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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In the interim, Lissauer had worked with Barbra Streisand, Manhattan Transfer, and had scored films.

Incidentally, there`s nothing in the booklet to tell you who is playing and singing with Cohen on VP, which is a shame. 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. 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 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.

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. 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. 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").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). Although it featured a more contemporary sound for its time compared with the singer's previous LPs, Columbia did not think it was commercially viable and refused to release Various Positions in the US. 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 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.

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. 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. I've listened to it during a million (full)moonlit nights and sung some of its songs aloud again and again (and then some)! An hermetic, contemplative, wonderfully sung and played tour-de-force that will disarm and captivate the listener at first hearing. The pulling and the putting of the pieces together coherently, the being inside of that process and knowing, once I'd done that, it would be finished and I would have to leave it and go back to the world.The album was recorded at Quadrasonic Sound in New York in the summer of 1983 with Leanne Ungar engineering. 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. Various Positions made the top ten in Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia, and fared modestly well in the United Kingdom. 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 .