by Alan Light
“The concept of the album was the spiritual nature of the Canadian songwriter,” said lang. “I wanted to make a modern, conceptual hymn record. I think with all of these writers, there’s a heavy spiritual thread, and an equanimity and a compassion running through the lyrics in a way that’s totally available to the listener, without any sort of guidance of the moral of the story; it’s always up to you. And I think that in general Canadians are pretty open in terms of that.
“I don’t know why Canadians are that way. I don’t know if it’s being sandwiched between the European and the American cultures, I don’t know if it’s because we have to live through winter every year, or because we have such a huge amount of space to live with. We have a totally different relationship to the environment. That’s what the Hymns record was about.”
Growing up in the province of Alberta, lang heard Cohen’s records and was familiar with his “Hallelujah,” though she said that Buckley’s recording “defined the song in popular culture.” She believes that the lyrics grew out of Cohen’s sense of “the irony of being a human being and looking for the religion in sex”—a concise summary of the dichotomy at the heart of the song, and central to much of Cohen’s work.
In lang’s analysis, Buckley picked up on and emphasized the aspect of the song focused on desire, but she thinks that its ongoing resonance actually comes from its spiritual essence.
“Leonard is a Buddhist, I’m a Buddhist,” she said. “I know he wasn’t Buddhist when he wrote it, but he has that sensibility. I think spirituality in general in our society has been diffused into some sort of relationship between the pop culture and our own personal pillars that we create for ourselves. As culture moved forward, we were counting on God less, and people settled into some sort of spirituality that they created themselves, and a lot of it has to do with incorporating their own human desire. We’re greatly craving some sort of spirituality in music.
“It’s a song for meditating, for pondering bigger issues, moral issues. I think that’s why it has such an impact on today’s society—because we’re mulling over a lot, we’re not being rammed with somebody else’s doctrine down our throat, we’re coming up with our own. It’s less structured, less guided, and more individual, more personal.”
When she first chose “Hallelujah” for inclusion on Hymns of the 49th Parallel, however, lang wasn’t thinking as much about the song’s cultural or spiritual significance as she was about its musicality—maybe because, at the time, it hadn’t yet fully ascended to universal status. She’s quick to point out that the aesthetic element is as crucial as the content to the song’s legacy.
“ ‘Hallelujah’ has a lot to gravitate toward as a singer,” she said. “The structure of the song, the melody of the refrain; it gives you a lot to work with. I think when I first recorded it, I was more into the melodic structure, the flow of the song, and then as I performed it live and lived the cinematic, narrative nature of the song, it became infinitely interesting to me. I never get tired of living the experience of the emotional scenario—the ironic resolve in getting to the chorus and acquiescing to the fact that the very nature of being human is desire itself.
“It’s up to interpretation. It just boils down to that. It’s applicable to whatever you need it to be applicable to.”
The version of “Hallelujah” that lang recorded is leisurely, expansive. It retains the contemplative nature of the lyric, but the sheer force and clarity of her voice give it a triumphal power. It’s much closer to a public shout to the heavens than Buckley’s solitary incantation, and if lang’s delivery lacks the humor and irony of Cohen’s, she adds a melodic pull and sense of purpose. Where Jeff Buckley’s is the “Hallelujah” of a sullen, lustful adolescent, and Leonard Cohen’s conjures the hard-fought wisdom of a surviving elder, k. d. lang’s “Hallelujah” is that of a thoughtful, searching, mature adult.
Cohen has often praised lang’s rendition of the song over the years. His companion/collaborator Anjani Thomas said that after hearing lang perform “Hallelujah” at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006, “we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, I think we can lay that song to rest now! It’s really been done to its ultimate, blissful state of perfection.’ ”
• • •
As both the soundtrack usages and the covers of “Hallelujah” were becoming pervasive, one thing becoming evident was that the song had a peculiar advantage over and above its compositional merits. Since its best-known version was already a cover, and the song’s author had himself altered the lyrics almost immediately after recording it, it was somehow understood that the words were never truly considered fixed or set in stone. With Cohen’s tacit approval, and Buckley not around to object, verses could be cut, lyrics could be changed, with no real sense of betraying the song’s meaning.
