"Dance Me to the End of Love" | |
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![]() Canadian vinyl single | |
Single by Leonard Cohen | |
from the album Various Positions | |
Released | December 1984 |
Recorded | June 1984 |
Genre | Pop, Jazz |
Length | 4:38 |
Label | Columbia |
Songwriter(s) | Leonard Cohen, David Campbell |
Producer(s) | John Lissauer |
Official video | |
"Dance Me to the End of Love" on YouTube |
"Dance Me to the End of Love" is a 1984 song by Canadian singer Leonard Cohen. It was first performed by Cohen on his 1984 album Various Positions . It has been recorded by various artists and in 2009 was described as "trembling on the brink of becoming a standard."
"Dance Me to the End of Love" is a 1984 song by Leonard Cohen and first recorded by him for his 1984 album Various Positions . The instrumentals are evocative of traditional klezmer music. When asked about his music sounding "more Jewish" in a 1985 interview, Cohen responded [1]
'My songs are always Jewish, they can’t be anything else but Jewish.'
When pressed more about that framing, Cohen added,
'What is ‘more Jewish?’ It’s like saying somebody is a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead. I write out of my own tradition. My heart was circumcised in the Jewish tradition.'
It has since been recorded by various artists, and has been described as "trembling on the brink of becoming a standard".[ citation needed ]
Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End Of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust. In a 1995 radio interview, Cohen said of the song: [2] [3]
'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 that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet [4] was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin," meaning the beauty thereof being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. 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.
In 1996, Welcome Books published the book Dance Me to the End of Love, as part of its "Art & Poetry" series, featuring the lyrics of the song alongside paintings by Henri Matisse. [5]
Chart (2016) | Peak position |
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France (SNEP) [6] | 42 |
Portugal (AFP) [7] | 67 |
Spain (PROMUSICAE) [8] | 14 |
Switzerland (Schweizer Hitparade) [9] | 68 |
"Dance Me to the End of Love" | ||||
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Single by Madeleine Peyroux | ||||
from the album Careless Love | ||||
Released | 2005 | |||
Recorded | 2004 | |||
Genre | Jazz | |||
Length | 3:54 | |||
Label | Rounder | |||
Songwriter(s) | Leonard Cohen | |||
Producer(s) | Larry Klein | |||
Madeleine Peyroux singles chronology | ||||
| ||||
Official audio | ||||
"Dance Me to the End of Love" on YouTube |
Jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux included "Dance Me to the End of Love" on her second solo album, Careless Love (2004). It was released as the second single for the album and has been a part of her concert set-list since then.
Peyroux's rendition was included on the fifth and last of the Queer as Folk soundtracks, as well as on the soundtrack of the 2009 computer game The Saboteur .
Interviewing Peyroux in 2012, The Huffington Post described the song as a "haunting 2004 rendition ... undoubtedly one of modern music's brightest highlights. An inspired, exquisite cover that besides drawing countless comparison's to Billie Holiday's singing, brought the free spirited musician to just artistic prominence." [10]
The Scottish painter Jack Vettriano created a painting with the same title. He has also made two other paintings named after and inspired by Leonard Cohen works: one based on Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers and the other inspired by his song "Bird on the Wire". When asked on Desert Island Discs , [18] Vettriano mentioned Leonard Cohen's album I'm Your Man as one of his must-have records.
Kathryn Dawn Lang, known by her stage name k.d. lang, is a Canadian pop and country singer-songwriter and occasional actress. Lang has won Juno Awards and Grammy Awards for her musical performances. Hits include the songs "Constant Craving" and "Miss Chatelaine".
Odetta Holmes, known as Odetta, was an American singer, often referred to as "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement". Her musical repertoire consisted largely of American folk music, blues, jazz, and spirituals. An important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, she influenced many of the key figures of the folk-revival of that time, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mavis Staples, and Janis Joplin. In 2011 Time magazine included her recording of "Take This Hammer" on its list of the 100 Greatest Popular Songs, stating that "Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan, and Martin Luther King Jr. called her the queen of American folk music."
Songs of Love and Hate is the third studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Produced by Bob Johnston, the album was released on March 19, 1971, through Columbia Records.
Various Positions is the seventh studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in December 1984. It marked not only his turn to a modern sound and use of synthesizers, 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.
Madeleine Peyroux is an American jazz singer and songwriter who began her career as a teenager on the streets of Paris. She sang vintage jazz and blues songs before finding mainstream success in 2004 when her album Careless Love sold half a million copies.
Half the Perfect World is the fourth studio album by American jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux. It was released on September 12, 2006. It peaked at No. 33 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and had sold 218,000 copies in the United States by December 2008.
Larry Klein is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer. He is based in Los Angeles.
William Alexander Galison is an American harmonica player.
Leonard Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter and poet who was active in music from 1967 until his death in 2016. Cohen released 14 studio albums and eight live albums during the course of a recording career lasting almost 50 years, throughout which he remained an active poet. His entire catalogue is available on Columbia Records. His 1967 debut Songs of Leonard Cohen earned an RIAA gold record; he followed up with three more highly acclaimed albums: Songs from a Room (1969), Songs of Love and Hate (1971) and New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), before allowing Phil Spector to produce Death of a Ladies' Man for Warner Bros. Records in 1977. Cohen returned to Columbia in 1979 for Recent Songs, but the label declined to release his next album, Various Positions (1984) in the US, leaving it to American shops to import it from CBS Canada. In 1988, Columbia got behind Cohen again and gave full support to I'm Your Man, which brought his career to new heights, and Cohen followed it with 1992's The Future.
Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist. Themes commonly explored throughout his work include faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, and sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. In 2011, he received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize.
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"So Long, Marianne" is a song written by Canadian poet and musician Leonard Cohen. It was featured on his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen.
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Larry Klein born 1956) is an American musician, songwriter, record and soundtrack producer, and head of Strange Cargo, an imprint with Universal Music Group.
J.C. Hopkins is an American bandleader, writer, record producer, and Grammy-nominated producer, and songwriter.
The Blue Room is a 2013 studio album by American jazz musician Madeleine Peyroux. It has received positive reviews by critics.
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Art of Time Ensemble is a Toronto-based musical collective of leading Canadian musicians from the worlds of jazz and classical music.