Mark Steyn, as part of his always diverting “Song of the Week” series, has a delightful piece today on Leonard Cohen’s song Dance Me To The End Of Love. It begins with his reflections on the difficulty songwriters have always had in coming up with interesting ways to use the very limited number of rhymes for the word love. Cohen did spectacularly well in this song, Steyn argues. Read his whole piece — but he included a quote from Cohen that was news to me, as regards the genesis 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 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.

Click here to listen to the song on YouTube.

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