Dance Me to the End of Love

Its instrumentals evoke traditional klezmer music. In 1985, asked about his music sounding more Jewish, Cohen answered that his songs were always Jewish and could not be anything else. In a 1995 radio interview he said that although it is structured as a love song, it came from hearing that a string quartet was forced to play beside the crematoria in the death camps, and that the burning violin in the lyric is that music.

Lissauer told Reynolds that Cohen wrote it on a small Casio keyboard and that the drum track on the record is the Casio itself, miked up, because Cohen liked its simplicity. The key could not be changed without altering the drum pattern, which explains a slight strain in his singing. David Campbell arranged the strings. It became Cohen's perennial show opener, played in a lower key live.

Covers

Madeleine Peyroux recorded it on her album Careless Love in 2004 and released it as the second single. Sting sang it at the Tower of Song memorial concert in 2017, and Bob Dylan performed it live in Montreal on 29 October 2023. In 1996 Welcome Books published a book pairing the lyrics with paintings by Henri Matisse.