Various Positions

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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.

It was the first time I could really see and intuitively feel what it was I was doing, making or creating in that enterprise. 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 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"). I've listened to it during a million (full)moonlit nights and sung some of its songs aloud again and again (and then some)!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. 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.

The use of synthesisers and Cohen's "new voice" would mark the beginning of a new era in Cohen's composing style and sound. I've fallen in love listening to it and broken up listening to it, and then I painfully waited listening to it and was reunited, and it still was there crooning to me wisely about just how these things are and feel. The pieces in Book of Mercy were coming and I was, slowly, writing the album that ended up as Various Positions.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 . 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. 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 album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and " Hallelujah".

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. 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.But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song – it's not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.

The album was recorded at Quadrasonic Sound in New York in the summer of 1983 with Leanne Ungar engineering. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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.Cohen, like very few others, has always appreciated that love is at least as much comedy as tragedy. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria . 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. I thought it was because of 50,000 cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey that my voice has gotten low. Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust.