NEW YORK Releasing a new album near his 80th birthday, Leonard Cohen cheekily addresses his age in its first song, intoning, Its not because Im old . . . I always liked it slow.

The poet and songwriter nonetheless glides confidently through a gamut of themes and styles on the album Popular Problems, ruminating in his husky and undiminished voice on war, loss and his own spiritual odyssey.

The Canadian-born talent turned 80 on Sunday. But Cohen said that the timing of his 13th studio album his first since 2012 that comes decades after classic songs such as Hallelujah and So Long, Marianne was coincidental.

On the latest album, Cohen invokes Hurricane Katrina in Samson in New Orleans, lamenting the destruction of jazzs birthplace.

In one of the more striking musical passages, Cohen brings in plaintive Arabic snippets of a female singer in Nevermind, in which he bemoans the anonymity of war victims with verses such as, The storys told with facts and lies / I had a name / But never mind.

Cohen, previewing the album at a New York nightclub, said the womans voice represented the oppressed who are absent from public discourse.

Generally speaking, nothing anybody says in public anymore nourishes or resonates with any authentic sense that you have about things, Cohen explained.

So, same way about Syria or the general catastrophe that confronts us now. So that voice comes out of that unrepresented majority of people, he said.

Cohen, who declined to speak further on world affairs, has long mourned bloodshed in songs such as the Vietnam War-era Story of Isaac. He has pleaded for peace in the Middle East but has also defied calls to boycott Israel.

Cohen, who is Jewish as well as an ordained Zen Buddhist monk, delves into the Biblical story of Exodus on the Gospel-backed Born in Chains.

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At 80, Leonard Cohen meditates on spirituality and war on new album