Various Positions composer Leonard Cohen
Various Positions is the seventh studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in December 1984 (and February 1985). 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.Background
After recording Recent Songs, Cohen did not record again for five years and published no new writing until Book of Mercy in 1984.  Asked by Mojo's Sylvie Simmons about this period of inactivity in 2001, 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."  Cohen did write and star in the 1983 made-for-TV musical I Am a Hotel, which featured several of his songs in the narration.  Various Positions was produced by John Lissauer, who had been at the helm of Cohen's 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremony. The pair had not worked together or even spoken since a project called Songs For Rebecca had been scuttled by Cohen's manager Marty Machat to clear the way for the singer to work with Phil Spector on 1977's Death of a Ladies' Man. In the interim, Lissauer had worked with Barbra Streisand, Manhattan Transfer, and had scored films. According to Anthony Reynolds 2010 memoir Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life, the pair met at the Royalton on 44th Street in New York City so Cohen could play Lissauer his songs, and the producer was surprised: ... instead of presenting me with the new songs exclusively on a Spanish guitar as usual, he had this dinky little Casio keyboard with him ... 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 ... and this is how he came up with "Dance Me to the End of Love".  Another alteration that Lissauer noticed was the remarkable change in Cohen's singing, with his voice having dropped about a minor third. Cohen later remarked to author Paul Zollo in the book Songwriters on Songwriting: My voice has gotten very very deep over the years and seems even to be deepening. I thought it was because of 50,000 cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey that my voice has gotten low.  But I gave up smoking a couple of years ago and it’s still getting deeper ... My voice really started to change around 1982. It started to deepen and I started to cop to the fact that it was deepening.  The use of synthesisers and Cohen's "new voice" would mark the beginning of a new era in Cohen's composing style and sound.
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