The Future is the ninth studio album by the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released in 1992. Almost an hour in length, it was Cohen's longest album up to that date. Both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1992 Los Angeles riots took place while Cohen was writing and recording the album, which expressed his sense of the world's turbulence. The album was recorded with a large cast of musicians and engineers in several different studios; the credits list almost 30 female singers. The album built on the success of Cohen's previous album, I'm Your Man, and garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews. The Future made the Top 40 in the UK album charts, went double platinum in Canada, and sold a quarter of a million copies in the U.S., which had previously been unenthusiastic about Cohen's albums. Background After touring successfully in support of his "comeback" album I'm Your Man (1988), Cohen took a year off to help his son Adam convalesce after a serious car accident in the West Indies left the young man in a coma for four months. Cohen also began a romantic relationship with the actress Rebecca De Mornay. Anthony Reynolds notes in his book Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life that work on Cohen's ninth studio album "was not forged in one concentrated effort. The number of studios used ran into double figures and was spread between Montreal and Los Angeles, although the original plan was to record it in Montreal only, with the same personnel that had worked on I'm Your Man. The cast brought to bear on the album was more akin to a movie production and included both a choir and an orchestra..." The songwriting process had not gotten easier for Cohen over the years; in an interview with Q, the singer admitted, "I've never found it easy to write. Period. I mean, I don't want to whine about it or anything but...it's a bitch! It's terrible work. I'm very disciplined in that I can settle down into the work situation but coming up with the words is very hard. Hard on the heart, hard on the head and it just drives you mad. Before you know it, you're crawling across the carpet in your underwear trying to find a rhyme for 'orange'. It's a terrible, cruel job. But I'm not complaining." Composition According to Ira Nadel's 1996 Cohen memoir Various Positions, the