However I do find the superb track 'The night comes in' rather sad and uncomfortable listening [even more than 'The story of Isaac' on Songs from a room] - although music that's powerful enough to move you certainly can't be considered a bad thing. 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. 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. The album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and " Hallelujah". The song was further covered by Antony and the Johnsons frontwoman Antony Hegarty for a 2005 documentary, I'm Your Man.

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. 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 . 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. 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.Released in 1985 Various Positions proved to be a transitional album for Cohen, poised halfway between the classic balladic style of Recent Songs and the cool electronic backing of I'm Your Man. I think the song came out in '83 or '84, and the only person who seemed to recognize the song was Dylan. I've listened to it during a million (full)moonlit nights and sung some of its songs aloud again and again (and then some)!

Cohen, like very few others, has always appreciated that love is at least as much comedy as tragedy. The best-known, and most-covered song on the album, however, is "Hallelujah", having been recorded by John Cale, Jeff Buckley (in one of the song's most acclaimed versions), and many others. As a lyricist, Cohen has few, if any, peers--he has never been the relentless doom-monger of popular myth, but a wise, warm and frequently very funny chronicler of heartbreak. In 2004, jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux covered "Dance Me to the End of Love" on her album " Careless Love"; the version even became a hit in Brazil.Incidentally, there`s nothing in the booklet to tell you who is playing and singing with Cohen on VP, which is a shame. The pulling and the putting of the pieces together coherently, the being inside of that process and knowing, once I'd done that, it would be finished and I would have to leave it and go back to the world. Cohen wrote around 80 draft verses for the tune, with one writing session at the Royalton Hotel in New York where he was reduced to sitting on the floor in his underwear, banging his head on the floor.

It also contains the bizarre country epic "The Captain", in which Cohen plays the part of a young officer being handed command of his unit by his dying superior. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The album was recorded at Quadrasonic Sound in New York in the summer of 1983 with Leanne Ungar engineering. 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 . As usual it is Cohen's strong lyrics (more poetry really) and the quality of his voice that holds the simple backing tunes together.But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria .