Various Positions

Product Information

As usual it is Cohen's strong lyrics (more poetry really) and the quality of his voice that holds the simple backing tunes together. he observes his own happily quirky rhyming of "do ya/-lujah" and "fool ya/-lujah" which adds so much to the brilliance of this great song. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I think this is one of the great Cohen albums, despite its admittedly slightly generic musical accompaniments and less feisty female singers than we`re used to.

instead of presenting me with the new songs exclusively on a Spanish guitar as usual, he had this dinky little Casio keyboard with him . In 2010, producer John Lissauer revealed to Cohen biographer Anthony Reynolds that the drum track on the former is actually from the Casio keyboard the song had been composed on: "It didn't even have audio output so we had to mike it up. We tried to do that song with real drums and percussion but he liked the simplicity of the Casio and had become accustomed to it.

I've listened to it during a million (full)moonlit nights and sung some of its songs aloud again and again (and then some)! The album was recorded at Quadrasonic Sound in New York in the summer of 1983 with Leanne Ungar engineering. This is an irrepressible, Jewish/Greek-sounding song I can imagine moving to, in soft inebriation, in a taverna somewhere crepuscular and warm. After recording Recent Songs, Cohen did not record again for five years and published no new writing until Book of Mercy in 1984.The album opens with one of his best compositions, and a signature song since he wrote it and one he tends to begin concerts with: Dance Me To The End Of Love. The Casio was a great discovery for Leonard because these machines allows you to put one finger down and have a whole band come back at you .

Asked in 2001 by Mojo 's Sylvie Simmons about this period of inactivity, the singer replied, "My children were living in the South of France and I spent a lot of time visiting them. Cryptic and spartan, the set continues in the eclectic vein of recent efforts, but with greater clarity and focus, resulting in an intriguingly diffuse collection ranging from the Serge Gainsbourg-esque pop of 'Dance Me to the End of Love' to the boozy, country-inflected 'The Captain. It is one of Cohen`s most deeply felt and most moving songs - a poem, a meditation on the stages of life, a hesitant prayer to life itself. The song contains several biblical references, most notably evoking the stories of Samson and traitorous Delilah from the Book of Judges ("she cut your hair") as well as the adulterous King David and Bathsheba ("you saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you").I thought it was because of 50,000 cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey that my voice has gotten low. If you are new to Leonard Cohen I'd also get the later 'I'm your man', plus perhaps 'The Future' and 'Songs from a room'.

Various Positions contains some of Cohen's best--"Dance Me To The End Of Love", "Coming Back To You" and a shortened, accusatory version of "Hallelujah", later covered to such majestic effect by Jeff Buckley . I think the song came out in '83 or '84, and the only person who seemed to recognize the song was Dylan. It was the first time I could really see and intuitively feel what it was I was doing, making or creating in that enterprise. But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song – it's not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.LC has sung this live and it can be found on the sublime Live In London, but nowhere has he sung it with such restrained grace as here.