The Holy or the Broken

by Alan Light

  A February 2009 appearance at New York’s Beacon Theatre for fans and media served as the launch announcement for the next installment of the tour. It was intended to create—or amplify—buzz for the tour, and was the first time most of the NYC press witnessed the warmth of Cohen’s new elder statesman persona. Whether it came from all the years of Zen study or from having a song that had taken over the public’s consciousness, his mood and the impeccable caliber of his performance were stunning.

  One highlight of the U.S. dates was an April performance at the Coachella Festival in Indio, California; Cohen was an inspired booking for this annual gathering of the hipster elite. Stacey Anderson was part of the team covering Coachella for Spin.com that year. “Only a few minutes from the start time of Cohen’s set, I was able to walk up and almost reach the barrier,” she said. “But the momentum started when they rolled out the carpet and the brocade chairs. It was very regal, and everyone saw that something special—something very different from the normal, sweaty, Ray-Bans-wearing bands—was happening. And when he started, there was this magnetic pull toward his stage.”

  Cohen played “Hallelujah” toward the end of his set, after the desert sun had gone down. “In the first few notes, I heard gasps around me,” Anderson remembered. “No one thought he would hold it back, but just like the urgency of the song is such a surprise each time you hear it, so was the experience of ‘I’m about to hear him sing this song.’ I wasn’t prepared for it, and I knew it was coming.

  “The song started very minimally, and built so quickly to the audience overpowering him as they sang along. There was no separation between his rendition of the song and the audience’s—they intervened immediately. I remember seeing a look of genuine surprise come over his face, and he took off his fedora and put it to his chest and nodded in appreciation, with tears in his eyes.”

  From “Hallelujah” on, she said, the audience stayed at Cohen’s stage, transfixed, rather than moving along to other bands playing at the same time. “Usually at Coachella, people are waiting to hear the hit, or whatever song is in the Honda commercial that week, but no one left after that,” she said. “I think everyone left that set really enraptured with him.”

  Amanda Palmer performed at Coachella that year, and planted herself by the stage to watch Cohen. When he started “Hallelujah,” she recalls, “everyone that I could see shut up. It was a cultural agreement to have a moment of silence. Then everyone sang along with the choruses. It felt like church—it was fantastic.”

  Palmer said that her admiration for Cohen’s accomplishment at the festival grew when she went from his stage to watch Morrissey’s set. “It was like, have you ever done a sauna and got into a cold plunge? Morrissey [an outspoken vegetarian] was in a bad mood, because he was pissed about the meat carts. Leonard Cohen’s set would have been profound anyway, but it gave me such an intense appreciation for what a fantastic showman he is.”

  On Spin’s website, Cohen’s performance was tagged the “Best Set” of the day. “How fitting that Leonard Cohen’s performance of ‘Hallelujah,’ his most famous song, would still come as a glorious shock,” wrote Anderson. “After all, that’s what the melody does: It seeps into your heart and lies dormant—then erupts as pure emotion. . . . When the keys kicked up the first strains of ‘Hallelujah,’ those ascending notes led a seismic reaction—offstage, as an ecstatic audience sang every word back in hymnal, and onstage, where Cohen removed his hat and peered out into the audience with reverent, brimming tears.”

  Coachella was a remarkable moment for Cohen. It’s one thing to thrill an audience made up of old fans, who have been waiting for over a decade to see you onstage. Even Glastonbury, though certainly a triumph, took place in a country (and in a part of the world) where Cohen has long been a much better known and admired figure. But winning over the hearts and minds of tens of thousands of young, jaded Americans—this was truly new territory.

  “When he took off his hat to the audience, it struck me as such a pure moment, and I wondered what it looked like to him,” said Anderson. “What must it look like for that crowd, so young and sweat-soaked, to be singing the song back to him?” Clearly, it was meaningful: When Cohen assembled a second DVD from the tour—Songs from the Road, which collected performances from different concerts around the world—the version of “Hallelujah” he included was the Coachella performance.

  Needless to say, the song was now a climax in every show, received like holy scripture. It belonged in a category with seeing Bob Dylan sing “Like a Rolling Stone” or watching Bruce Springsteen perform “Born to Run”—it was an event that people simply wanted to witness, to say they had seen. It took on a power that had to do with the song’s history first, its feeling second, and its details hardly at all. Every performance carried with it a sense of where this song had been, who had sung it, where and how every listener had first encountered it; it had reached a place where it was something to be experienced, rather than listened to. In the notes to Songs from the Road, producer Ed Sanders said that the song was “a rather predictable bet . . . [to] peg the nightly applause meter.”

  In these concerts, “Hallelujah” was triumphant and valedictory, but it was never dumbed down. It’s probably impossible to be ironic when twenty thousand people are singing along with you; as Bill Flanagan noted, “It’s kind of like ‘Born in the U.S.A.’—you can say people misunderstood it as a patriotic anthem, but really, if you’re standing up in front of a football stadium singing, ‘Born in the U.S.A., born in the U.S.A.,’ it is kind of a patriotic anthem.”

  But night after night, Cohen never betrayed the complexities of “Hallelujah.” It’s as if these performances were a culmination of all the years and all the interpretations of the song—like he absorbed all of these elements, and emerged with a comprehensive and unassailable version.

  “I noticed that when Leonard was singing it this last time I saw him, it was like he was trying to take it back,” said Bono, “trying to remind us of the irony, the humor in it, take some of the portentousness out and bring it back to his original humility, bring it back to earth. He performed it like Lucky in Waiting for Godot, taking off his hat.

  “It had all of its richness without any robes, any grandeur. He was wrestling it back to earth, like one of Blake’s angels that’s tethered to the ground. That song is not meant to be up with the angels—the thing to watch for is when people make it too lofty.”

  The tour rolled on—in 2010, Cohen did a final, fifty-six-show run, starting in Zagreb, Croatia, and finally winding up in Las Vegas in December. Cohen’s 2009 tour earned a reported $9.5 million. The 2010 dates sold 375,000 tickets and took in an astonishing $40 million around the world, making it one of the thirty biggest tours of the year—ahead of such artists as Elton John, Alicia Keys, Carrie Underwood, and Rod Stewart, and with an average nightly gross higher than those of John Mayer and Justin Bieber.

  Interest in Cohen also led to the release of some revelatory historical material. His tense, moving 1970 appearance at England’s Isle of Wight Festival was issued as a CD and a DVD. A controversial, long-out-of-print documentary of his 1972 tour, Bird on a Wire, was also given a DVD release; the movie is built around two concerts in Israel at which an exhausted Cohen tries to maintain order amidst security and technical disasters.

  Following the Kelley Lynch debacle, the septuagenarian Cohen had put himself back into financial security. What’s more, by the end of the tour, his show included four new songs, and he indicated that he had another seven or eight written, with plans to return to the studio early in 2011. If he would never be able to reclaim all of the money due for the latter-day success of “Hallelujah,” he was certainly able to use its popularity wisely, and keep looking to the future.

  In fact, by this time Cohen himself had started expressing some “Hallelujah” fatigue. He told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2009, “I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it and the reviewer said, ‘Can we p
lease have a moratorium on “Hallelujah” in movies and television shows?’ And I kind of feel the same way.”

  Ironically, this divisive adaptation of the revered, disturbing graphic novel was one of the very few soundtracks to use Cohen’s recording and not Buckley’s. And the Watchmen scene scored by the song, in which two former superheroes who were unable to perform sexually in their civilian clothes put on their costumes and make love, may not work dramatically (it was, in fact, a sequence that some reviewers singled out for attack), but in some ways, it gets at the song’s uncertain muddle of spirituality and eroticism more precisely than most of the more glib usages.

