portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

and so how about this  . . . . . . ?
 . . . . . just because, well Madeleine Peyroux covers Leonard Cohen

Madeleine Payroux - Dance Me To The End of Love

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Although structured as a love song, "Dance Me to the End Of Love" was in fact inspired by the Holocaust. In an interview, Cohen said of the song: 
 “ '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[2] 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 there of 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."

Madeleine's version comes for her second album here from 2004 'Careless Love'  and still features as part of her live set . . . . . . 

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