As I mentioned the other day, after a grim 2011 it looks like 2012 has the makings of a good year for film. Later this week, I’ll be posting Jonathan Romney’s review of Alexander Payne’s tremendous The Descendants. But meantime, I hope you’ll indulge me while I throw forward to one of February’s best releases, Young Adult – a terrific sort-of-comedy from the Juno team of director Ivan Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody. I don’t want to get too bogged down in recounting Juno’s many charms, but it’s worth remembering that key to the film’s success was Ellen Page’s warm, sweet-tempered central performance. Intriguingly, the lead character here, Mavis Gary, shares none of Juno’s positive attributes. She’s hard, cynical and self-pitying; a “psychotic prom queen bitch” according to one description. Reitman is used to giving us similarly prickly leads – think of Aaron Eckhart’s tobacco lobbyist in Thank You For Smoking or George Clooney’s corporate hatchet man in Up In The Air. But those weren’t really mainstream movies, while Young Adult certainly appears to behave as if it is – superficially, at least. You can see many tropes here familiar from the kind of assembly line robocomedies that clog up your multiplex. There’s a return from the big city to the small hometown, the old high school romance vibe, the quirky old friends and former classmates who’ve learned life lessons and moved forward positively in their endeavours. You can just see it – can’t you? – starring Jennifer Aniston, with maybe John Corbett as the high school ex she’s still got a crush on and Megan Mullally from Will & Grace as her wise-cracking best pal. Fortunately, Young Adult is nothing like these things. Mavis is the successful ghost writer behind a series of children’s novels, who lives in Minneapolis; she returns to Mercury, Minnesota – “a hick lake town that smells of fish shit” – specifically to win back Buddy, her unsuspecting college sweetheart, now happily married with a newborn baby. Mavis has little understanding of what damage she might cause. She is vain, deluded, she lacks empathy. I suspect she’s also an alcoholic. If you want warm, bubbly sentiments about a person’s capacity to grow and change, let’s say you’re not going to find them here. Charlize Theron is pretty fearless as Mavis. She doesn’t play it for comedy: Mavis is drifting quite close to the edge and it doesn't feel like it would take much to tip her over it. I'm not entirely up to speed with Theron's accomplishments: Monster, of course, and she's been good in films like In The Valley Of Elah and The Road - and pertinently here, a recurring guest slot on Arrested Development. But this is by far the most out-there performance I've seen from here, in many ways uglier and more demanding than Monster's Aileen Wuornos. One final, albeit incidental, thing. There's a notion that our college years - roughly, 17 - 21 - are peaks, our golden years, never quite to be repeated. There's a great moment, over the opening credits, where Mavis gets into her old Mini and drives from Minneapolis back to Mercury. She pops an old cassette into the car's antiquated stereo system and cranks up Teenage Fanclub's "The Promise", hitting repeat over and over. This, we learn, was her and Buddy's song, back in the day when she was prom queen and they were the golden couple at high school. In a way, Mavis is life is like that tape - on a loop, stuck in a time and place, repeating the same patterns over and over. Young Adult opens in the UK on February 10. You can see the trailer here.

It would be nice to pretend otherwise, but I’m far from an expert on medieval lute music. A few years ago, however, a strong enthusiasm for the British guitarist James Blackshaw lead me to an album he’d made with a Dutch lute player – lutenist, apparently – called Jozef Van Wissem. Blackshaw and Van Wissem called themselves Brethren Of The Free Spirit, and the album, “All Things Are From Him, Through Him And In Him”, which I described at the time as “a series of intense duets that owe as much to the graceful formalities of modern classical music as they do the patterns of folk and its renaissance antecedents. Like all Blackshaw projects, it has a sort of warm, concentrated intensity to it, an intangible character that makes this music much more approachable than a sketchy description like this might suggest.” Subsequently, I’ve heard some of Van Wissem’s solo jams – though jam seems incredibly inaccurate here – most recently “The Joy That Never Ends”. Yesterday, though, a bundle of new downloads came from the Important label, including Blackshaw’s ravishing latest, "Love Is The Plan, The Plan Is Death" and a new one from Van Wissem, this time in conjunction with the guitarist (and of course film director) Jim Jarmusch). While Jarmusch has obviously worked with musicians in many of his films, I can’t say I know anything about his own music. “Concerning The Entrance Into Eternity” mostly seems to be holding tightly to Van Wissem’s usual game, with incredibly stately progressions and, as the title suggests, a preoccupation with a distinctly mystical strand of Christianity. That’s corroborated by notes