the songs with the authority and intensity required." Composition The album includes some of Cohen's most popular songs and concert staples, including the single "Ain't No Cure for Love", "First We Take Manhattan", "Tower of Song", and "Everybody Knows", which was a collaboration with Cohen's backing vocalist Sharon Robinson. "Everybody Knows" is known for its somber tone and repetition of the title at the beginning of most verses. Featuring phrases such as "Everybody knows that the dice are loaded" and "Everybody knows that the good guys lost", the song has been variously described by critics as "bitterly pessimistic" yet funny, or, more strongly, a "bleak prophecy about the end of the world as we know it." The lyrics include references to AIDS, social problems, and relationship and religion issues. The album's opening track, "First We Take Manhattan" (originally called "In Old Berlin"), deals with geopolitical ideas, specifically extremism, as he explained himself in a backstage interview: I think it means exactly what it says. It is a terrorist song. I think it's a response to terrorism. There's something about terrorism that I've always admired. The fact that there are no alibis or no compromises. That position is always very attractive. I don't like it when it's manifested on the physical plane – I don't really enjoy the terrorist activities – but Psychic Terrorism. I remember there was a great poem by Irving Layton that I once read – I'll give you a paraphrase of it – it was "Well, you guys blow up an occasional airline and kill a few children here and there," he says. But our terrorists, Jesus, Freud, Marx, Einstein. The whole world is still quaking... "Take This Waltz" was originally released as part the 1986 Federico García Lorca tribute album Poets in New York (Poetas en Nueva York) and as a single. It reached number one in Spain in 1986. The song appears on I'm Your Man in slightly re-arranged version (with addition of violin and Jennifer Warnes's duet vocals, both absent from the 1986 version). The song's lyrics are a loose translation of the poem "Pequeño vals vienés" by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (one of Cohen's favorite poets). The poem was first published in Lorca's seminal book Poet in New York/Poeta en Nueva York. In his 2010 Cohen biography, Anthony Reynolds claims that the unorthodox "Jazz Police" was Cohen's response to his band's