The Holy or the Broken

by Alan Light

  Presented with numerous communications like this, the jury reached a guilty verdict against Lynch within hours of receiving the case. A week later, she was sentenced to eighteen months in jail (though she will likely spend much less time behind bars because of prison overcrowding in California), plus five years’ probation, and was ordered to attend anger-management sessions, psychological training, and alcohol education sessions.

  Prior to the sentencing, Lynch blamed prosecutors for carrying out a “vicious attack” on her, though she added, “I do believe that I have engaged in excessive and unauthorized rambling.”

  “It gives me no pleasure . . . to see my onetime friend shackled to a chair in a court of law,” said Cohen, “her considerable gifts bent to the service of darkness, deceit, and revenge.”

  With this harassment as a backdrop, and faced with the reality of having only a few hundred thousand dollars saved, in 2005, the seventy-one-year-old Cohen had little choice but to get back to work; he had already begun to sell off his assets and had taken out a mortgage on his house. In May of 2006, he released a collection of poetry and drawings titled Book of Longing, which topped the best-seller lists in Canada. That same month, his backup singer and current girlfriend, Anjani Thomas—whom he first met when she participated in the Various Positions sessions in 1984—put out the album Blue Alert, which was made up entirely of songs cowritten by Cohen, many of them constructed from writings they found in his notebooks that he had never completed.

  “Finances were a huge factor,” Thomas said. “It was like, ‘We’ve got to make a record, make some money.’ It was a terribly pressurized situation, full of shock and awe and disbelief—so in the midst of that, running to the studio and banging on a piano was the fun part.”

  The album, a pleasant, almost smooth-jazz take on Leonard Cohen, was well reviewed. The release of the album and the book also roughly coincided with the general release of the I’m Your Man documentary. Cohen even made a couple of rare appearances on stage, performing a few songs with Anjani in New York and Paris. It proved to be a fine confluence of activities for an artist who needed a quick infusion of both income and visibility.

  “I’m happy that all these events came to completion around the same time,” Cohen told me in 2006 for a New York Times story. “It’s useful in a certain way—since I’m not in the marketplace that often, it creates a certain possible invitation to listen.”

  As he did a slate of promotion for these various projects, journalists were finally starting to ask Cohen about the resurgence of “Hallelujah.” In a March 2006 interview for CBS Sunday Morning (which was filmed but never aired), he addressed the ongoing interest in the song.

  “It’s wonderful,” he said. “The path of that song has been so curious to me, because when I first put that song out, perhaps my own version of it was not distinguished—it certainly doesn’t compare to the subsequent versions of it. But when I put the record out, no one remarked on the song. And then, years later, it started to appear.”

  He mentioned that Cale’s version had been used in Shrek, and continued, “Then suddenly many, many people were using it. It seems to have discovered its place. I was very, very surprised at how it was resurrected, because it really was lost.”

  Cohen recognized that there was an interest in “Hallelujah.” What he may not yet have fully realized, though, was the extent to which the song would prove the key to offering the larger world an “invitation to listen” to his work.

  • • •

  By this time, “Hallelujah” was no longer just a song that young artists could present as a new discovery and deploy as a way to prove how deep they were or increase their credibility. In 2007, a poll of fifty songwriters conducted by Q magazine listed Buckley’s “Hallelujah” among the all-time Top Ten Greatest Tracks. In the entry for the song, R&B singer John Legend called it “as near perfect as you can get . . . one of the most beautiful pieces of recorded music I’ve ever heard.”

  Now it was firmly carved into the Mt. Rushmore of contemporary song—a challenge for established rock stars to tackle, and demonstrate that they, too, were hip enough to draw from the power of this composition. In the next few years, veteran artists such as Willie Nelson and former Doobie Brother Michael McDonald would record “Hallelujah.”

