Various Positions

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The album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and " Hallelujah". To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. 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.

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.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. 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 pieces in Book of Mercy were coming and I was, slowly, writing the album that ended up as Various Positions. 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. 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.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. After recording Recent Songs, Cohen did not record again for five years and published no new writing until Book of Mercy in 1984.

Finally, a song that comes into its own live as well as on VP, the quietly sincere prayer, If It Be Your Will. I thought it was because of 50,000 cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey that my voice has gotten low. 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.

Incidentally, there`s nothing in the booklet to tell you who is playing and singing with Cohen on VP, which is a shame. 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'. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria .This is an irrepressible, Jewish/Greek-sounding song I can imagine moving to, in soft inebriation, in a taverna somewhere crepuscular and warm. 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 . The best-known, and most-covered song on the album, however, is "Hallelujah", having been recorded by John Cale, Jeff Buckley (in one of the song's most acclaimed versions), and many others.