  Cohen’s own objections notwithstanding, in 2009, when both Alexandra Burke’s and Jeff Buckley’s versions of the song were riding high on the charts, and Leonard Cohen’s tour was conquering the world, Martin Bandier, the chairman and CEO of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, spoke to Billboard about “Hallelujah.” At a time when record sales and revenues had plummeted, publishing looked like the best bet in the music business, since these companies profited from every soundtrack placement, cover, and commercial use of a song.

  “This is one of those songs that we very carefully guard in terms of how it’s used and who it’s licensed to for product endorsement and anything like that,” Bandier said. “I think that there are wonderful things that are out there where the song can be used. We’re not against it, but I do think that we carefully watch it.

  “To put it in today’s parlance,” said Bandier, “it’s protecting the brand. ‘Hallelujah’ is a brand.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The children of Shrek were growing up. And as they continued to encounter “Hallelujah” in the music of the bands they liked, and in the foreground and background of the television shows they watched, they were also hearing it, and singing it, in settings closer to home. The impact of the song was extending beyond music culture, and into culture itself. It’s quite remarkable, in fact, how often “Hallelujah” has figured into the everyday lives of my own friends and acquaintances, as I discovered once I started casually asking around.

  Brian Glickman was working as a counselor and music director at North Star Camp for Boys in Hayward, Wisconsin. In the winter of 2005, one of the camp’s other counselors, Alex, became stricken with encephalitis during a vacation in Hawaii. He was in a coma at one point, and remains in a wheelchair today.

  Glickman loved Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” and, having learned it at home, decided to play the song at the 2006 pre-camp staff show and dedicate it to Alex. “I wasn’t sure I would make it through it,” he said. “I started to strum the chords and either closed my eyes as I sang or looked at the floor. I knew that if I made eye contact with any of my friends, I would most likely start to cry.”

  When he looked up, he saw a counselor named Jake curled up in a corner of the room, weeping. “That actually made me smile, if only because Jake was a big, macho football player and I had reduced him to a puddle of tears,” Glickman said.

  After that night, he was asked to perform the song at the first campfire of the season, and then it became a staple of the summer (minus the second, “kitchen chair” verse, which he “didn’t think would fly with the directors”). Glickman sang “Hallelujah” all the way through the season, including on the last night of camp, which was “request night,” and each time, the kids all sang along.

  Camp sing-alongs marked one rite of passage, but “Hallelujah” had also started to appear in another new, more formal context: Increasingly, the song was being used in religious ceremonies—weddings and funerals, but also regular services, across the Judeo-Christian spectrum. If, as k. d. lang pointed out, we live in a time when people are looking for spiritual connections that feel authentic, “Hallelujah” was one of the conduits providing an opportunity to make that link.

  Reverend Sandy Scott of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Saskatchewan singled out two Canadian artists, Cohen and Sarah McLachlan, as the most frequent additions to his congregation’s events. “When planning worship services . . . more and more are requesting popular songs to be used in place of hymns,” he said, while noting a bit skeptically that “the music is written from the perspective of human experience, and less as a reflection on scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.”

  With Cohen’s work, though, the Reverend pointed out that there was a fit that went beyond a fuzzy spiritual feeling. “The music and poems of Leonard Cohen were not written for the synagogue or the church, and he does start with human experience, but some of his poetry and music engages in an exchange or conversation with scripture.” Noting that in Jewish tradition, the Cohen surname indicates a member of the priestly class, Reverend Scott went on to offer his thoughts on the reasons that people wanted to bring “Hallelujah” into the church.

  “The hallelujah being declared is not from a confident and victorious believer who has seen the light, has the answers to everything, and is entitled to God’s blessing and salvation,” he said. “I think it is a song of praise for those who have experienced loss, pain, and sin in life and yet still believe God can reconcile and even redeem the things that we cannot.

  “There are days, I am sure, when you and I and even the great King David could only muster a cold and lonely Hallelujah. It may be that the cold and lonely Hallelujah is a turning point that marks our salvation, because we know only God can save us from some of the situations we find ourselves in. The cold and lonely Hallelujah is a surrender to the mystery and backhanded glory of God.”