  These performances both proved surprising. At this point, you might expect that such old hands would give the song a stately, sober reading, using the melody to showcase their distinctive, weathered voices. But both singers gave “Hallelujah” unexpected spins, and both clearly approached it as a Leonard Cohen song rather than as a Jeff Buckley song.

  Nelson recorded it on his Songbird album, an inspired if ultimately disappointing experiment that matched him with young gun country rocker Ryan Adams. Adams picked the material, which included songs by Fleetwood Mac and Gram Parsons, as well as some Nelson classics and “Amazing Grace.”

  In the arrangement Adams did for “Hallelujah,” Nelson sings the verses from Various Positions, with a pedal steel guitar and a harmonica adding a bluesy feel. Rather than explode into the chorus, Nelson sings the payoff word almost perfunctorily, tossing it off twice rather than the usual four times—there’s nothing celebratory here; he presents it as something of an afterthought. Only toward the end, when a choir somewhat incongruously takes over the chorus, does Shotgun Willie’s “Hallelujah” surrender to the song’s most obvious sentiments.

  As for McDonald, he took the song in an even more surprising direction. On the Soul Speak album—which encompassed covers ranging from Van Morrison to Bob Marley—he sings the lyrics from the Cohen Live arrangement, opening with the “Baby, I’ve been here before” verse rather than the now-iconic “secret chord” verse. He performs a soul-jazz version of the song, and bravely takes liberties with the melody, opening up the standard singsong simplicity and moving away from the waltz feel underpinning almost every other rendition.

  McDonald’s throaty, oft-parodied baritone, as always, is a matter of taste, but he definitely gets points for ambition. Like Nelson’s, his “Hallelujah” is the song of a survivor, not a young romantic.

  McDonald had been asked to participate in a Cohen tribute at UCLA by his friend, longtime Cohen backup singer Perla Batalla. Other performers on the bill included Jackson Browne, Don Was, and rediscovered soul titan Howard Tate. Batalla sent McDonald some material to choose from, and he was drawn to “Hallelujah,” a song he didn’t previously know.

  “I came up with this idea for a classic R&B 6/8 feel, changed the key, and voiced the chords a little differently,” he said. He also let the introduction go longer, pulling the melody up front for a while before getting to the words. “I strove to loosen it up a bit and let the lyrics fall in a wider space—on the records, the words come in really soon.”

  The show came in the middle of the sessions for his Soul Speak album, and when he returned to the studio the morning after the performance, he decided that he should record the song. “It’s one of the most beautiful, honest lyrics ever written about love,” he said. “It stands apart in its honesty, in addressing the part of love that’s lonesome, desperate. Love isn’t just a pink cloud that you ride around on—love is what it is, and hallelujah for that. Don’t have grand notions or huge expectations because then you miss what love really is, you miss the real gift of it.”

  The recording that Batalla had initially sent him was indeed the “Hallelujah” from Cohen Live, and McDonald said that even after he listened to the studio versions, he chose to stick with the less-conventional edit of the lyrics. “I just preferred the verses I heard on the live album,” he said. “The way the conversation started was so much more personal and honest, it really set up the whole idea of the song.”

  As for the familiar opening lines, he claims that he just doesn’t miss them. “Not that I didn’t like that verse,” he said. “I thought it was clever wordplay, but it didn’t hold the same emotional feel for me.”

  McDonald has kept “Hallelujah” in
his live set ever since, and stripped it down more and more as time goes on. “It’s a song you can’t take down to the bare essence enough,” he said. On his most recent tour, he and co-headliner Boz Scaggs performed it as the show’s encore, accompanied by just piano and guitar. “No matter how many times I do the song, it goes deeper every time,” he said. “It’s like a good book—three hundred times later, you feel like you’re just getting it for the first time. You could never really exhaust the feeling of that song.

  “I love that it took this iconic, religious word and returned it to its actual meaning—that love is above and beyond all other things, it transcends all things on the planet. No matter how beat up I am by the world around me, as long as I recognize love and give it its due, hallelujah.”