For a song as weird as “Hallelujah,” this open invitation to experiment and adjust is perhaps its greatest allure. Depending on preference and context, the different elements—religion, sex, hope, despair, love, death—can be turned up or down at will. Certainly, the “I remember when I moved in you” verse was often abandoned, especially for religious or charitable uses. Sometimes even “She tied you to a kitchen chair” was a little too much for the setting. But with its abstract and disconnected imagery, the song’s contradictions and nuances could easily be elided, which gave “Hallelujah” a versatility that went beyond its ambiguities.
“I tend to be a wordy person, and I think every verse is so beautiful that I just couldn’t part with one of them,” said Kate Voegele. “But I think the song has this unbelievable ability to take a personal concept and elevate it to the universal. So I think people pick and choose the verses because they’re all sort of little stories within themselves, and no matter what order you sing them in or hear them in, it means something.”
“It’s very open to interpretation,” said Lee DeWyze, the 2010 American Idol champion. DeWyze sang one highly abbreviated edit of the song on the show, when the stakes were high and the contest had come down to three finalists, but he has altered the choice of lyrics on his own subsequent tours. “The only other song like it would be the national anthem. Because there’s no one national anthem that everyone’s like, ‘That’s the one.’ People just do it however they want. ‘Hallelujah’ is one of those songs that doesn’t feel like it has an owner. When people sing it now, it’s almost like, ‘This is my song.’ ”
Some artists offer more practical reasons for the revisions of the lyric. “I’ll drop the fourth verse if I’m running out of time,” said Brandi Carlile. “A lot of times, I close with it, so if I’m playing a union hall and I have six minutes before it goes into overtime pay, I’ve got to drop a verse.” This ability to truncate would prove invaluable as the song became a staple of televised singing competitions.
The impressionistic composition of the verses, with shifting perspective and nonlinear narrative, means that there’s no functional loss or disruption in meaning if verses are skipped or moved. “I think with that song,” said Rufus Wainwright, “as is the case with a lot of Leonard’s work, there are certain phrases that really jump out and hit you in different ways, and mean different things to different people—‘learn to shoot at someone who outdrew you.’ I think it’s more about those tiny nuggets of words than any broad meaning, but then once ‘hallelujah,’ that word, is placed in there, it kind of gathers up all of these elements, which is the essence of existence anyway: There’s no general theme for the world—it’s all little tiny pieces.”
Consider the contrast with one of the few songs that goes on a list with “Hallelujah” as a modern-day anthem—John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Yoko Ono has said that she constantly has to turn down requests for people who want to record the song and change just one word. The possible uses for “Imagine” multiply dramatically if she would allow singers to modify the line “Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too”—which she refuses to let them do, feeling that a change to the less radical
“And one religion, too” would interfere with the song’s message and intentions too much.
CeeLo Green performed “Imagine” on NBC’s 2012 New Year’s Eve broadcast from Times Square, changing the lyric to “And all religion’s true.” Predictably, Lennon loyalists, especially in the online world, immediately went nuts: Rolling Stone reported a typical tweet, from @geekysteven, which read, “The whole point of that lyric is that religion causes harm. If ‘all religion’s true’ it would be a pretty bleak place.”
In the end, though, Lennon’s recording of “Imagine” is so iconic it can never truly be challenged, or even fully reimagined, by a cover; as with “Bridge over Troubled Water,” with Art Garfunkel’s distinct vocal, any new performance is instantly, however subconsciously, assessed in relation to the original. And, as CeeLo learned, any alteration of the lyric dramatically changes the song’s message in ways that many listeners are unwilling to accept.
“Hallelujah,” on the other hand, isn’t fixed and formalized in the same way. Before it had even penetrated the general population’s consciousness, it had demonstrated that it is capable of withstanding multiple modifications, possibly resulting in a change of its emphasis, but not its essence. This fluidity helped open countless doors for the song over the years.
• • •
In October 2004, Leonard Cohen released a new album, titled Dear Heather. It had been only three years since his last album—the shortest time between new music from him since the 1970s. Though the record contains some affecting moments, it has a bit of a patchwork feel and in the end is one of Cohen’s least satisfying albums. Nonetheless, Dear Heather reached Number 131 on the Billboard charts—Cohen’s highest ranking since Songs from a Room in 1969.
Newfound appreciation for Cohen was also apparent in a series of tribute concerts assembled by the producer Hal Willner, titled “Came So Far for Beauty.” The 2005 Australian production of the show—which included such unassailably über-hip artists as Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Jarvis Cocker, and more—would later become the foundation for a documentary by Lian Lunson called I’m Your Man. The film also included such star turns as U2 backing Cohen on a performance of “Tower of Song,” filmed in a tiny New York nightclub.
In the film, Rufus Wainwright reprised his version of “Hallelujah,” as he did at most of the “Came So Far for Beauty” shows, accompanied by his sister Martha. The “Hallelujah” performance Willner now seems proudest of, however, came at the 2006 show in Dublin, when Wainwright couldn’t make the trip.
“We thought, ‘Oh, man, what are we going to do with this now? Wait a minute, let’s break this down, let’s look at it differently,’ ” he said. “I’d heard a number of versions, and I thought it was time to give it a different look.” For this show, he matched Irish post-punk singer-songwriter Gavin Friday with eccentric Canadian vocalist Mary Margaret O’Hara for a cacophonous, irreverent “Hallelujah” that polarized the audience.
“It was this outrageous, two-sided thing,” said Willner, who has always championed a slightly cockeyed approach to his tribute projects, preferring provocation over canonization. “We weren’t being funny, we were just incorporating something else, and the reactions were unbelievable. I think Leonard would have loved it, but I always said that if the artist hears what we’re doing and likes it, we didn’t do our job.”
Meantime, the cult and the myth of Jeff Buckley were continuing to grow. In 2004, Buckley’s “Hallelujah” was included as number 259 in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 2006, the Q magazine readers’ poll that had previously placed Grace at number seventy-five on the list of Greatest Albums of All Time was taken again—and this time Grace ranked thirteenth. The same year, Mojo magazine named Grace its #1 “Modern Classic.”
This ongoing discovery and reevaluation of Buckley’s music was being matched by a steady stream of new product. The Grace material was repackaged and extended with the release of the Grace EPs box set and then of a two-disc “Legacy Edition” of the album. In 2000, the Mystery White Boy album collected live performances from 1995 and ’96 by Buckley with his band, recorded around the world. “Hallelujah,” played in Seattle as a medley with the Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over,” closed the album.
Perhaps most important, the Legacy Edition of Live at Sin-é was released in 2003, expanding the original EP’s four songs to two full CDs, and giving a true sense of the now-legendary, freewheeling Monday night sessions on St. Mark’s Place. This package also concluded with “Hallelujah”—a riveting, nine-plus-minute solo excursion, full of wailing incantation and guitar wizardry that certainly confirms the grasp Buckley had of the song before he took it into the recording studio.
For better or worse, following the song’s initial burst into the public imagination, the years from 2001 to 2005 solidified the standing of “Hallelujah” in numerous ways, and broadened its reach. Having fanned out across the globe, and conquered the small and large screens, the song was increasingly becoming part of pop’s common vocabulary, and the momentum it was gaining showed no signs of slowing down.
CHAPTER NINE
While the “Hallelujah” industry was expanding, it turned out that Leonard Cohen himself was not fully able to reap the benefits. In 2004, he discovered that for years, his manager, Kelley Lynch, had been defrauding him of millions of dollars, siphoning off a large amount of money that he presumed was being amassed for his retirement. The situation turned into a legal nightmare when Lynch simply disappeared. Cohen, now seventy, sued Lynch, accusing her of stealing $5 million from his personal accounts and investments while he lived at Mt. Baldy.
“It was a long, ongoing problem of a disastrous and relentless indifference to my financial situation,” he told the New York Times. “I didn’t even know where the bank was.”
In March 2006, a judge granted Cohen a default judgment in the case, ordering Lynch to pay $9.5 million. She ignored the suit and did not respond to a subpoena issued for her financial records. It was generally assumed that Cohen would never be able to collect the awarded amount, nor any of the money with which Lynch absconded. He suddenly found himself needing to make decisions about his career based on economics, which didn’t seem to sit well with the usual pace of his output.
As much of a disaster as Cohen’s financial situation was, it turned out that things with Lynch actually got much uglier than anyone suspected. Years later, it emerged that after he dismissed her as his manager, she began calling and e-mailing him with hostile, sometimes threatening messages. Cohen obtained numerous restraining orders against her in California and in Colorado, where she had moved. Lynch’s actions continued to escalate until, in 2012, Cohen pressed charges against her—five counts of violating protective orders and two counts of repeatedly contacting Cohen with the intent to annoy or harass.
When the trial opened in April, Cohen was the first witness to appear in Los Angeles County Superior Court. He testified that he and Lynch had a business and personal relationship for about seventeen years; she had been an assistant to his former manager, Marty Machat, and took over in the role when Machat died, in 1988. He said that at one point, they had a “brief” intimate relationship.
Cohen said that as soon as he fired Lynch as his manager, the threatening messages began, with some voice mails lasting up to ten minutes and e-mails that ran as long as fifty pages. “It started with just a few now and then, but it eventually accelerated to twenty or thirty a day,” he said. The caller leveled accusations and threats at him and said that he “needed to be taken down and shot.”
“It makes me feel very conscious about my surroundings,” Cohen said. “Every time I see a car slow down, I get worried.” He added, “My sense of alarm has increased over the years as the volume of e-mails has increased.” (The case focused specifically on messages left between February 2011 and January 2012.)
Over several days, prosecutors played voice mails said to be from Lynch, peppered with obscenities, sexual references, and accusations
that Cohen was abusing drugs. Many of the calls were said to have been made when Lynch was intoxicated. Prosecutors also displayed ten binders filled with printed e-mails sent to Cohen, his attorneys, and others.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Lynch, who pleaded not guilty, “occasionally smiled as voice mails from 2011 were played for jurors.” In his opening statements, Michael Kelly, a public defender representing Lynch, said the case was “very much about relationships and how relationships oftentimes get messy.” He said Cohen’s attorneys had “done everything in their power” to undermine his client’s credibility.
As time went on, it seems that Lynch grew bolder in her actions, in recent years writing lengthy screeds not only to Cohen, but also to various bloggers, journalists, and government officials. A series of Facebook messages signed by Kelley Lynch and sent to writer Mikal Gilmore, who has profiled Cohen several times (once for a story I assigned at Spin magazine in 2001), were posted under the name “Cyber Terrorism” to a site called River Deep, which is devoted mostly to the elaborate and passionate defense of producer Phil Spector against his murder charge and all other alleged misdeeds—and if these are representative of the messages Cohen was receiving, they are creepy stuff indeed.
The writer repeatedly and obsessively attempts to refute Cohen’s story that Spector had a gun in the studio during the Death of a Ladies’ Man sessions. In a message posted May 28, 2011, the writer calls Cohen “a great liar; fraud; and con artist” and later says he is “an out of control lunatic and his history of mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. does not help.” She claims that he made the accusation against Spector because “Cohen committed serious criminal tax fraud (with penalties & interest in the amount of $30 million) and thought perhaps the District Attorney could help him and visa versa [sic].”
Another message, posted that same day, says that “Phil Spector thinks Cohen is a closet Partridge Family groupie and he and I both believe Cohen is a porn artist with biblical references.” The writer says that “we were never lovers although he repeatedly attempted to have sex with me when I would visit him on Mt. Baldy,” and implies that Cohen “molested” his own daughter. A message posted the following day, May 29, finds the writer claiming that “this man has stolen from me; destroyed my life; permitted me to end up homeless; had his lawyer file a declaration in my son’s custody matter . . . and recently had his unconscionable thug lawyers threaten to have me arrested when I requested information I require for a complete forensic accounting in order to amend my federal tax returns and determine the amount of the theft.”