by Alan Light
“One young man who used to be religious came to the service, and it was the first time he came to Yom Kippur after ten or fifteen years. He told me, ‘I was sitting there all in knots, thinking, This isn’t the place for me, why did I come? And as soon as you started singing “Hallelujah,” I relaxed. I thought, There’s room for me here.’ ”
Kagan said that people have told her to edit or alter the lyrics, but she refuses to do it. “People say it’s too dirty for children, but I prefer to give honor to the words—otherwise don’t sing them at all,” she said. “I saw a rabbi who set the words of Psalm 150 to the melody of ‘Hallelujah,’ but for me that’s a little kitschy. I don’t like to kill that heretical message of the poem. I don’t want to be tricked into believing that he’s saying everything is going to be okay.”
Taking the opposite approach, Helen Hamilton led the congregation of the Holy Trinity Church in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, France, in a rendition of “Amazing Grace” set to the melody of “Hallelujah.” In the sermon that followed, she explained that she always felt the tune was “crying out” for Christian words.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I love Leonard Cohen’s words, set in the Old Testament from David’s point of view . . . but it’s not the whole story, is it? Leonard Cohen obviously didn’t find it enough. He converted from Judaism to Buddhism and spent five years in a Buddhist monastery. No wonder he talks about broken, cold, and lonely hallelujahs.”
So Hamilton (whose sermon also stated her fondness for Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah”) married the song’s melody and chorus to the immortal lyrics of “Amazing Grace,” and in doing so, she presented the salvation offered by Jesus Christ as a counter to the idea that “it all went wrong.” That, for Hamilton, completed Cohen’s narrative—“we will be able to stand there, at the end of time, with nothing on our lips but hallelujah. Not through anything we have done, but through amazing grace.”
Looking at these different usages of “Hallelujah,” one thing that stands out is not only how the song remains so open to interpretation and flexible in meaning and construction, but also how easily it fits into services and celebrations of multiple faiths. Though the song’s language, and the chorus itself, derive from specific sources, the words composed by the Jewish Buddhist travel easily from church to synagogue, and from wedding chapel to graveyard.
“There’s a universality to the word hallelujah,” said Cantor Jen Cohen of Temple Beth Sholom in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. “Someone gave me the advice long ago that whenever a Jewish clergy person or choir is called upon to participate in an interfaith service, any prayer or psalm or song with ‘hallelujah’ in it will always work. People are overjoyed to share that word with other faith traditions.”
Cohen chaperones a trip to Israel every year with a crop of tenth-graders. In 2010, the group visited the underground City of David water tunnels. Outside the tunnels, they had a view of the crowded rooftops of East Jerusalem, and their guide said that this could have been the very spot where King David saw Bathsheba “bathing on the roof.” Picking up on the reference, Cohen started to sing “Hallelujah,” and all of the kids joined her for the choruses. (“Whatever one thinks of the Hebrew Bible and its status as the greatest fiction ever,” she said, “I love when those moments happen in Israel.”)
The song turned up at the wedding of Amanda Palmer to superstar fantasy writer Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Coraline) on the day after New Year’s 2011. The event took place at the San Francisco home of writer Michael Chabon, with guests including Armistead Maupin and Daniel Handler, best known for the children’s books he’s written under the name Lemony Snicket. After a takeout Mexican dinner, every one started to drink and sing.
“Pretty much everyone except the kids was drunk,” recalled Palmer, “and someone suggested, ‘We’ve got to sing “Hallelujah.” ’ It’s a great party song—but it’s not a ‘beginning of the night’ party song, it’s an ‘end of the night, everybody’s drunk, somebody’s got a guitar, that’s the song you sing’ song. And because I know that, or because I don’t, I don’t always remember every verse. So I started playing the chords on the piano and Daniel Handler had an accordion, and we all folked it up and played it, and it was actually Michael Chabon’s teenage daughter that remembered the first line of every verse.”
Another couple that used the song in their wedding was Mirjam van Emden (my own sister’s husband’s sister—my sister-in-law-in-law?) and her husband, Daniel Elzas, who made it the first dance when they were married in Amsterdam in 2011. Like many people his age, Daniel first heard “Hallelujah” in Shrek, and when Mirjam was an exchange student at the University of Michigan in 2004, the choir of the local Hillel performed it. “In my ears, they were able to keep so many musical layers in there with just their voices,” she said.
The decision to include the song at the wedding had more to do with the melody than with the words, though Mirjam’s own interpretation of the lyrics also made it feel relevant to the occasion. “It talks about unevenness in a relationship,” she said, “especially about lack of communication, which I think exists in certain periods and to a certain extent in every relationship, even though you try to do your best together. By the end, the communication seems to revive, even if it doesn’t seem to repair the relationship. The word hallelujah seems to symbolize the connection between the two and the times when it was or it will be better—a word of hope, future, dreams, and wishes, which are quite appropriate to a wedding.”
Not that the song had entirely transformed into a song of celebration. In September of 2005, newborn Danielle Burigsay died on her fifth day of life. Her parents made a video for the memorial service at Santos-Robinson Mortuary in San Leandro, California, with accompanying music including Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah.”
“I don’t really know why I picked it,” said Danielle’s mother, Ann Burigsay. “I honestly never really knew what the song was even about. The song has always seemed sad but powerful, and has an impact on my heart that I can’t explain. Maybe it felt like a final send-off and a blessing? For me, I guess the melody and the chorus is what I respond to most, not trying to decipher or make sense of the lyrics.”
This kind of use might have seemed logical when “Hallelujah” was serving as the anthem of sorrow and romantic ache popularized through Scrubs and The West Wing. At that time, in fact, it would have been very difficult to imagine choosing the song as part of a celebration or happy occasion. In time, however, it became clear that “Hallelujah” could convey different moods than those established by the intimacy and longing that defined Jeff Buckley’s performance.
Yet as “Hallelujah” proved itself to be just as powerful expressing triumph as it was expressing loss, or desire, or perseverance, history has seen this ambiguity turned into the song’s great strength. Those who want or need it to serve as a hymn, a balm, can find that sense of soaring grace, and those who respond to its sense of struggle and confusion can present that as the song’s backbone. There is no “right” way to sing “Hallelujah.”
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As time went by, those listeners who had discovered “Hallelujah” earlier in its existence now had more complex relationships to the song. Many old-school Cohen and Buckley fans felt that it had been corrupted by all the licensing and Idol worship. Others found that the journey the song had taken was something that mirrored their own experiences.
Back in the early 1990s, James Talerico was in a bad way. He had graduated from college and was spending his time traveling, drifting through Europe and the Middle East. At one point, he wound up on the Greek island of Santorini, where he fell in with a group of friends, including another American named Todd, a guitar player who was busking and tending bar in the town of Thera.
Todd was “committed to what he felt were the great unrecognized songwriters of American music,” said Talerico, who is now the creative director for a digital advertising agency in New York City. Todd wo
uld play his friends tapes of Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Bob Dylan B-sides, and a Canadian singer Talerico was unfamiliar with named Leonard Cohen—who, as it happens, had lived for a number of years on one of the Greek islands himself.
Todd would tend bar and play these cassettes and Talerico would drink, and then closing time would come, and their friends would usually all wind up hanging out on the porch of the house Talerico was renting on the town’s main drag. “We would sit out there, smoke a lot of black hash, and listen to music,” he said.
Todd played Cohen’s “Hallelujah” over and over. Talerico thinks they were listening to a live version from a bootleg recording. “That song had percolated up in his consciousness,” said Talerico. “Particularly the opening verse—this idea of a secret chord, of there being some transcendent element, if only you could hold on to it.”
“Hallelujah” began to lodge itself in Talerico’s brain as well. “My initial relationship to the song was kind of morose. It wasn’t the most optimistic part of my life. I drank a lot, I did a lot of drugs—and it was actually a lovely place to do it, you’re in the sun—but it was a hard slog night after night, and I wasn’t very healthy emotionally. And listening to it again and again, it was like a sad kind of testament—it felt like he was talking about no matter how hard you tried, it almost didn’t matter. The ‘secret chord,’ ‘you don’t really care for music’—there were all of these overtures to our mangy little efforts at something transcendent, and it falling or not holding fast, which felt pretty consistent with where I was at.”
Talerico made a tape of his own favorites from Todd’s collection, including “Hallelujah,” and he listened to it through the rest of his travels—through Italy, concluding in London before returning to the U.S. the following year. “It was part of my soundtrack of being alone and pessimistic,” he said.
Talerico eventually made his way to New York, moving to the East Village and reconnecting with a musician friend he had met along the way. His friend told him about a young singer named Jeff Buckley, whom he had seen play at Sidewalk Café, a little club in the neighborhood. Other friends were talking about Buckley, too, and about the wide range of covers that he performed, including the Leonard Cohen song that Talerico liked.
Things had begun to turn around for Talerico. He started out working at a job that he hated, but then he met someone with whom he would start a new business. He also met the woman he would eventually marry, though she was still with someone else. “I was still coming out of those years of not feeling right, but I had just started to gain some momentum,” he said.
Talerico went to the late, lamented Tower Records store on Broadway and East Fourth Street and bought Grace. He heard Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah”—the young singer’s impossibly expressive, angelic voice heightening the sense of sensuality, with some different verses, and some that he recognized from the live Cohen bootlegs—and now he picked up on something different in the song.
“It felt like being able to have that aspiration, to be able to commit yourself to transcendence—whether it’s recognized or not, and no matter how small it was—that was beautiful. And I think that actually came through Buckley’s interpretation, which is heavenly, like he carries you up with it.
“Cohen gave me this really solid baseline on which I settled a lot of these grievances against the planet,” Talerico continued, “and it reinforced a sense of pessimism that I had. Buckley just turned it upside down for me.” The new recording of the song became his “personal anthem” through an exhilarating, tumultuous time, as he began dating music publicist Shawn McCormack and, just three months later, married her.
