“Give me back the Berlin wall / Give me Stalin and St Paul / I’ve seen the future, brother / It is murder.” Given their position as outsiders, prophets and dictators often come into contact – either collision or collusion – with each other.

And both derive their powers of persuasion from the same source: collective fear. Prophets can find their message usurped by those with more brute force and tongues of clay. This observation is the nucleus of one of Leonard Cohen’s greatest songs – a pearl to swallow with our grain of salt when we watch the news.

There is a saying that great prophets make sure of the event before they predict it. Cassandra, the Trojan noblewoman who had been given the gift of prescience, was not given the power to make those around her take her seriously. She lacked the ability to turn her prophetic power into political power. Not so the narrator of Cohen’s The Future: “There’ll be the breaking of the ancient western code / Your private life will suddenly explode/ There’ll be phantoms, there’ll be fires on the road.”

With the martial rap of the snare drum, Cohen takes you on a trip through a sickening catalogue of the chaos to come. While his predictions are just as dire as Cassandra’s, this is not a man who is begging to be heard; this is someone vicious, with the will and the epaulets to make sure that what he predicts will happen: “Give me absolute control / Over every living soul.” As I write this, in Washington DC two political parties seek simultaneously to assure and frighten a nervous populace.

We are assured, with colour codes, that future terrorist attacks are being closely monitored, but are, nonetheless, imminent. Attempts to reduce the occupation force in Iraq are predicted to create a ninth circle of Iraqi hell by the same seers who claimed there would be WMDs and children throwing chocolate in the streets. As Cohen’s song indicates, the future is a scary place, but, as he also reminds us, the future is rarely more frightening than the man who has the power to make his own prophecies come true.

Josh Ritter’s single, Right Moves, is out on Nov 5; his UK tour starts on Nov 16

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette