Various Positions

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. The unusually straightforward love song "Coming Back to You" was covered by both Trisha Yearwood and Martin L.

This is an irrepressible, Jewish/Greek-sounding song I can imagine moving to, in soft inebriation, in a taverna somewhere crepuscular and warm. 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 . 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. 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.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").

So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin", meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. In the interim, Lissauer had worked with Barbra Streisand, Manhattan Transfer, and had scored films. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. Incidentally, there`s nothing in the booklet to tell you who is playing and singing with Cohen on VP, which is a shame.It was the first time I could really see and intuitively feel what it was I was doing, making or creating in that enterprise. The album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and " Hallelujah". The recording quality of all these re-released Cohen CD's is very good, and this one is no exception.

But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria . 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. I thought it was because of 50,000 cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey that my voice has gotten low.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. 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.

I've Been a fan of this record ever since I heard "If it be your will" in the movie Pump on the Volume When I was a teenager.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. 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'. Finally, a song that comes into its own live as well as on VP, the quietly sincere prayer, If It Be Your Will. Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust.