Songfacts®:

• "Closing Time" starts off as an euphoric track about a wild party.
  
  The fiddler fiddles something so sublime
  All the women tear their blouses off
  And the men they dance on the polka-dots
  
  As the song goes on, the scene evolves from the closing of the bar, to the concluding of a relationship, to the end of life.
  
  I loved you when our love was blessed
  and I love you now there's nothing left
  but sorrow and a sense of overtime
  And I missed you since the place got wrecked
  and I just don't care what happens next
  Looks like freedom but it feels like death
  it's something in between, I guess
  It's closing time
• Cohen based "Closing Time" on a violin sample that came with a Casio keyboard. "When he first started recording it, the sample was slowed down," engineer Leanne Unger told Uncut magazine. "It was very moody, with six string bass, very vibey. I loved it."
  
  She added: "He came in for next weekend and said, 'It's all wrong, I'm starting over.' I was like, 'Noooooo!' Devastated. He brought it back in a week later and it was uptempo, jumping, and he had a giant hit with it in Canada. So what do I know?"
• The song peaked at #70 in Canada. It was Cohen's second-biggest hit in his native country after "Hallelujah."
• The music video, directed by Curtis Wehrfritz, won the Juno Award for Best Music Video in 1993.