by Alan Light
The scene served as evidence once and for all that this song held an irresistible emotional impact that transcended generations. Even for the adults in the audience, who might find more irony in the scene than their kids, the song had to live or die on the feeling it presented—at the time, very few viewers would have been familiar with “Hallelujah” in any of its extant recordings, so it couldn’t rely on associations the listeners might already have had with the song in order to generate a reaction.
Codirector Adamson was a longtime Cohen fan, but even he had been unaware of “Hallelujah” until he heard Cale’s version on the Basquiat soundtrack. “I came from outside the animation world, and the movie was very much under the radar at DreamWorks,” he said. “At the early stages of Shrek, we were temping it with music by Tom Waits and a number of other people I just liked—definitely not what you would expect in an animated film—and people started reacting to that. We would sit in a room with our favorite songs and start putting them up against different scenes.”
Adamson’s codirector, Vicky Jenson, had the Cale recording in her collection, so they tried it in the separation scene, and then also considered the versions by Cohen and Buckley. “For that scene, the Cale version just seemed to have the right feel of longing,” said Adamson. “I actually thought Buckley’s might have a better feeling given the tone, but it didn’t—it’s amazing, it’s such a reinterpretation with a more contemporary feel, but it still wasn’t better.
“The song came at a moment of emotional irony, taking something that’s a celebration and playing against itself. It’s a sad moment, after he’s been through this huge experience, with a sense of how it’s better to have loved and lost.”
An even bigger shock was the positive response that the directors received to their unconventional choice. “People reacted immediately, which, to be honest, surprised me,” said Adamson. “I expected that the studio would push me to do something more popular, which they often do, but the emotion really outweighed the expectation.
“I think there’s a sense that Leonard Cohen songs are for grown-ups, for people who are melancholy, yet if they’re presented to an audience in a different way, they react to the emotion. This was Shrek’s voice, his path it was tracking. It became his song, and it didn’t carry that baggage.” Listeners encountering the song cold, in such an unexpected context, didn’t have to get past the fact that it was written by a “difficult” adult artist; they just responded to the feelings they got from the music.
In May of 2001, after almost five years of production, Shrek was released. The movie would become the third-highest-grossing film of the year, and go on to take in almost $500 million worldwide and win the first-ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The franchise flourished over the following decade, spawning three sequels, several television specials, a Broadway musical, and numerous video games.
Yet when Shrek fans young and old picked up the soundtrack album—which reached the Top 30 of the U.S. album charts, and was nominated for a Grammy Award—“Hallelujah” was there, but John Cale was nowhere to be found. In the name of corporate synergy, it was decided that if the soundtrack to a DreamWorks movie was coming out on DreamWorks Records, it should include only artists who were signed to the label. So it came to pass that an acclaimed, widely buzzed-about young singer named Rufus Wainwright performed the song on the album, adding yet another rendition to the “Hallelujah” canon—a version that would become one of the most popular of all.
Though Wainwright—who was raised in Cohen’s native Montreal—was well aware of Cohen’s work, and moved in many of the same New York City circles as Jeff Buckley (and, like Buckley, had a father who was a well-respected singer-songwriter, Loudon Wainwright III), he claims that he was not really familiar with “Hallelujah” at the time. “Initially, I was never really attuned to its significance,” he said over a vegetarian Chinese lunch at a midtown Manhattan recording studio, during a break from work on his 2012 album Out of the Game. “Mainly because when I covered it, a) I hadn’t heard the Jeff Buckley version, and b) even at that point, his was the only real substantial one. Even Leonard’s was considered kind of a throwaway track. I learned it from the John Cale version, which is very beautiful.”
Wainwright laughed as he recounted how his own jealousy had prevented him from paying much attention to Buckley in the ’90s. “We’d kind of been in the same environment for a while. All those places like Sin-é and Fez, I would bring my demos by and they would always refuse them, and Jeff would be up there cavorting. So I was very jealous and spiteful. And then, lo and behold, he died—and then, of course, listening to his music after the fact, he was incredibly talented.”
