The Holy or the Broken

by Alan Light

  In a phone call during a break on a movie set, Timberlake (who grew up in Memphis) explained that he is a “huge” Jeff Buckley fan: He named his dog after the singer, and he and his friends would sometimes go down to the spot on the Mississippi where Buckley drowned to try to retrace his final footsteps. He has messed around with “Hallelujah” at home, on guitar and piano, “a million times,” and he often uses it when he’s making films. “If a scene is moody or haunting, I’ll listen to it in between takes.”

  Timberlake batted around a few ideas with Morris when the producers of the Haiti telethon called and asked him to participate. “Matt had a version of ‘Help!’ by the Beatles that was just unbelievable,” he said, “but ‘Hallelujah’ became the front-runner because I started toying around with modifying the voicings on the piano.” By altering the construction of the chords, Timberlake stumbled on a sound that shifted the mood of the song. “I found something that made it feel more uplifting,” he said. “There were clusters of notes that made the choruses feel less descending and more rising.

  “So I called them back and said that we had this beautiful version of ‘Hallelujah,’ but obviously it’s so long, we had to cut it down to the three verses that we thought were appropriate for this moment. We only figured it out a day or two before—we were just kind of freewheeling it.”

  Once again, the take-what-you-want nature of the lyrics proved essential to the song’s use, and success. “It was easier to find the verses that shouldn’t be there—‘remember when I moved in you,’ that was way too intimate for something like this,” Timberlake said. “But ‘maybe there’s a God above,’ that seemed universally appropriate for what was happening, to question a higher power. The figurative nature of that seemed right. There are some dark verses in there, but to me it’s not about retribution. It’s ironic, in a dark and haunting way, and I thought we were able to give it a different context.”

  Despite the license to take liberties with the song, and his own interest in Leonard Cohen’s work, the most intimidating part of “Hallelujah” for Timberlake was definitely coming up against Jeff Buckley’s legacy. “We got there and were like, ‘Is this sacrilegious? We might be committing suicide here—we really have to be careful right now.’

  “I was nervous because I was so in love with Jeff’s version,” he went on. “But then I wonder how he felt, what he knew about it when he sang it.”

  Critics seemed unprepared for the poignancy of Timberlake’s “Hallelujah”; New York magazine’s website called it “the biggest surprise, and arguably the best performance of the night.” The song shot up the iTunes chart, selling more downloads than any of the other telethon material, reaching the Number One slot over the weekend following the broadcast. Between YouTube and the MTV site, the video was viewed more than a million times during those few days.

  If Timberlake put the song in front of young listeners, a few weeks later, it was their moms’ turn to hear a new take. On February 10, immediately before the opening of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Oprah Winfrey featured the Canadian Tenors on her talk show. As the Tenors sang a harmonically immaculate, emotionally flat “Hallelujah,” which they had recorded on their debut album, they were joined by a surprise guest—a surprise even to the group, who had to continue singing as they registered what was happening. Before the last verse, Celine Dion (another Canadian) strode onstage for a genuine “Oprah moment,” and added some responses and filigrees to the final section that were relatively free of her usual histrionics. The audience, naturally, went bananas.

  The opening ceremonies for the Olympics came two days later. A somber mood hung over the festivities: A Georgian luger had died earlier in the day during a training run. Following a slate of performances that included songs by such Canadian stars as Bryan Adams, Nelly Furtado, and Sarah McLachlan, the opening remarks were delivered, beginning with the president of the International Olympic Committee and ending with Michaëlle Jean, the governor-general of Canada.

  And then came the chance for Cohen’s song to reach the global masses. Wearing a white three-piece suit over a white shirt, k. d. lang was given a truly once-in-a-lifetime shot at “Hallelujah,” which was presented, somewhat inexplicably, as a “song of peace.”

  “The producer asked me to sing it, and I couldn’t fucking believe it,” said lang. “That’s like being handed a golden egg and saying, ‘Do you want this?’ But I said, ‘The only way I’m going to do this is if I get to sing live,’ which was either really stupid or really brave.

  “I said, ‘Well, am I going to get to sing the verses I want to sing?’ And they ran it by the committee and they all said yes. They signed off, there was no back-and-forth—I mean, I don’t sing the one where ‘I moved in you’ and stuff like that, so it’s not that bad.”

  For the Olympics, lang said that in her choice of lyrics and in her delivery, she was looking for something that would translate around the world, a feeling that was “more of an empathetic reaching out of the hands to the universal selves, to embrace the fact that we all share the same emotional structure.”

  And what a delivery it was. lang’s performance was stunning, a huge, bravura vocal that never lost the song’s fundamental intimacy, never turned overblown. With the added pathos of the athlete’s death that same day, this “Hallelujah” was a song of survival and hard-fought perseverance. While lang was singing, images of doves were projected on the stage floor, and then rose to the ceiling via columns to symbolize their release (which still wasn’t enough to get her to include the lines “I remember when I moved in you / and the holy dove was moving too”).

  In the course of a few weeks, in front of two global audiences, the extremes of “Hallelujah” were defined. If Justin Timberlake was able to use the song to respond to a natural disaster, offering the confusion and pain of the broken hallelujah, k. d. lang had countered with the holy hallelujah, the universal feelings of struggle and reward that were also contained in the words.

  The Olympic opening ceremonies were watched by a reported three billion people around the world. A single of lang’s “Hallelujah” was released, which reached Number Two on the Canadian charts and Number 61 on the U.S. charts. More than twenty-five years after its unheralded release, a phenomenon that had already happened in Europe now reached North America—multiple versions of the song were simultaneously among the most popular recordings on the continent.

  k. d. lang has sung “Hallelujah” at countless concerts, benefits, and ceremonies, but she doesn’t hesitate when asked what her favorite performance was. “The Olympics really took it to a new level for me,” she said. “Singing that song, in Canada, for the world—it’s a pretty big, pretty beautiful opportunity.”

  • • •

  Cover versions of all kinds continued to appear throughout 2010. Another vocal group, Celtic Thunder, weighed in with the blunt force implied by their name. Neil Diamond included a version on Dreams, an album of his “all-time favorite songs of the rock era,” alongside selections by the Beatles, the Eagles, and Randy Newman. The album was self-produced (following two albums that Diamond recorded with mega-producer Rick Rubin), and reveals impressive restraint from “the Jewish Elvis”—“Hallelujah” in particular is given a simple arrangement, far from Diamond’s usual theatrics, and even if his vocal can’t fully resist some melodrama, it is nonetheless an effective reading.

  Still, the heat started to turn up a bit on a simmering “Hallelujah” backlash. The review in England’s Guardian newspaper described the song as “dulled by ubiquity,” while acknowledging that Diamond “presented [it] in a new light.”

  Jake Shimabukuro, the young ukulele wizard, included the song on his 2011 Peace Love Ukulele record, where it acts as a kind of counterbalance to the album’s other cover, his blistering version of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” After the multitude of other “Hallelujah”s, it’s invigorating to hear it played as an instrumental, to step away from the poetry and the voices and just listen to this stunning, simple me
lody.

  “You can get the same satisfaction by singing it alone in your living room as you can onstage in front of an audience,” said Shimabukuro. “It’s a song that you sing for yourself, not necessarily for anyone else.

  “With this song, people have such a strong personal connection that they can fill in the blanks—the more space you leave, the more they’re going to fill in their own interpretation, their own lives, their own memories. And maybe that’s what makes it so great as a live, performing song, because everyone in your audience becomes a part of your band, part of your choir or your orchestra, and it’s because they’re all bringing just as much to the song as you are as a performer.”

  If Justin Timberlake and k. d. lang articulated the extreme emotions that “Hallelujah” could still carry, the song’s outermost musical possibilities may have been defined by Shimabukuro’s solo ukulele on one side and opera superstar Renée Fleming’s performance of the song as an orchestrated epic on the other. Fleming, one of the world’s most acclaimed sopranos, included “Hallelujah” on her controversial album Dark Hope, on which she interpreted a carefully curated set of pop material that favored more obscure indie-rock songs by the likes of Death Cab for Cutie and the Mars Volta.

  In an enormous photo studio along Manhattan’s West Side Highway, where she was filming some promotional material for the album, Fleming explained how the song, which didn’t exactly fit the project’s concept, ended up on the album. “We did ‘Hallelujah,’ and it was just supposed to be a test,” she said. “It came up somehow in conversation with David [Kahne, the album’s producer] and he said, ‘Just so I can get to know your voice, why don’t you come in and do that, since you’re familiar with it already?’ So then everybody said, ‘Wow, we like this, we want to keep it,’ and eventually it morphed into a version where we decided to do all seven verses.”

  Prior to the sessions, Fleming was unfamiliar with most of the new songs she recorded, but she was well aware of the challenges surrounding yet another new “Hallelujah” at this point—and they felt familiar. “Obviously, it’s a song that’s been covered a lot, even recently, so it has to be interesting or there would be no reason to redo it,” she said. “But that’s also doubly true of classical music, because the same piece has been sung the same way for hundreds of years, so what are you going to bring to it?

  “It’s funny, I’ve decided ‘Hallelujah’ is kind of a Rorschach test for people, because everyone has a different reaction to it and to what I’m doing. I just sang it, and whatever came out was just natural and spontaneous and maybe that’s the best thing, because there’s kind of an enigma, both in the meaning of the words and the way Leonard Cohen said them, that catches people’s attention.”

  The response to Dark Hope was largely muted. Though it was generally acknowledged that Fleming was attempting something far more ambitious than the usual “classical crossover” lite-pop travesties, most critics felt there was a lack of connection to the material. Fleming sang far lower than her signature soprano, and she had to get used to singing closely into a microphone rather than projecting to the back of the Metropolitan Opera House; producer Kahne likened the change required in her vocal power to “a Ferrari going through a school zone.”

  Though technically flawless, Fleming’s “Hallelujah” is also bloodless. Losing both humor and sex, she finds neither the intimacy nor the communal power that the lyrics had repeatedly demonstrated. In the New York Times, Jon Pareles called the song’s arrangement “too plush and fussy.” (In a conspicuously snarky review of Dark Hope on NPR, correspondent Linda Holmes referred to “Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah,’ which apparently everyone has to cover,” and classical music critic Tom Huizenga replied, “Yes, even I’m working up a cover of that now.”)

  And while it was well-intentioned to record all seven of the verses covered between the Cohen and Buckley versions of the song, the truth is that it doesn’t work as well as either edit—it loses the focus that gives Cohen’s rendition its spiritual questing and Buckley’s its erotic intensity. It was certainly a mistake to sing Cohen’s climactic “I’ll stand before the Lord of Song” verse in the middle of the lyrics—as Bono’s version had demonstrated, there’s really no way to follow that. Nonetheless, Fleming thought enough of her “Hallelujah” to make it the only song from Dark Hope included on her 2012 anthology, The Art of Renée Fleming.

  Fleming was shooting for the sublime, but “Hallelujah” also dwelled among the ridiculous. Scottish hausfrau-turned-Britain’s-Got-Talent-sensation Susan Boyle included “Hallelujah” on her enormously successful 2010 Christmas album, The Gift. Given that the Jewish Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas,” perhaps it shouldn’t be so shocking to see a song rooted in Old Testament imagery, composed by a Jewish Buddhist, embraced as modern Christmas material. It did, however, apparently require even more elision than usual of some of the lyrics, including cutting a verse in half for no discernible reason, so that the final line she sings before the concluding chorus is “I used to live alone before I knew you,” which makes no sense at all.

  Boyle slows every line to a pious, painful crawl, and adds a quivering melisma at seemingly arbitrary points. Irony, sex, confusion, experience—any of the elements that give the song its depth are simply erased, leaving verses that simply fill up the space between those Big Moment Choruses.

