Various Positions

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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. Various Positions was Leonard Cohen's first album of the 1980s, yet was in keeping with the rest of his albums in two important respects: one, it sounded absolutely nothing like anything else anyone else was doing; two, it was a compelling reason for anyone else dealing in songs of love and its loss to wonder why they were bothering. The pieces in Book of Mercy were coming and I was, slowly, writing the album that ended up as Various Positions. instead of presenting me with the new songs exclusively on a Spanish guitar as usual, he had this dinky little Casio keyboard with him .

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 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. 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.I think the song came out in '83 or '84, and the only person who seemed to recognize the song was Dylan. 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. This is an irrepressible, Jewish/Greek-sounding song I can imagine moving to, in soft inebriation, in a taverna somewhere crepuscular and warm. This 1984 album, Cohen`s seventh studio recording, following the wonderful Recent Songs five years earlier and preceding the unexpected I`m Your Man almost four years later, has over the years received some mystifyingly mixed press - on these pages too I see.

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. Various Positions was eventually picked up by the independent label Passport Records, and the album was finally included in the catalogue in 1990 when Columbia released the Cohen discography on compact disc. 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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.it's curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that's why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. An hermetic, contemplative, wonderfully sung and played tour-de-force that will disarm and captivate the listener at first hearing. This explains the slight strain in Cohen's singing on the track; changing the key on the Casio would have meant altering the drum pattern that Cohen wanted to use (The song, which would become Cohen's perennial show opener, is performed in a lower key live).

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. The recording quality of all these re-released Cohen CD's is very good, and this one is no exception. 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"). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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. situations, beginning perhaps (it isn`t spelt out) with a Mary the Madonna figure, then taking in a father, wife, lover, until the final verse by which time our narrator is getting on in years. 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 . 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 marked not only his turn to a modern sound and use of synthesizers (particularly on the opening track), but also, after the harmonies and backing vocals from Jennifer Warnes on the previous Recent Songs (1979), an even greater contribution from Warnes, who is credited equally to Cohen as vocalist on all of the tracks.