Various Positions

Product Information

The album was recorded at Quadrasonic Sound in New York in the summer of 1983 with Leanne Ungar engineering. The album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and " Hallelujah".

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. I've Been a fan of this record ever since I heard "If it be your will" in the movie Pump on the Volume When I was a teenager. 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. 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.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

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. I thought it was because of 50,000 cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey that my voice has gotten low. instead of presenting me with the new songs exclusively on a Spanish guitar as usual, he had this dinky little Casio keyboard with him . Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust. 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.Finally, a song that comes into its own live as well as on VP, the quietly sincere prayer, If It Be Your Will. 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. 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. 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 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 .