  Naming Boyle’s recording one of the “20 Worst Songs of 2010” in the Village Voice, Maura Johnston (an ardent “Hallelujah” tracker over the years) wrote that Boyle’s “overly-enunciated, hollow singing of each word that doesn’t mean ‘praise God’ makes you wonder if she was actually given phonetic instruction in the studio.” Jon Bon Jovi put it more succinctly. “Who is the stupid fuck A&R guy who allowed that to happen? What executive who thinks he belongs in this business would do that?” (The Gift did reach Number One in the U.S. and the UK, though, and received a Grammy nomination—so in truth, Boyle’s A&R executive probably got a bonus that year.)

  In October, soft rock/R&B balladeer Michael Bolton filled in for an ailing Susan Boyle to perform the song, backed by a choir, on Dancing with the Stars, one of the highest-rated shows on television at the time, up there with American Idol and Monday Night Football. The biggest emotional charge here came from the fact that Bolton had previously been an unsuccessful contestant on the show—any lingering sense of spirituality fully gave way to pure, old-fashioned, show-business drama.

  Bolton said that he was only vaguely familiar with the song prior to his stint competing on the show. “It was on [his dance partner] Chelsie Hightower’s favorite tape to stretch and warm up to. She had a version of two guys doing an acoustic version. She played that a lot, and I started to listen a little more closely.

  “Then, after I was off the show and back on tour, I got this weird call out of nowhere, saying that they had a cancellation from Susan Boyle. I was in South Dakota or somewhere. I said. ‘Are you asking me to come back and sing on the show? I’d love to do that—that’s what I should have been doing all along.’ We flew out Monday, shot on Tuesday, and I flew back on Wednesday, and the only time I had the lyric sheet in front of me was right before the show. They had already cut the backing track with the children’s choir and I was trying to see if I could match the key, to make everything easier. That was the first time I actually read the lyrics, and I’ve never seen or heard the same set of lyrics twice.”

  Bolton said that the best take he did was the first one, but because of a technical issue, they had to redo it. The version as it was broadcast—though Dancing with the Stars fans would presumably disagree—plays awfully close to parody. For Bolton, a singer prone to bombast (and self-aware enough to lampoon his own style on Saturday Night Live), the vocal is relatively dialed back, but it’s still a big, clarion delivery. With applause breaking out at inopportune times in the lyric—either for couples in formalwear spinning and dipping, or for the appearance of a children’s choir, or for the familiar notes of the chorus—the whole thing f
eels ridiculous.

  Whatever one’s own reaction to the clip, Bolton has certainly put some thought into the structure and meaning of the song. “I think of ‘Hallelujah’ as ‘thank God,’ when something phenomenal or life-altering happens that saves you,” he said. “There’s a positive power in that word, some sort of saving grace.

  “When you get to ‘I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch,’ there’s a kind of defiance, a shift that happens. I love that lyric; love and mercy aren’t what you think they’re about, it’s not about waving the victory flag. It really makes it so human and humble.”

  After the Dancing with the Stars performance, Bolton kept “Hallelujah” in his repertoire. He sang it in Italy, in front of a full orchestra and children’s choir at a Christmas concert in the basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, for broadcast on Univision in Europe, and he included a recording with “MB’s Children’s Choir” on the 2011 duets album Gems, alongside songs with the likes of Seal, A.R. Rahman, and Rascal Flatts.

  Also in 2011, Bolton sang “Hallelujah” to close the “Ein Herz für Kinder” telethon in Germany. “I was thinking I should do a big vocal, a powerhouse hook, but they asked for this song,” he said. “So I did it and people were crying and the cameras went to the face of the Princess of Monaco, with tears streaming down her face. The host, Thomas, is someone I’ve known for twenty years and wouldn’t describe as the most emotional guy, he’s crying. And they raised 14 million euros. It was an amazing finale, this song with a chorus that’s lower than some points in the verse. It was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had on stage.”

  You might think that after all of this exposure, the televised singing contests would start to leave “Hallelujah” alone. But it seems that for these shows, familiarity breeds opportunity; even after all of these appearances, use of the song only increased. A fifteen-year-old boy performed the song on the Australia’s Got Talent television show, and made it all the way to the finals of the competition.