Each of the two different renditions of “Hallelujah” came to define a formative moment in this one life. “I love having these two different relationships with this one song,” said Talerico, “particularly because each one really was where I was as a person—like, if I were in a more optimistic place, might I have found the hopefulness in Cohen’s version initially? Maybe I would have. Within the lyrics there are so many opportunities to go either way—the Samson and Delilah reference, the ‘cold and broken Hallelujah’—is there hope in there, is it death, is it despair? You’re allowed to bring to it what you will. But it took Jeff Buckley’s glorious voice to bring it out to me, and for me to be open to it at the same time.
“You know the end of [T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred] Prufrock’? He’s like, ‘I’ve heard the mermaids singing . . . I do not think that they will sing to me’—that despair, that’s really consistent with how I heard ‘Hallelujah’ in the beginning. It was like, there’s something there, and it wasn’t for me, and all my aspirations toward it were meaningless. But then, with that soaring finish that Buckley puts on, it became something else. It could be cold, it could be broken, your hair could be cut off, but maybe there is a little bit of it for me.”
When Talerico got married, the understanding was that he and Shawn were not going to have children. As time went on, though, they started to reconsider. “We had all of this love,” he said, “and we felt we had enough love for another human being.” Conversations, first casual and then less so, naturally turned to what they might name a baby, and Talerico had an idea. They could call her Hallelujah.
“I was like, ‘Wouldn’t that be brilliant? We could take all of that joy and put it into this name.’ And Shawn laughed; she was like, ‘Oh, my God, don’t do that to your child.’ ” But Talerico held on to the idea, and kept it at the bottom of the list of potential names. Shawn got pregnant and they learned that the baby would be a girl, which reduced the options, and down to the end, there were just a couple of names left in play—and Hallelujah was still one of them. The father-to-be would play the song to the baby growing in his wife’s belly.
Shawn had a very difficult pregnancy and was bedridden much of the time, but on August 8, 2001—in between the release of Shrek and the events of September 11—a new person arrived at the birthing center at St. Luke’s Hospital. “The baby comes out and I catch her and I hold her up, and she’s slimy and gross and bloody, like a little pterodactyl,” said Talerico. “The nurse leaves, and I’m like, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And Shawn said, ‘Let’s call her Hallelujah.’
“It was the only thing that we felt was representative of the experience. We thought it was such an incredible thing that we had found each other and brought this life onto the planet, and we never thought we would. I never thought that I would meet the love of my life and marry her and she would give birth to this beautiful, beautiful piece of life. And the only thing that I could think to name her was this word, and it was tied to my own transformation, and it came along with the transformation of how I looked at the song.”
When they wrote the name down on the birth certificate form, the nurse asked if they were sure. “I was like, ‘Yes, I’m really sure,’ ” Talerico said with a laugh.
They brought the baby home the next day. Talerico had kept the Buckley album cued up in the CD player just in case. They laid her in the bassinet and played the song.
At that moment, he said, “she became the embodiment of this idea, this little tiny hope that I had. So, in a way, my daughter functions as my daughter and this human and this great personality, but she also functions as a symbol. The verse about the ‘cold and broken Hallelujah’—cold and broken, but still beautiful and transcendent—she kind of took it all on in this human form.”
Hallelujah Talerico is now eleven years old. She usually goes by the name Lulu. She plays the guitar, and every once in a while, if her father asks really nicely, she will sing the song that gave her her name. Her own favorite version of “Hallelujah” is not performed by Leonard Cohen or by Jeff Buckley, but by a Bulgarian-born artist she found on the Internet named Geri X.
Talerico said that reaction to the name tends to be all or nothing. “People love it, they think it’s the most beautiful thing, or they’re just aghast that we would do that to a child—that maybe it’s too much
weight, too much to handle for a child’s name.” He does note that it tends to get an enthusiastic response from clerical workers and office administrators, which has helped the family navigate the New York City public school system.
His daughter’s own relationship to her name changes. “There was a while when she wanted to change her name to, like, Joan,” he said. “Now she’s playing with different nicknames—she said that when she goes to middle school, she wants to call herself Hallie. But I do love it when she introduces herself as Hallelujah. It’s a rare occasion. But when she does, it’s just great to hear that word coming out of her mouth.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
In 2010, the “Hallelujah” brand was thriving. The song was everywhere.
On January 22, ten days after the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, MTV Networks produced the all-star telethon “Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief.” The musical lineup was pop royalty, top to bottom: Bruce Springsteen, Shakira, Dave Matthews, Taylor Swift. Bono and the Edge teamed up with Jay-Z and Rihanna in London; in Los Angeles, Kid Rock, Keith Urban, and Sheryl Crow joined forces. All the performances were made available for download on iTunes immediately, and between pledges and sales, the event raised north of $60 million to aid in the relief efforts.
At this point, it was probably inevitable that “Hallelujah” would make an appearance, but it was still a bit of a surprise when a close-up of fingers on a piano pulled back to reveal Justin Timberlake beginning a slow and prayer-like performance of the song. With his friend and collaborator Matt Morris playing acoustic guitar and singing harmony and Charlie Sexton (a longtime member of Bob Dylan’s band, among many credits) adding electric guitar washes behind them, it was more ragged and more powerful than anything you might expect from the former ’N Sync-er. It was the broken hallelujah in full force.