Bob Dylan‘s Rough and Rowdy Ways tour hit Leonard Cohen‘s hometown of Montreal on Sunday night, and he honored the late singer with a breathtaking performance of his 1984 classic “Dance Me to the End of Love.” Check out an audience recording right here.
“Dance Me to the End of Love” originally appeared on Cohen’s 1984 LP Various Positions. The second side of the album kicks off with “Hallelujah,” but Cohen’s commercial career was in a state of steep decline at this point, and Columbia initially refused to even release the album in the United States. “Dance Me to the End of Love” became Cohen’s standard concert opener for the remainder of his career.
On the surface, “Dance Me to the End of Love” seems like a love song. But it’s actually about the Nazis playing classical music as they marched Jews into gas chambers. “A string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also,” Cohen said in 1995. “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 thereof being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation.”
This is only the second time in Dylan’s career that he’s played a Cohen song in concert. The first took place in 1988 when he covered “Hallelujah” at shows in Los Angeles and Montreal. This was before the famous renditions of the song by John Cale, Rufus Wainwright, Jeff Buckley, and countless others.
Cohen rarely played cover songs in concert and has never performed a Dylan tune, but he was a huge fan. In his final public appearance, Cohen spoke about Dylan winning the Nobel Prize. “To me,” he said, “[the award] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.” At that same event, he spoke about Dylan’s songwriting. “I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don’t write the songs anyhow,” he said. “So if you’re lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you’re lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this. You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you’re actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.”
“Dance Me to the End of Love” is the most recent surprise city-specific cover Dylan has spindled into set over the past few weeks. He covered John Mellencamp in Indiana, Chuck Berry in St. Louis, and Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in Chicago. When he hits a city that stumps him, like Rochester, New York, he tends to break out a Grateful Dead cover like “Stella Blue” or Brokedown Palace.”