringing in other musicians or singers. Of course as it turned out, we didn't so my voice stayed because Leonard liked what he was hearing. Robinson also divulged to Reynolds that most of the album was recorded in her three-car garage that was adjoined to her house (which she had converted to a studio) and that she would take the raw audio on a portable hard drive to Cohen's converted studio above his garage. The album was Cohen's first to be recorded completely digitally. "There's a sense of relaxation in the tunes that comes through", Cohen told Nick Patton Walsh of The Observer in 2001. "There's a kind of pulse, an invitation to get into it - a groove." Several of the tracks on Ten New Songs existed in some form or another long before they appeared on the album; Cohen first revealed he was working on a new song called "My Secret Life" in 1988, and, in 1995, Melinda Newman of Billboard reported that two tracks, "My Secret Life" and "A Thousand Kisses Deep", were "close to completion...