- Person
- Leonard Cohen
- Lived
- 1934–2016
- Field
- Song and poetry
- From
- Canadian
The story
Leonard Cohen spent years struggling with 'Hallelujah'. By his own account he wrote around 150 draft verses, and his notebooks bear out the many revisions; one famous story has him sitting on the floor of a New York hotel room, filling notebook after notebook. The documentary makers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine concluded that the song took him about five years. Its verses draw on the Hebrew Bible, alluding to King David and Bathsheba and to Samson and Delilah, and its title is the Hebrew for 'praise God', a word Cohen said people had been singing for thousands of years to affirm their little journey.
The song appeared on his album Various Positions in 1984. Columbia Records declined even to release that album in the United States, telling Cohen, as he later recalled, that they knew he was great but did not know if he was any good. When it did come out on an independent label, the song had limited success at first.
Its fortunes changed through other musicians. In 1991 John Cale asked Cohen for the lyrics, received 15 faxed pages and chose his own selection of verses. Cale's version inspired Jeff Buckley's 1994 recording on his album Grace, which Rolling Stone later ranked among the 500 greatest songs of all time, and Cale's recording reached a vast new audience through the 2001 animated film Shrek.
From there the song spread around the world. According to one count it has been performed by almost 200 artists in various languages, and by 2008 more than 300 versions were known. It has become a fixture of film soundtracks, talent contests and memorial services. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin described it as one of the most haunting and often-performed songs in American musical history. It is the subject of a book, Alan Light's The Holy or the Broken (2012), and a 2022 documentary, Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song.
Cohen himself found the number of covers ironic and amusing, given the song's early rejection. When he sang it at the Glastonbury Festival in 2008 as the sun set, it drew a rapturous reception and a long ovation, and after his death in 2016 it entered the American Billboard Hot 100 for the first time.
Why it matters
'Hallelujah' has become one of the best-loved songs of modern times, recorded and performed by artists around the world.
About Leonard Cohen
Montreal poet and songwriter of “Suzanne”, “Bird on the Wire” and “Hallelujah”, whose songs of love, faith and mortality drew deeply on the Jewish tradition he never left.
Sources
- Leonard Cohen Wikipedia
- Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen song) Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.