by Alan Light
“To me, it really outlined how people tend to misconstrue religion versus faith,” she said. “I felt that this song was, in a really pure, realistic way, describing what ‘hallelujah’ actually is. ‘It’s not a cry that you hear at night, / It’s not somebody that’s seen the light’—‘hallelujah’ is not something that you shout out on Sunday in a happy voice; it’s something that happens in a way that’s cold and broken and lonely. And that’s how I was feeling at the time.”
For Alexandra Burke, winner of the 2008 X Factor in the UK, “to anyone who’s a Christian, that word hallelujah—full stop, that’s what you’re going to hear.” To the acclaimed, offbeat singer-songwriter Regina Spektor, “he’s using traditional Jewish stories and history, and having gone to yeshiva and studied those stories, all the biblical things are an extra place for my mind to go.”
“I got the sexuality in the song right away,” said Jon Bon Jovi. “The chorus is like the climax, the rest is like foreplay.” For Rabbi Ruth Gan Kagan, who has included “Hallelujah” in the Yom Kippur service at the Nava Tehila congregation in Jerusalem, “it’s a hymn of the heretic, a piyut [liturgical poem] of a modern, doubtful person.”
For some, it’s this ability of “Hallelujah” to contain multitudes, to embrace contradictions, that gives it such power. “I can’t think of another song that can be done so many different ways,” said Justin Timberlake, who performed it at the “Hope for Haiti Now” benefit telethon. “It’s a testament to the songwriting. The interesting thing that Leonard Cohen is able to do—which equates to some of my favorite actors—is that he never makes you choose what to feel. He just gives you, like, a three-pronged road, and you can take whichever path you like. That’s the beauty of all of his work.”
Maybe punk-cabaret artist Amanda Palmer, formerly of the Dresden Dolls, put it best. “Those verses are like the I Ching of songwriting,” she said, “and the chorus, that word hallelujah, is the ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”
When Colin Frangicetto, a guitarist in the band Circa Survive, married his wife, Sam, in 2011, the bride walked down the aisle to a recording of “Hallelujah” performed as an instrumental by a string quartet. “We wanted a non-traditional wedding,” he said, “but there are always family members who are more religious or traditional or whatever, and I felt like this was in a way throwing them a bone, which is ironic. Even when you take away the words, there’s still a magical thing happening in the music. It’s simple, but with an extreme sophistication—and I think that’s the secret to most great songs, complexity hidden inside simplicity.
“It felt so fitting when committing our lives to each other,” Frangicetto continued. “Leonard Cohen said the song represented absolute surrender in a situation you cannot fix or dominate, that sometimes it means saying, ‘I don’t fucking know what’s going on, but it can still be beautiful.’ ”
• • •
Along with the rediscovery—more accurately, the discovery—of “Hallelujah” came a reconsideration of Leonard Cohen’s standing in pop music history. After being swindled by a manager and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 (at the ceremony, Lou Reed said that Cohen belonged to the “highest and most influential echelon of songwriters”) and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010. He has received the Prince of Asturias Award, the highest literary honor granted by Spain, and the Glenn Gould Prize in his native Canada.
A lengthy world tour, during which he turned seventy-five, saw him sell out stadiums across Europe, headline the massive Glastonbury and Coachella festivals, and play to millions of fans, of all ages. After not performing on stage for fifteen years, between May 2008 and December 2010 Cohen trooped through 246 marathon shows, to rapturous crowds and rave reviews.
In January 2012, Cohen released Old Ideas, his first new studio album in eight years. The record debuted in the Number One position in nine countries, and in the Top Five in eighteen more. In the U.S., where none of his previous albums had ever reached the Top 50 of the charts, Old Ideas debuted at Number Three. Tickets for the tour that he announced for the second half of 2012 sold rapidly across Europe and the States. Propelled in part by the ascendance of “Hallelujah,” Cohen, long considered a cult artist, was finally welcomed into the pantheon of rock stars in his eighth decade.
Like Cohen’s ultimate popular acceptance, the impact of the song was only realized over time. In fact, the trajectory of “Hallelujah” seems unprecedented; it is perhaps the only song that has become a worldwide standard over the course of a gradual climb spanning several decades. Only after former Velvet Underground member John Cale recorded a rearranged version of the song in 1991, which was in turn covered by the tragic young rocker Buckley a few years later, did “Hallelujah” truly begin its improbable, epic voyage.
Furthermore, in becoming Buckley’s signature performance, it eventually helped the gifted but doomed artist earn a legacy commensurate with his talent: While the Grace album, the single studio record he released in his abbreviated life, only peaked at a disappointing Number 149 when it was released in 1994, it was certified gold in 2002 and—as a Buckley cult grew and expanded over the years—has gone on to sell several million copies around the world.