  Hartwick College professor Lisle Dalton explains that there is extensive precedent for bringing popular song into worship. Churches have used songs from musical theater dating at least back to Gilbert and Sullivan, and a few contemporary hymnals actually include songs by the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber. “There are lots of other genres that have been ‘baptized’ as well, including rock, folk, country, and even punk,” said Dalton. “That ‘Hallelujah’ has biblical allusions is probably seen as a bonus, but it’s not absolutely necessary in this type of music.”

  Of course, the specifics of the “Hallelujah” lyric, and the options it allows, do seem to lead the song to places other compositions can’t go. Consider this post, which Dalton found on an online wedding forum thread from someone with the username “winter bridezilla”:

  “I love hallelujah, fab song and would love it sang at the wedding . . . but maybe a sensored [sic] version if one exists. what do people think? totally inapprorpiate [sic] or would be lovely. . . .”

  Responses ranged from people saying that they had sung it in church but took out anything “offensive” to a suggestion to play the instrumental of the verse and just sing the chorus. But, Dalton points out, other religious usages have stuck with the original lyrics, believing that they are obscure or ambiguous enough to lend themselves to varied interpretation.

  “You could look at the more sexually suggestive lyrics, like ‘I remember when I moved in you’ in a nonsexual way—‘moved’ connoting an emotional change of heart or a spiritual change,” he said. “I’m sure there are many congregations that even like that the song has multiple layers, and appreciate Cohen’s efforts to link his own personal struggles to biblical characters and themes.”

  Rabbi Ruth Gan Kagan of Jerusalem’s Nava Tehila synagogue has utilized the song in a number of different ceremonies. Her daughter chose to sing it at her bat mitzvah. (“She was singing about the heartbreak of a sixty-year-old man!” Kagan said with amusement. “But it was her choice.”) A distant relative of Kagan’s asked her to officiate at his wedding. The bride and the groom were both musicians, and didn’t want a religious ceremony, but wanted “a certain enchantment.” She suggested they start with a niggun—a mostly wordless, hummed melody—but they couldn’t agree on what to sing.

  She tossed out the idea of using “Hallelujah,” and they “lit up like Hanukkah candles,” she said. “For a secular Israeli crowd, this is like a holy chant. And they had four h
undred guests, young and old, and everybody was singing.”

  The most codified use of “Hallelujah” Rabbi Kagan has attempted came when she introduced “Hallelujah” into the Yom Kippur service at Nava Tehila in 2009, a month after Leonard Cohen played a concert in Tel Aviv to benefit Palestinian and Israeli peace groups (“everybody was still under his spell,” she recalled). Kagan, a lifelong Cohen fan, had previously used his “If It Be Your Will” as a Day of Atonement prayer.

  “In the beginning of the Kol Nidre service, we say three times ‘Al da’at ha-Makom’—a prayer saying we hereby make it permissible to pray with the wrongdoers,” she said. “It doesn’t mean there are some black sheep and they can come, too. It means bringing our whole self, including the wrongdoer inside ourself, even the piece that maybe doesn’t want to be there or doesn’t believe. ‘Hallelujah’ is not a hymn of the believer—it’s a hymn of the one who is full of doubt, a hymn of the heretic. In Hebrew, the word heretic shares the same root as kippur, ‘atonement.’ So the song is an opportunity to bring that heretical part in—not just the one who is ready for repenting, but the part that is doubting.”

  Asked how she can reconcile this skeptical sensibility, and the language of Cohen’s song, with the more traditional aspects of the High Holidays, Kagan answered immediately. “I don’t want to reconcile!” she said. “The whole reason of bringing it in was that it doesn’t reconcile.

  “Yom Kippur is not an easy day. That confusion is good, and it works better to admit that. Maybe I’m not sure I want to ask forgiveness—and who from, anyway? We should bring the poems that reflect this more complex relationship with God into the service. This is not the only poem of Cohen’s with this question, but it also has that ‘Hallelujah,’ which is a good answer.