which reveal some of the song titles have been drawn from Swedenborg, and the spoken word piece read by Jarmusch on “He Is Hanging By His Shiny Arms, His Heart An Open Wound With Love”, is from St John Of The Cross (though whether Van Wissem’s music is motivated by an actual faith, or by an idea of the devotional, I couldn’t say). Anyhow, Jarmusch predominantly moves stealthily in the background, shading out Van Wissem’s lute with empathetic acoustic chimes or a thicker, feedback-heavy electric tone which recalls Neil Young’s “Deadman” soundtrack (check out “Continuation Of The Last Judgement” and “The Sun Of The Natural World Is Pure Fire” especially). Often, the mix is reminiscent of the Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabaté sessions, especially the “Ali And Toumani” set where Diabaté’s kora (as ringing, clean and elevating as Van Wissem’s lute) took gentle precedence. A beautiful record, I think. Follow me on Twitter: @JohnRMulvey

The highlight of the week gone by, for me at least, was, of course, attending the playback of Leonard Cohen’s new album Old Ideas. Cohen was there, as you’ve no doubt heard by now, and if he had so chosen he could have kept his audience hanging on his every word for many more hours than he did. I’ve already written about the vent, but it seemed also timely to revisit this piece, written originally for my Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before column in Uncut, about meeting Cohen in somewhat unusual circumstances in June 1974. A few weeks after I join the hallowed ranks of what used to be Melody Maker I’m on my own one afternoon in the office. Everyone else is either being wined and dined at some no doubt lavish record company lunch, of which in those days there were plenty, or down the pub getting pissed - a daily ritual for the paper’s sub-editors. The common feeling among the senior staff at Melody Maker at the time of which I’m writing is that my recent appointment by editor Ray Coleman is either further evidence of Ray’s unravelling sanity or the result of a ghastly administrative error. To the horror especially of uncommonly suave assistant editor Michael Watts – famed in the MM office for his cravats, safari suits and gourmet luncheons – I can barely type and think ‘shorthand’ is a nickname for Eric Clapton. “If you’re still here by the end of the month, it’ll be a miracle,” Mick informs me on my first day. For the next couple of weeks he throws me scraps. It’s not quite what I expected and I’m beginning to feel like I’m being groomed for an early exit. Fucking cheers, Mick. Anyway, I’m dropping off something at Mick’s empty desk when his phone rings and doesn’t stop for about five minutes, someone clearly with urgent things to discuss with the absent assistant editor. I pick up the phone. It’s someone from CBS about an interview with Leonard Cohen – Leonard Cohen! - Mick’s been trying to set up since shortly before fire was invented. Can I now tell Mick that Cohen’s currently at a hotel in Chelsea and is happy to meet him tomorrow? I’m given a time and address, which I promise to pass onto Mick, dutiful servant that I am. Except that I don’t tell Mick anything about the call and instead turn up myself for the interview, feeling as a long-time fan about to meet one of his heroes slightly weak in the region of my knees as I tap lightly on his hotel door, which now opens. “I’m Leonard Cohen,” Leonard Cohen – Leonard Cohen! - announces with a warm smile, a handsome man, impeccably dressed in a smart grey suit. “Welcome.” He invites me into his modest room, windows overlooking Sloane Square, flowers on a small table. I notice now that he’s barefooted. He takes a seat, feet on the bed. I remind him that the last time he appeared in Melody Maker, remarks he’d made about his own low opinion of his music had been luridly accompanied by headlines announcing his retirement. Since he is in London finishing an album he tells me will be called either New Skin For The Old Ceremony or Return Of the Broken Down Nightingale, he’s clearly not retired. What’s the story? “I have read over the years so much negative criticism of my work and of my position, so much satire, so much humorous indifference to where I stand,” he says, “that on the public level and in social intercourse with strangers I tend to dismiss myself and not take my work very seriously. “I think that interview was just a way of saying goodbye for a while, a temporary cheerio, nothing tragic. I seem, however, to have given this impression to people that I’ve been recovering from some serious illness, which I am happy to say has not been the case. “The image I’ve been able to gather of myself from the press is of a victim of the music industry, a poor sensitive chap who has been destroyed by the very forces he started out to utilise. But that is not so, never was. I don’t know how that ever got around. I would also contest the notion that I am or was a depressed and extremely frail individual also that I am sad all the time. “There is a perception, too, of my songs as depressing, but I think that’s not the case. One side of the third album I find a little burdened and melodramatic. I think that’s