The title track of Leonard Cohen’s new album, You Want It Darker, opens with the dulcet tones of a male choir—which, not surprisingly, made Erick Lichte very, very happy.

“I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ ” Chor Leoni’s artistic director tells the Straight in a telephone interview from his West End apartment. “When I heard it, I just sat there smiling.”

It’s not only that Cohen has offered validation from on high for Lichte’s work with Vancouver’s own all-male vocal ensemble. It’s also that the local lions might have played a part in shifting Cohen’s musical landscape away from the bare-bones strategies of his recent recordings.

That has yet to be confirmed, but it’s telling that more than three years ago—well before Cohen started work on the new disc—Lichte and Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds approached the Montreal legend’s people, asking permission to set three of his poems to music.

Coincidence? For now, that’s as far as Lichte is willing to go. “I’d certainly never take any credit for that—but, then again, you never know what weird seeds get planted,” he says, laughing. “That’s how creativity works, right? It happens on a more subconscious level, and maybe we’re all just feeling something in the zeitgeist that his poetry, his art, needed that sound.”

Cohen and Chor Leoni make for a fine combination on the choir’s new Wandering Heart CD. Ešenvalds’s title track is a powerful centrepiece for a record that can easily be seen as a search for grace in the face of loss.

“Leonard Cohen does not get nearly enough credit for his spirituality, and how that has infused everything that he’s ever written,” says Lichte, who made an intensive study of Cohen’s poetry before sending a selection of texts to his Baltic collaborator. “You know, he’s a practising Zen Buddhist as well as a practising Jew, and that informs everything that he does. I think that perspective has informed the album—and maybe it’s informed me.

“It’s not so much about arriving at grace, or arriving at redemption; it’s about the journey,” he adds.

Chor Leoni’s upcoming War/Poet concerts offer a journey of a different kind, one that will take listeners through battle, death, and mourning before delivering them into a place of acceptance. Based on the elegiac writings of Walt Whitman, Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, and assorted folk poets, the featured compositions ask us to look at the horror of war, then offer the welcome solace of art.

Although only one of the pieces on Wandering Heart—Kim André Arnesen’s “Even When He Is Silent”—will be sung this Friday, a shared spirit links the new album to Chor Leoni’s two Remembrance Day concerts.

“Part of my mission, and Chor Leoni’s mission, is to create music and create spaces that are about finding connection to one another—connection within ourselves, connection to the bigger parts of life and living,” says Lichte, who adds that as far as he is concerned there’s no better way to combat isolation than singing with others.

“Life can be so full of the prosaic, and maybe just the hardscrabble of making ends meet in a city like Vancouver can be enough to get you down,” he explains. “But one of the blessings that I know I have, and that I share with the men of Chor Leoni, is that every Wednesday we get to close the doors on the rest of life and have a three-hour rehearsal.

“And maybe a couple of times in that rehearsal you’ll be working on some bit of music and you are both completely inside your own body, and completely out of body. You are completely connected with your own soul, but you are completely interconnected with everyone else.

“Choral music can offer that to people—and, to me, that is grace.”

Chor Leoni presents War/Poet at West Vancouver United Church and St. Andrew’s–Wesley United Church on Friday (November 11). Tickets are still available for the Vancouver concert.