The notion of a “standard”—a song that is freed from its original performance or context and seeps into the general consciousness, where it is interpreted frequently and diversely—defined American pop music for decades. Songs from Broadway shows or Hollywood movies were the basis of most singers’ repertoires, from giants like Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra to local saloon singers. But this structure was pretty much crushed in the 1960s by the advent of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Of the numerous upheavals these artists set in motion, perhaps the greatest revolution was the idea that singers should also be songwriters, and that their work expresses something specific and personal to them. (It’s fascinating to see the aging members of rock’s Greatest Generation, the very ones who made up new rules and redefined the job of the pop singer, being drawn to the music that preceded them, and trying on the role of interpretive singers, whether it’s Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart tackling pop songs from the ’40s or Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young recording traditional folk material.)
R&B and country, genres that still largely maintain the traditional separation between singers and songwriters, have continued to produce occasional standards, at least within their own communities; songs such as “I Believe I Can Fly,” “I Hope You Dance,” or “I Will Always Love You” become part of the social fabric, turning up at piano bars, proms, first wedding dances, talent shows. But since such transitional landmarks as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Yesterday,” post–rock-and-roll pop music has seen few songs transcend their original recordings. Even “Imagine,” though frequently performed in public settings, will always be so closely tethered to John Lennon’s original recording that it doesn’t have the same freedom and adaptability of older compositions. Furthermore, every one of these examples began spreading through the culture immediately—it was instantly clear that these were special songs that spoke to wide-ranging audiences.
Yet “Hallelujah” is different. Against all odds, it is now unquestionably a modern standard, perhaps the only song that has truly earned that designation in the past few decades. It appears in heavy metal shows and homemade videos by grade-schoolers, cartoons and action movies, Dancing with the Stars and religious services. It has reached a place where, for better or for worse, it is universal—even, as Paul Simon noted, immortal.
Rufus Wainwright, whose recording of the song is one of the most popular of them all, compared “Hallelujah” to compositions with an even longer history than those of the Great American Songbook, like classics by George Gershwin or Cole Porter. “With something like Stephen Foster’s song ‘Hard Times,’ it kind of shoots out and becomes this timeless ballad that is very appropriate at all times. And I think ‘Hallelujah’ has that ability to be released from its shackles, and every songwr
iter aims for that.
“It might seem odd to most people,” Wainwright continued, “but for me, being a classical music fanatic, it’s kind of the way things went. Schubert’s ‘The Trout’ or Ravel’s ‘Boléro’—they didn’t have records back then, and people had to disseminate sheet music and sing it or play it themselves. In a strange way, ‘Hallelujah’ followed a very traditional path that songs used to take. It’s encouraging that certain songs can still have their own lives and that they don’t have to be necessarily attached to a persona, because there was a time when the songwriter wasn’t necessarily the front man. I think that’s the way things should be—I’m a songwriter, so I’m on the song’s side.”
Wainwright also pointed out that, of course, the title and chorus of the song connect it to traditions and emotions going back to some of our earliest written history. “ ‘Hallelujah’ has been a pretty popular thing for a long time,” he said, “whether it’s the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ or Ray Charles’s ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So.’ It has deep, deep roots in the human psyche. So I think it can relate a lot to different situations, whether it’s about war, about peace or love or hate or whatever; it’s this unifying expression of human existence, in a weird way—hallelujah—it’s just life, in a sense.”
“In a lot of ways, musicians covering ‘Hallelujah’ feel the way doing the ‘To be or not to be’ speech would feel for an actor,” said Regina Spektor. “You become part of a tradition. The words are so expressive, the melody is so transcendent, you get to be in this incredible soliloquy and have this incredible moment. It’s not like, ‘Oh, Laurence Olivier did that, so no one else can.’ ”
How did this unconventional song attain such popularity, in such an incremental fashion, over such an extended period of time? Why did it go from being a forgotten album cut by a respected but generally unknown singer-songwriter to a track on Susan Boyle’s 2010 Christmas record?
Appropriately enough, I started to think about “Hallelujah,” which seems to me to be, at its heart, a challenge to personal and spiritual commitment, on Yom Kippur. Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST) hosts perhaps the largest High Holiday gathering in New York City: The gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender synagogue is one of the last congregations in Manhattan that hold open services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, not requiring attendees to purchase an annual membership, or even advance tickets, to attend. As a result, lots of stray Jews, music and arts professionals, journalists, and the like find their way there, and the 2010 Kol Nidre service, held in the enormous Jacob Javits Convention Center on the west side of Manhattan, drew some four thousand people.
Kol Nidre is the introductory service on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the Day of Atonement. CBST Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum—one of Newsweek’s “50 Most Influential Rabbis in America” and always a remarkable speaker, who particularly rises to the challenge of the major holidays and events—gave her sermon, focusing on an interview that Woody Allen had given that week to the New York Times in which he said that he wished he could be a spiritual person, because it would make his life easier. After challenging the filmmaker on this premise, the rabbi ceded the stage to the CBST choir, led by Cantor Magda Fishman, which delivered a stunning version of “Hallelujah.”
The unique composition of the congregation made it a little less weird to hear “She tied you to a kitchen chair / she broke your throne, she cut your hair” in this sacred context. But the notion of this song serving as the emotional peak of the service, crackling through thousands of listeners—who were clearly familiar with the song, many weeping as it crescendoed—made it eminently clear that “Hallelujah” had reached a singular altitude, and was a phenomenon worthy of some extended consideration.
