3 Key Tracks From Leonard Cohen’s ‘Various Positions’

Leonard Cohen’s most famous song, “Hallelujah,” almost didn’t see the light of day.

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When he submitted his seventh album, Various Positions, Columbia Records didn’t think it had commercial appeal in the United States. An independent label picked up the record instead, and since 1984, countless cover versions of Cohen’s defining song have proven the Columbia executives wrong.

The album also began a new chapter for Cohen. He became enamored with keyboards, and the glassy synthesizers provided a novel sound to accompany his classical guitar.

Meanwhile, a change in Cohen’s singing voice added to his shifting aesthetic. He thought the booze and cigarettes had something to do with it. (The price paid for a writer who expertly synthesized the sensual and the religious.) Regardless, his voice moved to a lower register while his poetry aimed for something higher.

If you only know Various Positions for “Hallelujah,” this list highlights three additional tracks from Cohen’s lucid reinvention.

There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard

“Dance Me to the End of Love”

The album’s romantic opener was inspired by the Holocaust musicians who were forced to perform while their fellow prisoners were being tortured and executed. Cohen said the listener doesn’t need to know the song’s genesis to understand it. The prisoners’ final dance happens in a state of rebellious joy against the burning world around them. This is the sound of a funeral march being put to a waltz. It’s also the defiance of love.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand, touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love

“If It Be Your Will”

If “Hallelujah” is Cohen’s hymn, “If It Be Your Will” is the prayer. The echoes of an old prayer ricochet against soft keyboards and surrender. Still, Cohen’s classical guitar grounds the track in earthiness against its celestial textures. Jennifer Warnes backs Cohen, and her voice brings to mind generations who’ve already transcended. Maybe they offered a similar prayer in another language or some ancient custom. But the thing binding the ghosts of the believers and the faithless is the understanding that someday, this all ends.

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before

“Night Comes On”

This song opens with Cohen visiting his mother’s grave. He doesn’t think he can continue living without her—enduring “the thunder and the lightning.” She speaks to him from the grave, and though he wants the conversation to last forever, she tells him, “Go back to the world.” Religious and historical imagery are Cohen’s tools, and the “night” could be the unknown, the unknowable, or the anxiety of an undetermined future. By the song’s end, he wants to “cross over.” Again, his mother says, “Go back to the world.”

We were locked in this kitchen, I took to religion
And I wondered how long she would stay
I needed so much to have nothing to touch
I’ve always been greedy that way

Photo by Terry Lott/Sony Music Archive via Getty Images