Various Positions

Product Information

Solo Exitos 1959-2002 Ano A Ano: Certificados 1979-1990. Iberautor Promociones Culturales. 2005. ISBN 8480486392.

Unlike 'I'm Your Man' this biography is a little more revealing of Cohen, and less flattering (especially during the early years). This is a good thing, though, because we finally see that the guy was human. Austriancharts.at – Leonard Cohen – Various Positions" (in German). Hung Medien. Retrieved 24 November 2016. Sadly, the musical section contained no great revelations. Nadel went through the career and offered some reading about songs, but not much more. He unfortunately concentrated on the most usual ones of which I had already heard about many times. In fact, it seemed that his knowledge was mostly based on the sleeve notes of the first Greatest Hits compilation. Along with " Suzanne", "Hallelujah" is arguably Cohen's most famous song. The original version is in 6/8 time, which evokes both waltz and gospel music. Written in the key of C major, the chord progression matches lyrics from the song: "goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, and the major lift": C, F, G, A minor, F. [2] 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. [3] 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"). [2] [4] Asked about the phenomenal success of the song in 2009, Cohen told the CBC Radio show Q: Also (and this has nothing to do with Nadel's book, it's just a detail on Cohen himself): I was a bit disappointed to see how inconsistent and childish Cohen actually was in many episodes. Nadel implicitly states something similar on several occasions in his book (and that's another plus - because he showed Cohen as naked as Cohen himself would have wanted, for his obsession with nakedness and the truth without embellishing is a well-known fact).This book reads very much like a research paper - filled with detailed analysis of his works, but totally devoid of any feeling. It's not like Nadel ignores the emotional angst of his work; after all that is what Cohen is all about. However, her treatment of his work is clinical, detached, almost aloof in discussing the psychic pain that imbues so much of his output. Dance Me to the End of Love" is the sound of French Canada. It has a romantic European aura, and it's a little bit cheesy. (French cheese is some of the best in the world remember.) Most of the album has to do with old Cohen standbys like heartache and loneliness. But, despite the universal themes, Cohen expresses with a sharper and deeper slant than maybe anybody has since the phonograph was invented. "Heart With No Companion" breaks no new ground in subject matter, but few can say "I feel your pain" like Cohen can: Don’t get me wrong: Leonard Cohen’s standards were insanely high and Various Positions lives up to them in spurts. It’s just not consistently great like we remember it to be. In Provence they encountered a massive traffic jam en route to the concert. Bob Johnston told Billy Daniels, the road manager, to get some horses, since most of the musicians were from Texas or Tennessee. There were horses at the stable attached to the country inn where they were staying, so they mounted up and headed through the countryside to their destination. To their astonishment, along the way they found a French steakhouse done up as a "Texas bar." Ten cowboys and one Montreal Jew who had learned to ride at summer camp pulled in and roped their horses to the only hitching post in Southern France. They marched in wearing Western garb, surprising a few of the patrons and fulfilling the fantasies of the owners. After several bottles of wine, they remounted and headed off to the concert. They decided the best entry would be to ride their horses onto stage, and they did...

British album certifications – Leonard Cohen – Various Positions". British Phonographic Industry . Retrieved 29 June 2019. Another alteration that Lissauer noticed was the remarkable change in Cohen's singing, with his voice having dropped about a minor third. Cohen later remarked to author Paul Zollo in the book Songwriters on Songwriting: He was a deep thinker, a monk, a lover, a poet, a novelist, a pop star, an oracle, a ladies’ man, a rogue, a victim, a legend, a ghost. But if he was all of those things to some degree, he was, to every degree, a man who spoke words.The others have the same problem as these: decent melodies and great lyrics slaughtered by terrible arrangements. Thankfully, Cohen would find a way to apply his interest in then-modern production values a little more tastefully with I'm Your Man, although the truth is that even that one's a long way from Cohen at his best.

I was happy that the song was being used. Of course, there was certain ironic and amusing sidebars because the record that it came from, which was called Various Positions, that record Sony wouldn't put out. They didn't think it was good enough ... So there was a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart. I was happy about it but it's ... I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said, "Can we please have a moratorium on 'Hallelujah' in movies and television shows?" And I kind of feel the same way ... I think the song came out in '83 or '84, and the only person who seemed to recognize the song was Dylan. He was doing it in concert. Nobody else recognized the song till quite a long time later, I think.Leonard Cohen is a fascinating character, one of the true originals of the music world, one could say. Only familiar with his "musical side" (and pieces of the myth of the artist), I was somewhat surprised by this book. In short, I did not expect quite so much about the non-music side: Nadel goes to great lengths to tell about the Cohen before the recordings and about his personal life, which are of course very fine as this is a full biography, not a look at an artistic career.