“Dance Me To The End Of Love” by Leonard Cohen

"Dance Me to the End of Love" arrived on Various Positions, Leonard Cohen's 1984 album, and it carries a terrible weight under its courtly surface: built like a love song, it was actually inspired by the Holocaust. The instrumental backing calls up traditional klezmer, and when a 1985 interviewer asked whether his songs were sounding more Jewish, Cohen answered that they had never been anything else, and that he wrote out of his own tradition.

John Lissauer produced and arranged it, Leanne Ungar recorded and mixed it, and Jennifer Warnes sings alongside Cohen. Various artists have recorded it since, and by 2009 it was being described as a song on the verge of becoming a standard.

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