Various Positions

Product Information

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.

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. 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 .In 2010, producer John Lissauer revealed to Cohen biographer Anthony Reynolds that the drum track on the former is actually from the Casio keyboard the song had been composed on: "It didn't even have audio output so we had to mike it up. 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. 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. It was the first time I could really see and intuitively feel what it was I was doing, making or creating in that enterprise.

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.

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 that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria . We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin", meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation.