The Holy or the Broken
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CONTENTS
Epigraph
“Hallelujah”
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Acknowledgments
Selected “Hallelujah” Discography
Links
About Alan Light
Index
For Suzanne and Adam,
with all my love
Hallelujah is a Hebrew word which means “Glory to the Lord.” The song explains that many kinds of hallelujahs do exist. I say all the perfect and broken hallelujahs have an equal value. It’s a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way, but with enthusiasm, with emotion.
—Leonard Cohen
Whoever listens carefully to “Hallelujah” will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth. The hallelujah is not an homage to a worshipped person, idol, or god, but the hallelujah of the orgasm. It’s an ode to life and love.
—Jeff Buckley
“HALLELUJAH”
Words and Music by Leonard Cohen
I’ve heard there was a secret chord
that David played to please the Lord
but you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
the minor fall, the major lift;
the baffled king composing Hallelujah!
Your faith was strong but you needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof;
her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to a kitchen chair
she broke your throne, she cut your hair,
and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah!
You say I took the Name in vain;
I don’t even know the name.
But if I did, well, really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word;
it doesn’t matter which you heard,
the holy, or the broken Hallelujah!
I did my best; it wasn’t much.
I couldn’t feel, so I learned to touch.
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong,
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!
(Additional verses)
Baby, I’ve been here before.
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor.
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch,
but love is not a victory march,
it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!
There was a time you let me know
what’s really going on below
but now you never show it to me, do you?
I remember when I moved in you,
and the holy dove was moving too,
and every breath we drew was Hallelujah!
Now maybe there’s a God above
but all I ever learned from love
is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
And it’s no complaint you hear tonight,
and it’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the light—
it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!
INTRODUCTION
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum sits on the Columbia Point peninsula of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. It is housed in a striking I. M. Pei building, situated in dramatic isolation on a reshaped former landfill.
This brisk February Sunday in 2012, President Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, is opening a ceremony by invoking one of her father’s speeches. “Society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him,” she quotes him as saying in a 1963 address at Amherst College, honoring Robert Frost. “The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself.”
The occasion is the inaugural presentation of a new award for “Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence,” given by PEN (Poets/Playwrights, Essayists/Editors, Novelists) New England. The award committee, chaired by journalist/novelist/television executive Bill Flanagan, includes Bono, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Paul Muldoon (poet and poetry editor at the New Yorker), Smokey Robinson, Salman Rushdie, and Paul Simon. The first recipients of the award are Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen.
The honorees are both dressed in their latter-day uniforms: Berry in a sailor’s cap and windbreaker, Cohen in a dark suit with a gray shirt, topped by a fedora. In truth, the spotlight mostly stays squarely on eighty-five-year-old Berry. Paul Simon presents Berry’s award—which the event program says “reflect[s] our passion for the intelligence, beauty and power of words” and celebrates these songwriters for “their creativity, originality and contribution to literature”—with a heartfelt, slightly rambling speech, reciting some of the rock and roll pioneer’s most evocative lyrics, which Berry admitted at the time he couldn’t hear.
Costello performs an impassioned, slowed-down version of Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go,” and Flanagan reads a congratulatory e-mail from Bob Dylan, who calls Berry “the Shakespeare of rock and roll” (adding, “Say hello to Mr. Leonard, Kafka of the blues”). Instead of making a speech, Berry straps on Costello’s guitar and delivers a haphazard verse of “Johnny B. Goode.” The whole thing winds up with Costello and surprise guest Keith Richards—perhaps Chuck Berry’s greatest acolyte—swaggering through a glorious rendition of “The Promised Land,” with the beaming Rolling Stone reeling off three lengthy, hard-driving guitar solos as his idol pumps his fist in the front row.
In contrast to all that firepower, the presentation to Cohen is quiet and modest. Shawn Colvin sings a delicate, slightly nervous version of “Come Healing,” as Cohen leans forward in his seat and watches closely. At the end of the song, she knocks over her guitar when placing it back in its stand; Cohen graciously bends over and steadies the instrument before leaning in to give Colvin a kiss of gratitude.
Cohen’s own speech is brief and characteristically humble. With Dorchester Bay and the Boston skyline gleaming through the windows behind the podium, the elegant seventy-seven-year-old talks for less than two minutes—exclusively about Chuck Berry. His bass voice scarcely above a murmur, he says that “Roll Over Beethoven” is “the only exclamation in our literature that rivals Walt Whitman declaring his ‘barbaric yawp.’ ” He concludes with the thought that “all of us are just footnotes to the work of Chuck Berry.”
Salman Rushdie’s presentation to Cohen is a bit more expansive. “When we were kids, he taught us something about how it might be to be grown up,” the novelist says. He quotes a few lines from Cohen’s songs, and sums up his admiration by saying, “If I could write like that, I would.”
Several times, Rushdie speaks of the song for which Cohen is now best known, calling it simply “the great ‘Hallelujah.’ ” He describes the song as “something anthemic and hymnlike, but if you listen closely you hear the wit and jaundiced comedy.” He gets a laugh from the audience when, with a grin, he notes Cohen’s rhyme
of “hallelujah” with “what’s it to ya,” alongside the lyric’s “other rhymes equally non-sacred.” Rushdie compares this “playfulness” with the work of poets W. H. Auden and James Fenton, and describes the song’s “melancholy and exaltation, desire and loss.”
When the hour-long ceremony is over, and the thousand or so audience members have filed out of the auditorium, perhaps Leonard Cohen allows himself a moment to smile and consider the irony. This song, which tormented him for years, only to wind up included on the lone album of his career that his record company refused to release, is now held up as “exemplify[ing] the highest standards of literary achievement.” What’s more, this turn of events is far from the most unlikely thing that has happened to “Hallelujah” along its almost three-decade-long journey.
• • •
“Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally,” Kurt Cobain once sang in tribute to the only song-writer, many believe, who belongs in a class with Bob Dylan. But “Hallelujah,” which first appeared on Cohen’s 1984 album Various Positions, has already had one of the most remarkable afterlives in pop music history. The song has become one of the most loved, most performed, and most misunderstood compositions of its time. Salman Rushdie’s description of the contrasts in the lyric holds true: Joyous and despondent, a celebration and a lament, a juxtaposition of dark Old Testament imagery with an irresistibly uplifting chorus, “Hallelujah” is an open-ended meditation on love and faith—and certainly not a song that would easily be pegged as an international anthem.
“Hallelujah,” however, has been performed and recorded by hundreds of artists—from U2 to Justin Timberlake, from Bon Jovi to Celine Dion, from Willie Nelson to numerous contestants on American Idol. It has been sung by opera stars and punk bands. Decades after its creation, it became a Top Ten hit throughout Europe. In 2008, different versions simultaneously held the Number One and Number Two positions on the UK singles chart, with Cohen’s original climbing into the Top 40 at the same time.
“Hallelujah” has been named to lists of the greatest Canadian songs of all time and the greatest Jewish songs of all time (though in writing about the song for America: The National Catholic Weekly website, one minister mused that the singer’s melancholic worldview might indicate that he “has some Irish blood”). It plays every Saturday night on the Israeli Defense Forces’ radio network. It made the list of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and, in a poll of songwriters by the British music magazine Q, was named one of the Top Ten Greatest Tracks of all time, alongside the likes of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Born to Run,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
According to Bono, who has performed “Hallelujah” on his own and with U2, “it might be the most perfect song in the world.”
• • •
It’s impossible to determine how many people have listened to a single given song. One way to gauge popularity these days is to look at views on YouTube, which has become the world’s leading on-demand music service. Totaling up the number of times “Hallelujah” has been watched on the site, it’s clear that we’re looking at a figure in the hundreds of millions: Performances by three different acts (Jeff Buckley, an all-star quartet of Norwegian singers, and Rufus Wainwright) have each been viewed roughly fifty million times. Cohen’s own renditions of the song have another thirty million views, and four more singers top out with over ten million apiece. The YouTube onslaught is participatory, as well—instrumental versions, for karaoke, have another ten million views.
“Hallelujah” served as a balm to a grieving nation when Jeff Buckley’s much-revered version was used for VH1’s official post-9/11 tribute video; as a statement of national pride at the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver; and as the centerpiece of the benefit telethon that followed the earthquake in Haiti.
These occasions are not always a comfortable fit for such a complex and ambiguous set of lyrics. The verses—four in Cohen’s original, five in Buckley’s 1994 rendition that is often considered definitive—touch on the biblical stories of King David and Samson, though they are far from pious, offering such charged language as “I remember when I moved in you, / and the holy dove was moving too” and “all I ever learned from love / is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.” Yet it also returns and lands, each time, on the reassurance and celebration of the title, which serves as a repeated, single-word chorus. The focus given to the hymnlike incantation of “hallelujah,” in contrast to the romantic and spiritual challenges evoked by the verses, raises an eternal pop music dilemma: Are people really paying attention to all the words, and does it matter?
Australian composer Andrew Ford expressed his reservations about the “ubiquity” of the song. He singled out its use at the memorial service for victims of the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, when 173 people died and more than four hundred were injured as a result of fires in the state of Victoria. “Who knows why?” he wrote of the choice. “Perhaps because its one-word chorus sits in the context of a song that includes the line ‘Maybe there’s a God above’ it offered reassurance amidst doubt. Still, to have that response you would have to ignore most of the other words, and particularly those about spying a naked woman bathing on the roof, being tied ‘to a kitchen chair,’ and the verse about orgasm.”