the fault of the songs and of the singer. It’s a failure of that particular album, but it’s not a characteristic of the work as a whole.” It seemed to me, and I hoped not fancifully, that his music was less ‘depressing’ than emblematic of an urgent inclination to create art that was fit for a world in which people died and calamity was wholesale, in which circumstance it would hardly be cheerful. “I’m very pleased with that observation,” he says. “That is definitely the most important aesthetic question of these days. Can art or what we call entertainment confront or incorporate the experience of man today? There’s a lot of evidence for a negative answer. I skirt around that question myself, very often. One feels often inadequate in the face of massacre, disaster and human humiliation. What, you think, am I doing, singing a song at a time like this? But the worse it gets, the more I find myself picking up a guitar and playing that song. “It is, I think, a matter of tradition. You have a tradition on the one hand that says if things are bad we should not dwell on the sadness, that we should play a happy song, a merry tune. Strike up the band and dance the best we can, even if we are suffering from concussion. “And then there’s another tradition, and this is a more Oriental or Middle Eastern tradition, which says that if things are really bad the best thing to do is sit by the grave and wail, and that’s the way you are going to feel better. “I think both these efforts are intended to lift the spirit. And my own tradition, which is the Herbraic tradition, suggests that you sit next to the disaster and lament. The notion of the lamentation seemed to me to be the way to do it. You don’t avoid the situation - you throw yourself into it, fearlessly.” Before I go, I ask him to sign my copy of his novel Beautiful Losers. He takes the book and looks at it, as if he hasn’t seen one in a while, notices a passage I’ve underlined and reads it aloud. “’How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday inside me. . .how can I exist as the vessel of yesterday’s slaughter?’ Not bad,” he laughs. “I wonder,” he smiles, returning the book and walking me to the door, “who I was when I wrote that.” There’s hell to pay, by the way, when I get back to the office.

Over the past year or two, MC Taylor of “Hiss Golden Messenger has become not just one of my favourite American contemporary songwriters, but also a great source of musical recommendations; most recently, of course, with his terrific “Wah-Wah Cowboys” mixtape. At the back end of last year, Taylor hooked me up with the new album by a friend of his, Joe O’Connell, who tends to record using the name Elephant Micah. “I met Joe sometime in the late ‘90s in Louisville,” Taylor wrote. “He was considerably younger than me at the time - I think he was maybe 17 when I met him - but it was already clear he was a formidable songwriter, and he's gotten seriously deep since then. The last couple Elephant Micah records have all made my personal/mental year-end lists, and this one won't be any exception. There is definitely a Richard & Linda Thompson vibe to this, and maybe even a John Martyn ‘Inside Out’ thing going on here, though I wouldn't be surprised if Joe had never heard either of those.” Since then, Elephant Micah’s “Louder Than Thou” has been a quiet pleasure, albeit one I keep forgetting to blog about. A looming release date at the end of January, however, has served to focus my mind about a record described in Product Of Palmyra label info as one in which, “Elephant Micah secures its place alongside other masters of post-roots mood music such as Califone and Sun Kil Moon.” I can relate to that, and can throw in a reference to PG Six (especially on “If I Were A Surfer”), too. The other elephant in the room, though, especially relevant to a former resident of Louisville, Kentucky (O’Connell has subsequently relocated to Bloomington, Indiana) is a distinct kinship with Will Oldham: O’Connell’s vocals similarly sound both frail, plaintive and diffident at the same time. He’s a comparably talented traditional songwriter, at least on the evidence of “Louder Than Thou” (I’m yet to dig deeper; if anyone can steer me, I’d appreciate it). O’Connell, though, seems to relish deconstructing his songs even as he sings them, so that while his vocal melodies stay more or less true, there’s a sense, on songs like the faintly jazz-tinged “Won These Wings” (where the John Martyn comparison seems particularly apposite) and the standout “Rooster On The Loose”, that the ground is moving beneath him, as the soft drum patter finds an idiosyncratic path that’s closer to improv than rote timekeeping. A lot of the playing on “Louder Than Thou” rolls like this: loose, intuitive, unafraid to leave space and take chances when there are plenty of safer and more orthodox options. The small miracle is that these musical digressions never undermine the basic strengths of the songs, nor impinge on a warm, engrossing and, to be honest, pretty mellow mood. A stealthy album, which rewards your patience, I think. But check out “If I Were A Surfer” at http://www.elephantmicah.com/ and tell me what you think.