He recalled the epiphany that later enabled him to make peace with Buckley’s memory, and with his performance of “Hallelujah.” “I was in Montreal,” said Wainwright, “and I was alone and probably on something. I put his version of the song on, and it was this kind of cosmic communion. It kind of hit me how great he was, and how fabulous the song is, and how foolish I had been for being so petty and having this jealousy thing with him. I really felt like he was visiting me cosmically, in some strange way.”
In 2004, Wainwright included the song “Memphis Skyline” on his Want Two album, the bulk of which was recorded at Bearsville Studios. It was his tribute to Jeff Buckley. “Always hated him for the way he looked / in the gaslight of the morning,” he sang. “Then came Hallelujah, sounding like mad Ophelia / for me in my room living.” He sometimes performed the song immediately following “Hallelujah” in concert.
Maybe it was his initial resistance to Buckley, though, that allowed Wainwright’s “Hallelujah” to find its own path. The arrangement as included on the Shrek soundtrack is clearly modeled on Cale’s solo piano approach, but Wainwright is able to find a mood that reveals yet another facet of the song, more a pure celebration of the melody than the struggle present in the previous renditions. “I do a pretty good version of it,” Wainwright said with typical cheekiness. “It has that emotional quality, but I don’t belabor that fact; I don’t wallow in a lot of that stuff. I go through it in a simple way, and it’s a little more streamlined.” With the most conventionally grand singing voice of the “Hallelujah” interpreters to date, Wainwright puts more focus on the sound and flow of the song than on the complexities of its meaning.
“If I had to go out there and sing it half as fast, and always have to pretend like I’m about to kill myself, then that would be another story. But I can do it in a nice, quick way where it’s more intimate, almost laissez-faire in a sense, which I think works well with the song.”
While Wainwright’s inclusion on the Shrek record may have been a corporate decision, ultimately it proved to be one more lucky break in the “Hallelujah” saga. Cale’s dolorous, bitter-edged version lent gravity and emotional weight to the scene in the movie, but Wainwright’s lighter, melodic take was more accessible standing on its own, easier listening for the kids around the world playing and replaying the soundtrack. (Andrew Adamson said that the filmmakers did try the Wainwright recording with the scene, but still preferred Cale’s version.)
“Shrek launched into popular culture so quickly, in a way I never expected,” said Adamson. “I had no sense of how much the characters would become part of popular culture. Suddenly you had six-year-old kids singing ‘Hallelujah’—it definitely reached a very different audience. But kids just accept it as the song from Shrek.”
Indeed, for millions of millennial kids, “Hallelujah” had simply become “the Shrek song;” a quick skim through the countless homemade YouTube videos of the song reveals numerous clips listed with this subtitle. It started to enter the realm of summer-camp sing-alongs and school talent shows. Introduced in the context of the movie, which established its emotional heft, then reinforced with the easier-to-swallow soundtrack version, the basic core of the song (if not its every nuance) was resonating more and more universally.
But even as “Hallelujah” was becoming permanently ass
ociated with a giant green cartoon character, history had other plans for Leonard Cohen’s composition, and for Jeff Buckley’s voice.
• • •
When terrorists hijacked four airplanes on September 11, 2001, and killed nearly three thousand people, there was no time to prepare a reaction. During the hours and days that followed the destruction of that morning, people were struggling for ways to process or address the tragedy. The media scrambled to make sense of senseless events, improvising what coverage was necessary, what statements were appropriate.
Around the world, viewers were glued to their television sets, looking for information or explanation. And these same issues had to be addressed at the entertainment broadcasters—maybe the stakes weren’t as high for MTV as they were for CNN, but the network still had choices to make about how best to serve its viewers at such an unprecedented moment of crisis for the United States.
