The Holy or the Broken

by Alan Light

  Though most cultural observers hadn’t noticed it yet, everything was now in place for “Hallelujah” to sweep through the pop landscape. It was a song that had multiple strong, emotional connections with millions of listeners. Its mood was both fixed and malleable, universal and specific. It was familiar enough to resonate, obscure enough to remain cool. Though its most celebrated performer was gone forever, its mysterious creator had come back to the spotlight just in time.

  After 2001, whether it signified an individual’s solitude (human or monster or otherwise) or a population in mourning, “Hallelujah”—now far removed from Leonard Cohen’s initial, “rather joyous” intent—was established as the definitive representation of sadness for a new generation.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sony/ATV Music Publishing is the publishing company for the songs of both Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley. The company’s job is to monitor the uses of the compositions in its catalogue and to find new placements and possibilities for these songs—and if the media had not fully caught on to what was happening with “Hallelujah,” the publishers certainly knew, and they realized that an opportunity like this was too good to pass up. They made sure that “Hallelujah” was in front of the executives who put together soundtracks and musical scores for movies and television. They were obviously savvy about their work, but even they couldn’t fully anticipate what was coming.

  In 2001, John Cale’s version showed up in the first season of Zach Braff’s medical sitcom, Scrubs. The next year, Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” appeared in an episode of The West Wing, and twice in the first season of the teen soap opera The O.C.—including a highly visible slot at the conclusion of the show’s season finale.

  Alexandra Patsavas is one of the most prominent music supervisors in film and television. She played a crucial role in helping to make placements in TV dramas a powerful tool in promoting and breaking new songs and artists, especially during a time of radio consolidation and the deemphasizing of music video at the TV music channels. She has worked on such shows as Grey’s Anatomy and Gossip Girl, and films including the Twilight series.

  “The song has so much depth on its own that it’s really important it be paired with a very emotional scene or a very pivotal scene, because it can lend so much depth,” Patsavas has said, explaining her multiple uses of “Hallelujah” on The O.C. “It’s not something you would sync lightly—sync means to pair with picture, synchronize—because of how much more it could make a scene feel.”

  According to Michael Barthel’s EMP paper, the song’s use in movie and TV soundtracks went from one appearance in 2002 to five in 2003 to seven in 2004. Shows such as The L Word and House continued to keep the song in network rotation (usually Buckley’s recording, occasionally Cale’s or Wainwright’s, and never one of the Cohen versions), even after all of these other placements started piling up. Apparently, the song’s impact was rising as it became more familiar, rather than becoming dulled through increased exposure.

  “ ‘Hallelujah’ can be joyous or bittersweet, depending on what part of it you use,” said Sony/ATV’s Kathy Coleman. “It’s one of those rare songs that the more it gets used, the more people want to use it.”

  As late as 2004—which was actually the year that the number of soundtrack placements reached its peak—Time magazine took note of the “Hallelujah” explosion; “because it covers so much emotional ground and is not (yet) a painfully obvious choice,” the story said, “it has become the go-to track whenever a TV show wants to create instant mood.”

  Writer Josh Tyrangiel added that “some shows use just a snippet, but The West Wing and Without a Trace let it play for minutes over their season finales, a tacit admission that neither the writers nor the actors could convey their characters’ emotions as well as Buckley.”

  But make no mistake: While it is absolutely correct that the song “can be joyous or bittersweet” and that “it covers so much emotional ground,” its use on virtually all of these soundtracks was to do one thing—to provide the feeling of people being sad.

  On The West Wing, “Hallelujah” plays when the press secretary’s secret service guard (and love interest) is gunned down trying to stop a robbery at a convenience store while the president and his staff are attending an opera. In the final moments of an ER season finale, it plays under cuts between scenes from multiple pain-ridden story lines: Sarah’s grandparents driving onto the highway, taking her away from Gates, who has lost his custody battle; Ray being taken home in an ambulance with his mother, after having his legs amputated; and Neela attending an antiwar rally that later erupts into chaos.

  This point was the crux of Barthel’s EMP presentation and, complete with video examples, he made an airtight case for the codification of “Hallelujah,” its compression into a single mood. “What’s fascinating about all this is not simply the song’s ubiquity on TV dramas—it’s that it’s used in the exact same way every time,” he said. “Songs can be used sincerely, ironically, as background shading, as subtle comment, as product placement. But ‘Hallelujah’ always appears as people are being sad, quietly sitting and staring into space or ostentatiously crying, and always as a way of tying together the sadness of different characters in different places. In short, it’s always used as part of a ‘sad montage.’ ”

  Barthel compared the use of the song to the “emotional shorthand” of a silent film actress holding the back of her hand to her forehead to express despair. But like that gesture, the song is indirect, never explicitly proclaiming its sense of sorrow. The ambiguity of Cohen’s words can “both reinforce and counterpoint” the feeling of the scene.

  The ultimate effect, he argues, is that the repeated use of “Hallelujah” for identical dramatic purpose has “erased the line-by-line, verse-by-verse meaning and replaced it with an overall feeling of sadness. You hear those opening chords now and the words hardly matter. The visual emotions it was used to counterpoint have overtaken the lyrical content.” With the benefit of hindsight, maybe his point is a little overstated, but it’s true at heart—during this phase, the association with these tragic dramatic scenes was so strong, and the repetitions so frequent, that it was difficult to hear the actual words and meaning of the song itself.

  As each of these popular shows introduced the song to millions more listeners, these impressions accrued and continually fed on one another. Soon, the song had truly become a fully functional narrative device, cueing up a response from viewers as instantaneously as “Walking on Sunshine” represents carefree joy or “Born to Be Wild” signifies badass abandon.

  The money generated from these usages was not insignificant, either: A rough estimate of the price for a television placement is somewhere in the mid five figures. If we assume a $50,000 fee, that sum is then carved up into two halves, for the recording and for the songwriter. Each $25,000 would then be divided again, between the artist and the record company, and between the writer and his publisher. For each licensing of Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” then, Buckley’s estate, Cohen, Columbia Records, and Sony/ATV Publishing each walk away with $12,500—which can start to add up over dozens of placements.

  Following the explosion in the use of (mostly) Buckley’s performance of the song, the next advance in soundtrack placement involved generating new versions to be employed as on-screen accompaniment. After The O.C. utilized Buckley in its first season finale in 2004, Patsavas put British singer Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” under the climax of the second season. For the third season, the show went full-on high-concept and asked Heap to record a new “Hallelujah” for the closing episode.

  “There was so much pressure on the song, and I was kind of terrified at the thought of having to do it,” said Heap. “I worried that I wasn’t doing it for the right reasons, plus I was in the middle of touring, really busy, so I had to find a way to carve out the time and space to make it something meaningful.

  “I had actually just sent an e-mail to the show saying I was sorry, but I wou
ldn’t be able to give this the time it requires. I was in the shower and feeling a bit sad about it, and I started singing it and thought, ‘Why don’t I just do it this way—do it a cappella, with no music or production, as if I were singing in the shower?’ So I got out and I sent them another e-mail back, saying what if I do this, but not have it totally empty, maybe go on my balcony and record the sound of the city, the sound of London, around it. Then I had found the connection that I needed, and I created this scene, up in a council flat.”

  Heap, who first came to the public’s attention through a different soundtrack placement—when Zach Braff used a song by her band, Frou Frou, on the influential soundtrack to the 2004 movie Garden State—expected that it would be easy to knock out a solo vocal of the two verses she chose from “Hallelujah,” but it ended up taking a few days to get it right.

  “I’d never done anything like that, where I take on a character and then let it speak for itself,” she said. “In the scene, this character, Marissa, had been killed, and there were images of the funeral. I never actually saw the scene, but they described it to me. I thought these were the right verses, though some people were annoyed at me for not doing the whole track. It was a good challenge, and an emotional experience.”

