Asked in 2001 by Mojo's Sylvie Simmons about this period of inactivity, the singer replied, "My children were living in the South of France and I spent a lot of time visiting them.

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".

Speaking with Judith Fitzgerald of The Globe and Mail in 2000, Cohen cited Various Positions as a breakthrough of sorts: 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 pulling and the putting of the pieces together coherently, the being inside of that process and knowing, once I'd done that, it would be finished and I would have to leave it and go back to the world.The album contains two songs that would become live standards for Cohen: "Dance Me to the End of Love" and "Hallelujah".

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 that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria ... a string quartet[1] was pressed into performance while this horror was going on ... they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt.

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.[2] 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.

[3] The song contains several biblical references, most notably evoking the stories of Samson and traitorous Delilah from the Book of Judges ("she cut your hair") as well as the adulterous King David and Bathsheba ("you saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you").

[5] Various Positions was eventually picked up by the independent label Passport Records, and the album was finally included in the catalogue in 1990 when Columbia released the Cohen discography on compact disc.

"[9] Jason Ankeny of AllMusic calls it "a stunning return to form – Cohen's strongest work since New Skin for the Old Ceremony.

Cryptic and spartan, the set continues in the eclectic vein of recent efforts, but with greater clarity and focus, resulting in an intriguingly diffuse collection ranging from the Serge Gainsbourg-esque pop of 'Dance Me to the End of Love' to the boozy, country-inflected 'The Captain.

'"[6] Writing about Cohen's approach to the album, Robert Christgau commented that "If you're sick of hearing him whisper in your ear that to be a roue is a religious calling, so be it--me, I think this is a better advertisement for middle-aged sex than Dynasty.

"Hallelujah", "Dance Me to the End of Love" and "If It Be Your Will" all appear on the Canadian singer Patricia O'Callaghan's fifth solo album Matador: The Songs of Leonard Cohen released in 2011.