Within the music community, songs were being written, benefit concerts were being organized, lyrics and video images were taking on new overtones. Radio titan Clear Channel Communications sent out a controversial memo to its stations pointing out songs with “questionable lyrics” for this charged moment, which ranged from the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” and the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” to the songs of Rage Against the Machine and John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Fred Graver was an executive producer for VH1 at the time. The network was winnowing down its video playlist in the aftermath of the attacks: He remembers looking at his screen and seeing the clip for the Goo Goo Dolls’ hit “Iris,” from the film City of Angels, and watching a shot of Nicolas Cage jumping from a building and realizing that it was another video that had to be dropped. As soon as possible, he wanted to make sure to get a special tribute of some kind on the air, honoring the victims and the rescue workers.
“There were two bits of tape that we had in the twenty-four hours after,” he said. “There was a crew shooting for a producer named Steve Rosenbaum, who ran something called City TV. They picked up their cameras when the planes hit, and while everybody was running out of the towers, they ran in—it was devastating, all the dust and ruins and people running. An editor placed a song that the band Live had put up [“Overcome”] behind that. And then our news crew just went around to places like Union Square, everywhere people were gathering. So we took all this footage and cut it down to a three- or four-minute thing.”
Scattered VH1 staffers who were in the office saw the clip, and some weighed in with thoughts on what music should accompany this footage. Sarah Lewitinn was working at the time as the assistant to Michael Hirschorn, head of the network’s news operations. More widely known by her online pseudonym “Ultragrrrl,” Lewitinn would soon begin a full-time juggling act as a record producer, party promoter, DJ, and blogger, and in 2006, be named one of the most influential people in music by New York magazine. (She started her career as an intern at Spin magazine while I was the publication’s editor in chief.) According to Graver, “it was Sarah who said, ‘What you want here is Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah.” ’ ”
Asked if she remembers making this suggestion, Lewitinn said that she has mostly erased the days around September 11 from her memory. To jog her recollections, she wrote to her brother Lawrence to see what he could remember from that traumatic time. She then sent me the following message, which is slightly edited and with IM names redacted:
lawrence: I remember it well
lawrence: you suggested it at a meeting
lawrence: VH1 people acted confused
lawrence: they wanted to use something else
lawrence: something lame
lawrence: You thought the Buckley version was good
ultragrrrl: the only thing i remember from that time was watching the buildings fall. I don’t even remember the VH1 meetings.
lawrence: You thought the way it was sung was the perfect tempo
lawrence: Plus, Buckley was a tragic person himself
lawrence: At the time, no one really knew the Buckley version at VH1, either
lawrence: You did because you were a fan.
lawrence: Wait, does that mean it’s your fault that song is now on every season of American Idol?
ultragrrrl: yup
lawrence: jerk
“Lots of people did not know it,” confirmed Graver. “I’m a huge Leonard Cohen fan, but I didn’t know Buckley’s version. But that long, languorous guitar lead-in, those pliant, beautiful notes—it was perfect. The song is open to a lot of interpretations, but Buckley’s sounds like it comes from one person’s broken heart, broken spirit—it drives straight through.
“If you really listen to the song, it doesn’t quite fit what was happening,” Graver pointed out. “But if you talk to a songwriter, or even someone making TV, they’ll say, ‘I create an emotion, people react to it, they rarely hear the whole thing.’ And the reaction was instantaneous. We basically turned the network over completely to tributes, videos that fit the mood, for the entire weekend.”
“I came into the office on September 12 and Fred said, ‘Come take a look at this,’ ” said Bill Flanagan. “It had just been delivered to him, and we watched footage of the smoking World Trade Center over ‘Hallelujah’ by Jeff Buckley. He said, ‘We’re going to put this right into rotation; we’re going to play it every hour.’ And I said, ‘You know, that’s not really what the song is about.’ And he said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’
“And he was right: It didn’t matter. The song had become something—it had already become something, but I think that was the first time that I realized that it really wasn’t a song about regret and the waning of sexual desire and all that stuff. It had become a spiritual.”