When I approached Leonard Cohen about this project, he gave me his blessing to proceed through his manager, but declined requests to talk about “Hallelujah.” And really, who can blame him? Aside from the fact that he seldom does interviews, even on the rare occasions when he has an album to promote, why would he want to disturb the mythology around this song? Having watched his composition unexpectedly attain such iconic status, largely without his own involvement, Cohen is wise to allow the song to retain as much mystery as possible.
In a 2008 BBC Radio 2 documentary about “Hallelujah” titled The Fourth, The Fifth, The Minor Fall, Guy Garvey of the British band Elbow recalled watching Cohen perform the song at the Glastonbury Festival. From his spot on the side of the stage, Garvey said that just before starting the introduction, Cohen turned to his band and said, “Let her go!” And that’s just what’s he’s done with this astonishing song—he’s let it go, to find its own way, through one of the most unexpected and triumphant sagas in the history of popular music.
CHAPTER ONE
Allen Ginsberg once said, “Dylan blew everybody’s mind, except Leonard’s.”
Comparisons are often drawn between Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. There are books devoted to comparing and contrasting the two towering singer-songwriters; in early 2012, someone even released a “Cohen and Dylan” app, documenting their recordings and set lists for comparative purposes, complete with “quiz mode.” (One especially free-thinking soul—who revealed only that his last name is also Cohen—even devoted a website, WhoWroteHallelujah.com, to a detailed “musical conspiracy” theory alleging that Dylan was the primary author of Cohen’s best-known song; even in the Wild West of the Internet, the site didn’t stay up for long.)
The two artists have in fact crossed paths many times. They were both signed to Columbia Records by the legendary A&R executive John Hammond; both lived in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, and later wrote about it in song; both recorded in Nashville. Dylan sang backup on “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On,” from Cohen’s 1977 Death of a Ladies’ Man album. In December 1975, when Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour played in Montreal, he dedicated the night’s performance of “Isis” to hometown hero Cohen, who was in the audience—and then delivered the definitive rendition of the song, as documented in the 1978 film Renaldo and Clara.
So it isn’t too surprising that when Cohen and Dylan were both on tour in the mid-1980s and found themselves in Paris at the same time, they decided to meet at a café. At this impromptu summit, Dylan expressed his admiration for one of Cohen’s new songs, the largely unknown “Hallelujah.” The discussion that followed has passed into myth among fans of both singers, and the details frequently change in the retellings over the years, but here’s the way Cohen recounted it in an interview with Paul Zollo in 1992:
“Dylan and I were having coffee the day after his concert in Paris a few years ago . . . and he asked me how long it took to write [‘Hallelujah’]. And I told him a couple of years. I lied, actually. It was more than a couple of years.
“Then I praised a song of his, ‘I and I,’ and asked him how long it had taken and he said, ‘Fifteen minutes.’ ”
Although clearly a story told for laughs, playing on the contrast between Cohen’s meticulous, obsessive lyric writing and Dylan’s notorious impatience, there seems to be a good bit of truth to it: Over the years, Cohen has repeatedly described the agony that this one composition gave him. “I filled two notebooks,” he once said, “and I remember being in the Royalton Hotel [in New York], on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor and saying, ‘I can’t finish this song.’ ”
When Old Ideas came out in 2012, Cohen chose not to do interviews to promote the album. Instead, he appeared at a few listening events in major cities before the release date, allowing journalists to hear the album in full and then taking questions for a brief session. In London, the playback was held in the basement of a Mayfair hotel, and Jarvis Cocker, debonair front man of the band Pulp, served as the moderator. These many years later, Cohen was still talking about the torment that “Hallelujah” caused him.
“I wrote ‘Hallelujah’ over the space of at least four years,” he said (elsewhere, he has also said that it was “at least five years”). “I wrote many, many
verses. I don’t know if it was eighty, maybe more or a little less.
“The trouble—it’s not the world’s trouble, and it’s a tiny trouble, I don’t want you to think that this is a significant trouble—my tiny trouble is that before I can discard a verse, I have to write it. I have to work on it, and I have to polish it and bring it to as close to finished as I can. It’s only then that I can discard it.”
This doesn’t seem to be an uncommon situation for Cohen. In the one extensive interview he consented to prior to the release of Old Ideas, for the British music magazine Mojo, he told Sylvie Simmons, who was also in the process of writing her Cohen biography, I’m Your Man, of an unfinished song that he had been working on for years. “I’ve got the melody, and it’s a guitar tune, a really good tune, and I have tried year after year to find the right words,” he said. “The song bothers me so much that I’ve actually started a journal chronicling my failures to address this obsessive concern with this melody. I would really like to have it on the next record, but I felt that for the past two or three records, maybe four.”
Cohen played another melody for Simmons on the synthesizer, saying it was something he had been struggling with for “five or ten years.” He told her that the new song “The Treaty” has been around “easily for fifteen years,” while he had been working on another, “Born in Chains,” since 1988.