Cohen has stated in numerous interviews that throughout the success of the I'm Your Man and The Future tours, he remained desperately unhappy; in the book Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life, biographer Anthony Reynolds quotes the singer: "I'd been drinking three bottles of wine a night on the tour and one of the things I was looking for was a rest...I didn't know what else to do."

In June 1999, Cohen returned to his L.A. duplex to live with his daughter and began collaborating with Sharon Robinson (co-writer of "Everybody Knows" and "Waiting for the Miracle") on what would become Ten New Songs.

The album was recorded by Robinson and Cohen in near isolation, with Leanne Ungar engineering and Bob Metzger adding guitar to the LP's first single, "In My Secret Life".

In 2010, Robinson spoke about the recording with Cohen biographer Anthony Reynolds: Robinson also divulged to Reynolds that most of the album was recorded in her three-car garage that was adjoined to her house (which she had converted to a studio) and that she would take the raw audio on a portable hard drive to Cohen's converted studio above his garage.

"In My Secret Life", a song that wound up being an ode to unrequited love, became the album's first single with an accompanying music video that was filmed in Montreal at Habitat 67.

[6] In the October 2001 Rolling Stone review of the album, Steven Chean stated, "Ten New Songs manages to sustain loss's fragile beauty like never before and might just be the Cohen's most exquisite ode yet to the midnight hour.

Playboy opined: "Although the tones of these odes and meditations is mournful, at the age of 67 Cohen's pessimism about the human condition is tempered with reconciliation.

Eric Burdon, Katie Melua, Till Brönner and Edo Zanki have recorded cover version's of "In My Secret Life".

[19] "Alexandra Leaving" was covered by Canadian singer Patricia O'Callaghan on her fifth solo album, Matador: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, in late 2011.