Hallelujah! Leonard Cohen song goes big
HALLELUJAH was arguably Leonard Cohen’s most famous song, the musical legend’s most lasting legacy. It may be rock’s most famous song, too, having been covered by more than 300 musicians, from Neil Diamond to Justin Timberlake, with Bono, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and KD Lang in between.
Cohen worked on it for years, writing more than 80 verses before trimming it down to the five that appeared on the record. But when he finally brought Various Positions, his 1984, nine-song record that included Hallelujah, to his label, Columbia Records, they decided not to release it in the United States.
“Leonard, we know you’re great. We just don’t know if you’re any good,” the head of the music division at Columbia Records, Walter Yetnikoff, said, according to Cohen.
Although it was released domestically by a minor label called Passport in 1985, that was enough to ensure the album never charted. Furthermore, Hallelujah wasn’t released as a single after the album’s first single, Dance Me to the End of Love, bombed.
The song didn’t chart in Britain, either, until 2008 – after an amateur singer named Alexandra Burke sang a version of it on The X Factor.
It still hadn’t charted in the United States, until now. Cohen died on November 7, after a fall, and his death was made public on November 10. Thirty-six years after being released, Hallelujah finally made its debut on the Billboard Top 100, which charts the country’s top singles, at 59. It also entered the Digital Song Sales chart at number 12, having been downloaded 33 000 times that week, according to Billboard.
During the same week, it was streamed in the US 3.8 million times.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as album sales tend to spike after an artist’s death. Following David Bowie’s death, for example, his album sales increased by 5 000 percent for a week. And after Prince died earlier this year, his record sales soared by 40 000 percent. As The Post reported, at a 70 000 percent rise in sales, his hits compilation The Very Best of Prince experienced the largest jump. A quarter of a million copies were sold.
Purple Rain, which is arguably Prince’s most well-known album, sold 133 000 copies. During the weekend, 2.3 million of his tracks were sold as singles, a 33 500 percent increase. Naturally, sales of Purple Rain were highest, at 287 000 copies.
Additionally, during the first three weeks following Michael Jackson’s death, more than nine million copies of his albums were sold.
Finally, The Post reported, “In the four days after Amy Winehouse died in 2011, her record sales experienced a 37-fold increase. Less than a month after Whitney Houston was found dead in a hotel bathtub in 2012, she became the first woman with three albums in the top 10 of Billboard 200’s chart.” – The Washington Post