Various Positions

Written largely on a Casio keyboard, it was turned down by Columbia for the American market and issued there by Passport. Columbia's boss Walter Yetnikoff reportedly said he knew Cohen was great but was unsure he was any good. It reached number 52 in Britain. In Rolling Stone in 1985, Don Shewey praised Lissauer's lucid and beautiful production.

It was recorded at Quadrasonic Sound in New York in the summer of 1983, with Leanne Ungar engineering and a small core of musicians from a group called Slow Train. Lissauer told Reynolds that Cohen arrived at the Royalton Hotel with a small Casio keyboard rather than his usual Spanish guitar, and that the drum track on Dance Me to the End of Love is the Casio itself, miked up. Cohen's voice had dropped about a minor third by then, and he said it began to deepen around 1982.

Cohen told the Globe and Mail in 2000 that with this record he could sense a unity, and that it had its own narrative. The album made the top ten in Spain, Portugal and Scandinavia. AllMusic's Jason Ankeny called it a stunning return to form, and Robert Christgau judged it a better advertisement for middle-aged sex than Dynasty. Columbia reissued it on CD in 1990.