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Various Positions

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In the interim, Lissauer had worked with Barbra Streisand, Manhattan Transfer, and had scored films. Cohen, like very few others, has always appreciated that love is at least as much comedy as tragedy. 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. 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 . 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.

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. Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust. Various Positions was produced by John Lissauer, who had been at the helm of Cohen's 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremony. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

The unusually straightforward love song "Coming Back to You" was covered by both Trisha Yearwood and Martin L. The album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and " Hallelujah". I've listened to it during a million (full)moonlit nights and sung some of its songs aloud again and again (and then some)! The album was recorded at Quadrasonic Sound in New York in the summer of 1983 with Leanne Ungar engineering. 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.

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 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 made the top ten in Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia, and fared modestly well in the United Kingdom.This is an irrepressible, Jewish/Greek-sounding song I can imagine moving to, in soft inebriation, in a taverna somewhere crepuscular and warm. 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.

After recording Recent Songs, Cohen did not record again for five years and published no new writing until Book of Mercy in 1984.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). Incidentally, there`s nothing in the booklet to tell you who is playing and singing with Cohen on VP, which is a shame. 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.

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