Another alteration that Lissauer noticed was the remarkable change in Cohen's singing, with his voice having dropped about a minor third. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

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. As usual it is Cohen's strong lyrics (more poetry really) and the quality of his voice that holds the simple backing tunes together. Various Positions is the seventh studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in December 1984 (and February 1985). 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. Finally, a song that comes into its own live as well as on VP, the quietly sincere prayer, If It Be Your Will.

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 unusually straightforward love song "Coming Back to You" was covered by both Trisha Yearwood and Martin L.

Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust. Three of the songs on `Side Two` are not very well-known but are all superb: the relatively uptempo The Captain, the slow-ish, hypnotic Hunter`s Lullaby. 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. The presence here of the single finest version (by anyone) of what must now be his most famous song, Hallelujah, is, appropriately enough, cause for celebration. 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.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. Cohen, like very few others, has always appreciated that love is at least as much comedy as tragedy. An hermetic, contemplative, wonderfully sung and played tour-de-force that will disarm and captivate the listener at first hearing.

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. 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 . 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.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). 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. 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. 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.

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. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria . 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. Various Positions was produced by John Lissauer, who had been at the helm of Cohen's 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremony.Various Positions made the top ten in Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia, and fared modestly well in the United Kingdom. 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'. The use of synthesisers and Cohen's "new voice" would mark the beginning of a new era in Cohen's composing style and sound.