With a career that has spanned nearly four decades, Leonard Cohen released his twelfth studio album, Old Ideas, earlier this year and reached his highest ever charting position in the United States.

He always found an audience before, mostly among—freaks, weirdos and fringe-art lovers—yet somehow Old Ideas managed to hit No. 3 on the U.S. Billboard charts, and even charted in eight other countries, including Finland, where at 77, Cohen earned the dubious distinction of being the oldest person to ever to make it on the Finnish charts. He finds an audience in San Jose on November 7 at HP Pavilion.

While Old Ideas is a good album, it’s not necessarily his best work. But then again, all his albums, however infrequent, are remarkably similar, especially since the mid-80s, when his vocals became more spoken than sung and the music tended towards light, minimalistic synthesized jazz. With each successive album Cohen steadily lost more of his voice, until Old Ideas, where it is barely a skeleton of its former self. This somehow makes each utterance that much more profound.

Old Ideas also has a greater amount of organic instrumentation than Cohen has used in a while, which does little to change the music since the words have always been more important in a Cohen song than the music underneath it.

Though it does emphasize what a gruff narrator he’s become. It’s like listening to a wise old man, sitting quietly in a smoke-filled bar with a lot to say and few words to say it in. Cohen is covering the same topics he has for years—love, betrayal, redemption, desire—but now he’s been around the block and really knows what he’s talking about, or at least he’s gotten better at sounding like he’s bubbling over with age old wisdom.

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Silicon Valley hosts a strong lineup of fall concerts with some of the biggest names in pop, indie rock and electronic music and the debut of SVSX.

Wobbleland
Aug. 31, 7pm; San Jose Civic; $50-$70. Some fans of Wobbleland have expressed disappointment that this year’s lineup isn’t loaded with the same dubstep star power as one that took San Francisco by storm in 2011. But they’re missing the point—nobody on that bill was famous yet outside of the electronic underground. Wobbleland is an underground party designed to let thousands of scantily clad fans get their spines rocked by these artists before they become phenoms. This year’s rave will pump untold decibels of bass into the San Jose Civic courtesy of headliner Flux Pavilion. Flux is best known for his Bassnectar-type dubstep anthem “Bass Cannon,” but fans of Kanye and Jay-Z are more likely to recognize his track “I Can’t Stop,” which was sampled on their “Who Gon Stop Me” album last year. The rest of the Wobbleland roster, aside from maybe Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs, comes straight from the underground: Zomboy, Barenoize, Bare, Grizzly, NastyNasty, Megalodon and more.

VivaFest!
Sept. 8-16; downtown San Jose; Sept. 16 HP Pavilion show, 7pm, $30 and up. Creative director of VivaFest!, Dan Guerrero, has brought an epic vision and a flair for spectacle to what started out a couple of decades ago as a folksy tribute to the well-known but poorly understood Mexican mariachi tradition. Guerrero is the kind of producer who believes that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing bigger, so it’s no surprise that the centerpiece of his show this year has Gigante in the title. I mean, the organizers of any festival celebrating Mexican culture would be beside themselves to have Latin music star Lila Downs; Chicano Cali favorites Ozomatli; Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, which was responsible for popularizing mariachi internationally in the 1980s; and legendary cantina chanteuse Paquita la del Barrio. But Guerrero has wrapped all four of them into one show at HP Pavilion on Sept. 16, “Domingo Gigante: A Night of Stars.” The festival will also feature their yearly free Outdoor Feria del Mariachi the same day on HP’s arena green. Besides the Super Sunday extravaganza, there will be a film series, historical walks, mariachi and dance workshops, and more.

SVSX
Sept. 22; downtown San Jose
The South Bay music scene thrives off the intersection of underground culture and high-tech empire. It’s no surprise that in the land of start-ups, the music revolution of the last few years has been born in the garages and on the laptops of a new generation of talent. The Silicon Valley Sound eXperience—SVSX—is a showcase for that revolution, supporting the local music scene with stages on which to make the next advance. This debut year will feature the first SVSX music awards and a club crawl brimming with the best and brightest on the South Bay scene. Artists like Will Sprott, whose unique songwriting and arrangements with the Mumlers opened the floodgates to the wave of eclectic and sometimes unclassifiable bands that have risen up here in the last few years. Like Anya and the Get Down, whose mash-up of rock, reggae and dubstep threatens to break big at any moment. Like Careless Hearts, the Shitkickers and the other bands scheduled to perform. They are all the sound of the Silicon Valley experience.

Harmony by the Bay
Sept. 29, 2pm; Shoreline, Mountain View; $49.50-$79. The Harmony Festival in Santa Rosa was known for a weird mix of performers; last year’s bill featured the Flaming Lips, Primus and breakbeat master Chango B, along with bluegrass and Afrobeat. In March, organizers announced that, after 33 years, money woes had done in the three-day festival, at least for the time being—and then surprised everyone with the debut of this South Bay spin-off festival, a joint venture among Harmony’s organizers, KFOG and Live Nation. Pared down to a one-day, two-stage setup, HBTB attempts to carry over the eclecticism of its namesake, with alt headliners Kimbra, the Shins, Tegan and Sara, plus reggae-rockers the Dirty Heads, bluegrass fixture Alison Krauss, electro-tribal strangesters Beats Antique and reggae legend Jimmy Cliff.

Legendary singer-songwriter and alternative-nation poet laureate Leonard Cohen announced the details of the North American leg of his 2012 world tour today, including a show at HP Pavilion in San Jose Nov. 7.

That makes it three years almost to the day since his last performance at HP, on what was then suspected by many to be his farewell tour. But the 77-year-old Cohen, known best these days for his ’80s “comeback” songs like “I’m Your Man” and “First We Take Manhattan”—not to mention a zillion indie-rock covers of “Hallelujah”—hasn’t gone anywhere. He released his 12th album, Old Ideas, in January.

Anyone who saw his last, tour-de-force show at HP had to suspect as much. He opened by telling the audience “It is our intention to give you everything we got tonight,” and then immediately ripped into some of his best-known songs—“Dance Me to the End of Love,” “The Future,” “Bird on a Wire,” “Everybody Knows”—in rapid succession. He even seemed to joke about his supposed impending retirement when, in “I’m Your Man,” he changed the words to “If you want another kind of lover, I’ll wear an old man’s mask for you.”

The “Old Ideas World Tour 2012” begins Oct. 31 in Austin, after the completion of his European dates. He’ll play six shows in the U.S., including the San Jose show Nov. 7, before touring his native Canada and then winding up in Madison Square Garden Dec. 18 and Brooklyn Dec. 20.

Tickets for the U.S. dates go on sale May 18.

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