Various Positions

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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 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.

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. 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. 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.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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"). In the interim, Lissauer had worked with Barbra Streisand, Manhattan Transfer, and had scored films.

Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

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. After recording Recent Songs, Cohen did not record again for five years and published no new writing until Book of Mercy in 1984. 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.

Finally, a song that comes into its own live as well as on VP, the quietly sincere prayer, If It Be Your Will. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria . 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 .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. 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. Cohen's words are often interestingly cryptic, moving and deeply reflective, rather than being outrightly political or 'protest'.

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 album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and " Hallelujah". 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. An hermetic, contemplative, wonderfully sung and played tour-de-force that will disarm and captivate the listener at first hearing. 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. Various Positions made the top ten in Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia, and fared modestly well in the United Kingdom.