[1] Both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1992 Los Angeles riots took place while Cohen was writing and recording the album, which expressed his sense of the world's turbulence.

[2] The album was recorded with a large cast of musicians and engineers in several different studios; the credits list almost 30 female singers.

The cast brought to bear on the album was more akin to a movie production and included both a choir and an orchestra..." The songwriting process had not gotten easier for Cohen over the years; in an interview with Q, the singer admitted, "I've never found it easy to write.

Nadel also reveals that "Anthem" was borrowed from Kabbalistic sources, especially the sixteenth-century rabbi Isaac Luria.

This is borne out by the fact that some of the lyrics already appear in the song "The Bells" from the soundtrack of the 1986 film Night Magic.

[6]Political events and history are found elsewhere on the album, with Cohen making references to Tiananmen Square, Stalin, World War II and Hiroshima.

Although the tone of the album is at times sombre, it does contain much of the wry humour that is evident on Cohen's previous LP I'm Your Man.

The Future also contains two cover songs—Irving Berlin's "Always" and Frederick Knight's "Be For Real"—as well as "Tacoma Trailer", the first instrumental that Cohen had ever placed on one of his studio albums.

Three songs from this album, "Anthem", "The Future", and the menacing "Waiting for the Miracle" (co-written by Sharon Robinson) were used prominently on the soundtrack for Oliver Stone's 1994 film Natural Born Killers.

[7] The Lumineers would go on to include an official cover of "Democracy" as a bonus track for their third studio album, III, in 2019.

[18] In the original Rolling Stone review, Christian Wright called the album "epic", enthusing "The Future might as easily have been a book: A more troubling, more vexing image of human failure has not been written.

"[8] In 2010 biographer Anthony Reynolds called The Future "classic big budget AOR yet with lyrics by Lorca, Bukowski and Lowell, sung by an old wino from Skid Row who really wanted to sound like Ray Charles at the Apollo."