  Moving further up the celebrity chain, Bon Jovi performed the song on an Unplugged session and for a live DVD—though Jon Bon Jovi confesses that when he first heard “Hallelujah,” he was among the many people who thought that Jeff Buckley had written it.

  “I saw Buckley at a club called the Saint in Asbury Park that couldn’t have held more than a hundred people,” he said. “I heard him sing ‘Hallelujah’ and I said, ‘That’s the hit!’ And somebody said, ‘Nice going, genius—that’s a Leonard Cohen song.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s the only song [Buckley’s] got.’ ”

  Bon Jovi may not have known who wrote “Hallelujah,” but he said that he instantly keyed in to the intention of the lyrics, which he believes many interpreters miss. “I got the meaning of ‘Hallelujah’ right away,” he said. “I got the irony, got the sexuality. I won’t name the artists who have no clue of what’s inside those words, but I’ve often said that people in America know the chorus to that song, people in the rest of the world know the verses.”

  Bon Jovi started performing the song in smaller settings and at private events. Initially, it seemed listeners didn’t know the song and assumed it was an original, but by the time he had it in rotation for the 2007 Lost Highway tour, his audience knew the song not only from his band’s own version, but also from all the other covers.

  As for the song’s popularity, he said, “I can only guess, but maybe it’s the simplicity of the chorus—sometimes simplicity gets people’s attention. How many Dylan songs are there that we’re amazed by, but they don’t do that?” But, he’s quick to add, that directness is contrasted with the complexity of the verses, including the explication of the chord sequence in the opening lines. “If you were really trying to write simple, you wouldn’t engage the audience in music theory in the first verse,” he said. “It shows that he’s an instinctual writer; he’s just saying it.

  “When you get to that last verse, I can’t even explain it to somebody who hasn’t stood in my spot and looked out—you zero in and deliver that to somebody, and you will see an electrical charge. . . . I’m being polite with the language.”

  Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora added that for him, the message of “Hallelujah” doesn’t feel far from the intentions of the band’s own songs. “Look at ‘Livin’ on a Prayer,’ ” he said. “Our songs are all optimistic, in a world that has a lot of problems, so a song like ‘Hallelujah’ fits into what we’re doing. It’s kind of a perfect song, to bring spirituality into everyday life and relationships like that.

  “Just to tackle that word hallelujah is daunting, and to bring so much culture and sociology into a song is pretty strange. But there’s a spirituality in Leonard Cohen that he found in relationships, human being to human being, and as songwriters, that’s something we’re all trying to conjure.”

  Much to the dismay of many Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley fans—who routinely rate Bon Jovi’s “Hallelujah” as the worst version of the song, or use it as an example of its most inappropriate interpretations—Cohen himself has expressed his admiration for the band’s take; when Rolling Stone asked him for his favorite “Hallelujah” covers, he mentioned k. d. lang and Bon Jovi.

  Jon Bon Jovi’s vocal is certainly more melodramatic than most, closer to a brawny power ballad and not as “cold and broken,” but after listening to a lot of weepy and fragile deliveries of the lyric, there’s something bracing about hearing it sung with some muscle. He feels no obligation to step delicately through these words; he hits them hard and sells them like a real rock song. It may not be an especially profound reading, but it certainly shows that the song can hold up to a stadium crowd and still pack an emotional punch.

  Members of Cohen’s generation, or maybe, like Jon Bon Jovi, the next age group down, weren’t the only ones taking “Hallelujah” to bigger audiences. Popular young rock bands Fall Out Boy and Paramore found a different way to pay homage to the song, working references to “Hallelujah” into their own originals.

  Paramore, fronted by charismatic redhead Hayley Williams, was nominated for the Best New Artist Grammy Award in 2007, losing to Amy Winehouse. On their platinum-selling 2007 album Riot!, the band recorded a straight-ahead upbeat love song of their own called “Hallelujah” (“This time we’re not giving up / Let’s make it last forever”). When they played the song live, though, they worked a section of the Cohen song into the performance, as documented on the gold-certified live album and DVD The Final Riot!

  The performance opens with the guitarist playing the familiar, Buckley-esque intro figure, followed by Williams delivering a full-throated pass at Cohen’s first verse. The shrieks of the audience are audible when she begins, and the crowd takes over the chorus when it comes; it’s clear that Paramore’s young fans already know this song. After the chorus, the band kicks into their original—with no particular connection to the other “Hallelujah” beyond the title, but with the points already scored for connecting to something familiar yet unexpected, with the history and sentiment these young fans carried with them from Shrek and their favorite TV dramas.

  Fall Out Boy, a pop-punk band who took their name from a fictional comic book character referred to on The Simpsons, make a more subtle use of “Hallelujah,” but one that is apparently just as effective. Singer Patrick Stump recalls that it was an odd set of circumstances that landed a piece of Cohen’s composition into their song.

  Stump writes all of Fall Out Boy’s music, while bass player Pete Wentz writes the lyrics. Their usual method is that Wentz hands over notebooks full of poems, lines, and ideas, and Stump pulls out the words or sections that inspire ideas for melodies.

  “I was going through his stuff,” said Stump, “and I saw a line about ‘Hum Hallelujah.’ Pete had a more religious upbringing than me, so I think he meant a literal church hallelujah, but I liked it being ambiguous, and it kept evoking the ‘Hallelujah’ melody. We were working on the bridge and couldn’t think what we were doing, and I sang the [Cohen] melody, really kind of as a joke, over the instrumental. I really had no intention of using it, but Pete came in right then and he said, ‘That was awesome! What is that?’ So I had to explain it to him.

  “But the funny thing was, he was like, ‘I know that, it’s an old church song.’ And I had to tell him that no, it isn’t. He knew that it was familiar, it was just something in music history at this point—and this is before American Idol and all that.”

  Stump routinely used the Buckley version of the song when he was singing for himself or warming up his voice; he claims that he probably sang it “a thousand times,” but had never thought to use it in the context of the band, and was wary when the idea presented itself.

  “There’s a real responsibility,” he said. “I respect the music that I care about, and I didn’t want to miscontextualize something that people hold near and dear, or butcher somebody else’s masterwork. When we decided to use that melody, I thought, ‘Well, now this has to be a good song.’ That section kept a sheen of beauty—borrowed beauty—over the whole thing. It added reverence to what would have been a cheeky pop-punk song.”

  Fall Out Boy’s audience reacted immediately to the inclusion of the chorus of “Hallelujah” as the bridge in “Hum Hallelujah.” Though the son
g wasn’t released as a single, it consistently received one of the biggest responses in the band’s live set.

  “No one ever told me about ‘Hallelujah,’ ” said Stump. “I had to do a little bit of investigative work to get to it myself, to find Buckley’s album, and then Leonard Cohen’s. So one of the biggest surprises was when our audience flipped out at that song every night.

  “People keep finding the song in new ways. It has a really enduring life. I’ve had kids talk to me about ‘Hallelujah’ as if they were the only ones who knew about it—it’s a cult classic, like the world’s biggest sleeper hit. It’s like joining a club.”

  That club extended far beyond the borders of the U.S. and the UK. In some of the countries that had embraced Jeff Buckley most enthusiastically while he was alive, “Hallelujah” was now breaking away from his body of work and gaining even more momentum. In 2006, an all-star Norwegian quartet of Espen Lind (a former Artist of the Year winner at the Norwegian Grammys, and cowriter of such hits as Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” and Train’s “Hey Soul Sister”), Kurt Nilsen (winner of the World Idol competition), Chilean-born Alejandro Fuentes, and Askil Holm released a cover of the song, which became the fastest-selling hit in Norway’s history.