Various Positions

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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 is the seventh studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in December 1984 (and February 1985). The album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and " Hallelujah". 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.

I've listened to it during a million (full)moonlit nights and sung some of its songs aloud again and again (and then some)!

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.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. After recording Recent Songs, Cohen did not record again for five years and published no new writing until Book of Mercy in 1984.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. 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 use of synthesisers and Cohen's "new voice" would mark the beginning of a new era in Cohen's composing style and sound. Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust. 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.

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'. Cohen, like very few others, has always appreciated that love is at least as much comedy as tragedy. Various Positions was produced by John Lissauer, who had been at the helm of Cohen's 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremony. 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. 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 pieces in Book of Mercy were coming and I was, slowly, writing the album that ended up as Various Positions. 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. 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. 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. Another alteration that Lissauer noticed was the remarkable change in Cohen's singing, with his voice having dropped about a minor third.

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. I think the song came out in '83 or '84, and the only person who seemed to recognize the song was Dylan. 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"). instead of presenting me with the new songs exclusively on a Spanish guitar as usual, he had this dinky little Casio keyboard with him . You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.As usual it is Cohen's strong lyrics (more poetry really) and the quality of his voice that holds the simple backing tunes together. 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.