Heard against the horrifying, bewildering, inspiring footage of the rubble, of the rescue workers and the vigils, of the tears and rage, the yearning physicality of Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” had precisely the necessary tone for the moment—the feelings of love and loss, of mystic confusion that didn’t surrender to despair.
The video played constantly on VH1 in the days that followed September 11. In his 2010 novel Evening’s Empire, Flanagan wrote of the days after the attacks that “Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ in all its incarnations became an anthem that month.”
Whether serving as consolation for a lovesick ogre or as a balm for a scarred and grieving nation, over the course of a few months “Hallelujah” had solidified its place as a modern-day hymn. It felt like something larger now, a connection to a broader kind of spirituality than the personal, one-on-one relationships its interpreters had been expressing; that chorus and its calming melody had been thrust even more front and center. Millions of new listeners, from multiple generations, were introduced to the song, with indelible feelings attached to it. What had been an insiders’ favorite for music aficionados now belonged to the general public in a way that very few songs ever have. As Fred Graver said, referencing Robert Frost, “A poem is going to get up and walk away and it’s not yours anymore.”
• • •
On top of the surge in attention that “Hallelujah” was receiving in 2001, that October Leonard Cohen returned from seven years of self-imposed exile with the acclaimed Ten New Songs album. The record was a triumphant if understated effort from an artist who had seemed as if he might fade into the realm of pure myth. Praise from such outlets as the indie rock hub Pitchfork.com proved Cohen’s hipster cred was still thriving.
Since it came out, coincidentally, just a few weeks after Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft album (which had a street date of September 11, lending an eerie weight to his end-of-days lines about “Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down” or “Coffins droppin’ in the street / Like balloons made out of lead”), the two songwriting giants were sometimes even reviewed together—a boost in visibility and reputation that certainly helped Cohen’s profile.
Recorded in collaboration with backup singer Sharon Robinson, Ten New Songs marked a new sense of spars
eness and austerity for Cohen, with minimal music settings and a voice that rarely rose above a murmur. Recorded at Cohen and Robinson’s home studios, the basic synthesizer arrangements may have sounded “like an orchestra” to Cohen, though for some they registered as little more than a monotone; in an excellent aside, Mireille Silcott wrote in the Canadian magazine Saturday Night that a friend of hers said that the album “sounds like a guy in the subway with a keyboard who decided to burn a CD.”
The lyrics were reflective and weary, less spiky and less grand than those on I’m Your Man and The Future—perhaps not surprising for a man who had spent most of the previous decade in a Zen monastery. Cohen said in interviews that a lengthy depression had lifted two years earlier, accounting for the calm and clarity of the new lyrics. Some of the Ten New Songs would be covered by artists from Eric Burdon of the Animals to the jam band Widespread Panic, and a few years later, our old friend John Cale would select the album’s “Alexandra Leaving” as one of his “Desert Island Discs” for the BBC.
Whether it was a direct result of the nascent “Hallelujah”-mania or not, Ten New Songs was also a commercial peak for Cohen. He returned to the U.S. album charts (a relatively modest Number 143, but still) for the first time since 1973. The disc went Top Five in Israel and Italy, hit Number Four in Canada, and reached Number One in Norway, Denmark, and Poland.
Cohen did quite a bit of press around the release of the album. Apparently, though, it was still too soon after the Shrek and VH1 usages of the song to feel the impact, because only a few interviews so much as made mention of “Hallelujah.”
At least one writer picked up on the rumblings, though. In a November 18, 2001, feature in the Denver Post, Steven Rosen recounted “Leonard Cohen’s Unlikely Debt to a Famous Green Ogre,” noting that “Hallelujah” had been “taking on a life apart from Cohen’s recording,” walking through the song’s history via Dylan, Cale, Buckley, and September 11. “For Shrek’s help in making this song a recognizable contemporary standard, one can only say Hallelujah!” wrote Rosen. Cohen declined an interview request for the story.