  Casting Heap to record the song was a bit of a stunt, but the placement seemed to work well for the show’s fans (and lives on, courtesy of YouTube). Music supervisor Patsavas said that “Imogen’s voice, the use of ‘Hallelujah,’ and then those things together combined to make a special sort of extra-O.C. ending.”

  Kate Voegele’s relationship to “Hallelujah” was very different from Imogen Heap’s when she performed the song on One Tree Hill, another teen drama. Voegele, a young musician and actress, played the role of singer-songwriter Mia Catalano on the series. She first heard the song when she was in high school in Ohio and grew “obsessed” with Jeff Buckley, and taught herself to play it during her freshman year at college.

  “My friends were all like, ‘You’ve got to play that song out!’ ” she said, “and I was like, ‘No, I can’t touch it—it’s an untouchable song.’ But eventually I decided to say screw it and do it anyways. People were always receptive and cool at my shows, but there were always a bunch of drunk college kids, and when I played that song, I remember it freaked me out how quiet everybody was.”

  Voegele left Miami University after two years, made her first record, and started touring on a package with several other singer-songwriters. “Before one show I was going through my set list,” she recalls, “and I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’m going to play “Hallelujah.” ’ And one of the other singers, Cary Brothers, was like, ‘No, you’re not. Don’t touch that song. Nobody can touch that song.’ I was young, I was nervous, I wanted to take everybody’s advice. But I got up there, and I looked out at the crowd and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to play this song.’

  “I told the story onstage and said, ‘Listen, I don’t know if everybody’s going to hate on me for this, because I know that a lot of hipster people feel like this song is overdone, but I think it’s so beautiful and it deserves to be heard, so I’m going to play it.’ I sold so many records that night—I didn’t even have the song on my record, but just because I won people over with that song. I teased Cary about it for the rest of the tour, and I played it every night.”

  Soon, she was cast in her recurring role on One Tree Hill, which featured several of her own compositions, sung in character, through the show’s fifth season in 2008. As the season reached its end, though, and the dramatic stakes were getting higher, it was time to pull out the big guns and have Voegele sing “Hallelujah.” The penultimate episode’s waning moments were given over to almost a full five minutes of the song—all five of the Cale/Buckley version’s verses—as scenes jumped across story arcs from a fight at a high school basketball game to a newborn intensive care nursery.

  “What’s so beautiful about ‘Hallelujah’ is that it’s a song for when you don’t have answers,” Voegele said.

  Released as a single, her “Hallelujah” actually achieved something that none of the previous versions had—it reached the pop charts, climbing to Number 68 in the U.S. and Number 53 in the UK. Voegele’s performance also remains one of the most popular on YouTube, where it has garnered over fifteen million total views.

  “The show essentially did for me what radio might do for an artist with a big song,” she said. “But it was a cool feeling that people trusted me with it.”

  • • •

  Concurrent with the rising popularity of “Hallelujah” as a soundtrack selection, more and more singers were recording their own versions of the song. In 2001, five covers of the song were released; the next year, that number almost tripled, to fourteen covers; and in 2004, no fewer than twenty different versions came out.

  This initial wave of covers—most of them, to be accurate, were covers of Buckley’s cover of Cale’s cover—came from artists who were still emerging or not very well-known. The song still felt like a discovery, a gem that could be unearthed and used to lend gravitas and taste to a developing career. This was the phase when, as Bill Flanagan recalls, “every time you walked into a showcase at the South by Southwest festival it was like, ‘Here’s two songs I wrote and “Hallelujah.” ’ ” In her early days breaking into the business, Brandi Carlile remembers playing at the Hotel Café, a premier showcase spot for young singer-songwriters in Los Angeles, and seeing a sign taped to the wall behind the soundboard that read, PLEASE DO NOT SING “HALLELUJAH.”

  Some of the artists who tackled the song during the first few years of the decade were the young English band Starsailor (named, probably not coincidentally, after a Tim Buckley song), jazz-pop trumpeter Chris Botti, and Canadian singer-songwriter Allison Crowe, whose version demonstrated surprising longevity and also became a YouTube favorite. A close look at the staggering and ever-expanding list of covers as documented on the Leonard Cohen Files website also reveals a bunch of recordings from Scandinavia and Germany.

  Another Canadian, alt-country singer Fred Eaglesmith, recorded the song for a Country Music Television Christmas record. Oversize guitar shredder Popa Chubby, better known for Jimi Hendrix covers and other blues-bar favorites, added a spiky version of “Hallelujah” to his set, where it remains to this day.

  Acclaimed singer-songwriter Regina Spektor chose the song as her contribution to a concert for the Jewish Heritage Festival in September 2005, an annual event at which Jewish performers sing material written by Jewish composers. Russian-born, Bronx-raised Spektor first heard Grace when she was in college, and assumed that Buckley had written the song. (“Now I just get annoyed at those people, but I was one of those people!” she said.) When she first heard Cohen’s recording at a friend’s apartment, she asked, “Why did he add all this other stuff?”

  As she came to learn more about Cohen’s work, though, Spektor became entranced. “The production on his records reminds me of old Russian movies,” she said. “It feels like you’re in a restaurant in the ’70s—the decade has a melancholy vibe to it, a certain color scheme.”

  She thought that “Hallelujah” seemed like the appropriate choice for a celebration of Jewish art. “Cohen writes a lot with biblical symbolism at the forefront of his mind,” she said. “Having gone to yeshiva and studied those stories, I know that all the biblical things are so unique lyrically, and he uses them so freely, but you don’t have to know the stories to appreciate the song.”

  Spektor relates the Bible stories “Hallelujah” invokes not only to the characters and language, but also to the song’s sense of searching and ambivalence. “The Torah is used to help translate emotions—it’s like a compass for getting through life. For something from 500 B.C., it’s pretty fucking modern,” she said. “However literal or philosophical, it’s still a blueprint for something, and he’s using those stories and traditional Jewish history. The king was conflicted, so he’s using that for his own blueprint.”

  Sp
ektor was twenty-five when she performed the song; she had only recently made the leap from the downtown “anti-folk” scene to a major label, and her commercial breakthrough, the Top 20 Begin to Hope album, wouldn’t be released until the next year. Her performance of “Hallelujah” is fascinating—her voice seems tentative, almost quizzical at times, then leaping into celebratory release. Accompanied only by a cello, she seems to be feeling her way through the song, and as an almost inadvertent result, attains some of the triumphant confusion that Cohen intended.

  Five years later, with much more experience under her belt, Spektor sang the song for a Haitian relief benefit, delivering it with much more confidence and force. The contrast between these readings is telling: Though technically a “better” performance, the 2010 version is ultimately not as compelling as the 2005 rendition.

  “It’s an ever-changing and transporting song,” she said. “You go somewhere every time you hear ‘Hallelujah.’ You never stay put. That song is the pillar of everything.”

  The best-known singer to take on “Hallelujah” during the first half of the 2000s, though, was yet another Canadian, k. d. lang. In 2004, the year she released Hymns of the 49th Parallel, lang was one of the most respected vocalists in the world. She had won four Grammy Awards since her 1987 U.S. debut, Angel with a Lariat. In 1999, she was ranked number thirty-three on VH1’s “100 Greatest Women in Rock & Roll,” and three years later, she came in at number twenty-six on CMT’s “40 Greatest Women in Country Music”—making her one of only eight women to appear on both lists.

  The Hymns album was made up of covers of songs by Canadian writers Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Jane Siberry, Bruce Cockburn, Ron Sexsmith, and Leonard Cohen (plus one original). The Cohen selections were “Bird on the Wire” and “Hallelujah.”