Yet to Canadian country/pop chanteuse k. d. lang, one of the most celebrated interpreters of “Hallelujah,” the song has entered another realm, in which the public plays a more active role in its meaning. When she was asked to perform the song at the Vancouver Olympics, she recalls her own family’s response.
“My mom is eighty-eight years old,” said lang. “She lives in a seniors’ apartment and all her friends were like, ‘Oh, I love that song!’ I said, ‘Mom, do they know what the lyrics are about?’ And she goes, ‘I don’t think they listen to the lyrics; I think they just listen to the refrain.’ I think it’s very indicative of spirituality in general, that something as simple as saying ‘hallelujah’ over and over again, really beautifully, can redeem all the verses.
“Ultimately,” she concluded, “it’s a piece of music and it belongs to culture. It doesn’t belong to Leonard, it doesn’t belong to me, it doesn’t belong to anybody.”
The earliest manifestation of “Hallelujah,” however, could not have been more humble: When Cohen submitted the Various Positions album, on which “Hallelujah” appears, to Columbia Records in 1984, they refused to put it out. When the record was eventually released, the song was still generally ignored. To complicate things even further, Cohen immediately began changing and reworking the song in concert, confusing those few fans who were aware of it.
For a full ten years after its release, it gained extremely limited exposure through a few scattered cover versions. Jeff Buckley’s interpretation on his 1994 album, Grace, ultimately served as the pivot point for the song’s popularity, but even that recording took a number of years before it truly started to capture the public’s imagination.
Yet by the time “Hallelujah” had become a staple for such sentimental moments as the 2011 Emmy Awards “In Memoriam” segment (performed by the Canadian Tenors), for some it was a “Hallelujah” too far. New York magazine’s website live-blogged, “ ‘Hallelujah’ is on the artistic ban list. Sorry, Emmys.” A story on Salon.com decried the “criminal overuse of ‘Hallelujah.’ ” Indeed, the song has been included in so many movies and television shows over the years—The West Wing, ER, The O.C., House, on and on—that in 2009 Cohen himself suggested a moratorium on further soundtrack placements. “I think it’s a good song,” he said, “but too many people sing it.”
By 2012, he was a bit more circumspect about the situation. “Once or twice I’ve felt maybe I should lend my voice to silencing it,” he said to England’s Guardian newspaper, “but on second thought no, I’m very happy that it’s being sung.”
Somewhere along the way, “Hallelujah” reached the kind of rarefied status that only a handful of contemporary songs—�
��Imagine,” “A Change Is Gonna Come”—have achieved. Its presence in the world reaches far beyond the song itself, and serves as shorthand for some greater idea or emotion.
Paul Simon wrote another one of these modern hymns. “I would not have predicted that ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ would be a song that would be kind of permanently there,” said Simon, sitting in the lobby of the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, on a break from rehearsal for his 2011 tour supporting the So Beautiful or So What album. “People used to play it at their weddings, and now they play it at their funerals, state funerals—I heard it played when Ronald Reagan died. So that song has found a purpose and it will stay there, serving that purpose, until it’s no longer needed.”
Over the years, Simon noticed that Cohen’s composition gradually began to play a similar role, in its popularity and its uses. “ ‘Hallelujah’ started to be the ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ alternative,” he said. “His song has that feel, but it’s also got somebody being tied down and having their hair cut off. But it moves people in the same way that ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ does, and I’ve heard it sung by a lot of different people, really beautifully. It’s part of the mystery, that there are songs that are like that, and if you’re lucky enough to be the writer of the song—well, in a certain sense, if there’s such a thing as immortality, then there’s a little bit of immortality attached to that.”
• • •
Many latter-day “Hallelujah” fans, though, actually have no idea it’s a Leonard Cohen song; they assume that it was written by Jeff Buckley. Others think that it’s an ancient liturgical song, and are shocked when informed that it was written in the 1980s. Because it has reached so many more listeners through interpretation rather than through the author’s own performances, now it mostly just seems like it’s always been here.
Whether listeners know its origin or not, however, the mysterious imagery of “Hallelujah”—like many of Cohen’s writings, a blend of the sacred and the sensual—has rendered the song something of a musical Rorschach test. Singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who does not hesitate to refer to “Hallelujah” as “the greatest song ever written,” said that it provided her with the key for reconciling her Christian faith and her homosexuality. Carlile went through a period during which she slept with a boom box next to her bed at night; she would leave Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” on repeat and let it play for eight or nine hours at a time.