The Hallelujah phenomenon
The Leonard Cohen song, which was little noticed when it was released, but has soared in popularity
In the second of his two Bell Centre concerts last month, roughly midway through the second half of the show, Leonard Cohen sang Hallelujah. Hardly surprising in itself — it’s all but unthinkable that he could leave it out. But its placement in the set, as neither an early grabber nor a rousing climax, felt significant. The sellout crowd, as if caught off-guard, never quite mustered the cathartic chorus singalong that might have been expected. It was almost as if Cohen, in his respectful way, was downplaying the song’s astounding contemporary ubiquity, perhaps beginning to put the brakes on a runaway train.
But can Cohen in fact do anything to contain the song that is not only the most popular in his deep catalogue, but rapidly becoming one of the most covered and sung songs of all time? It’s a cliché to say that a song, once released, belongs to the people at large more than to its creator, but here is a rare case where that has been proven. The Hallelujah genie is well and truly out of the bottle.
It was only a matter of time until a whole book was written on the subject, and thankfully it’s been done by someone equal to the task. As his CV encompassing books about the Beastie Boys and Gregg Allman, and editorship of the hip-hop Vibe and alterna-rock Spin magazines would indicate, Alan Light is a man of catholic interests.
The Holy or The Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & The Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah” (Atria, 254 pages, $28.99) combines broad music scholarship and insightful textual analysis with the narrative drive of a good detective novel.
Light was interviewed by email from his home in New York about the historic rise and spread of a song that languished unregarded for 10 years or more after its initial 1984 release, beginning to gather steam only when Jeff Buckley chanced upon a little-heard cover by former Velvet Underground member John Cale.
What’s your own history with Hallelujah? When did you first hear it?
I wish I had a better answer to when I first heard it, because I honestly can’t recall. I must have been aware of it in some form around when it came out, because I did pay at least peripheral attention to Leonard Cohen, if only because he was a McGill classmate of my father’s and so a running source of interest within my family. I saw him play at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 1988 or ’89. But like so many others, it didn’t really register with me until it started to become apparent as a phenomenon. As I tell in the book, it was when Hallelujah was sung at Yom Kippur services a couple of years ago that I first thought, “Wow, this song really has reached another kind of standing in the world, hasn’t it?”
Why do you think the song’s popularity had such a slow gestation? Is it a simple case of a song being ahead of its time? I was working in campus radio in Edmonton back when the Various Positions album was released, and partly with the incentive of Canadian content regulations, I played songs from it fairly often. But to be honest I barely noticed Hallelujah.
It’s hard to know “why” it took such a long and circuitous path to popularity. Obviously, Jeff Buckley’s version (on the Grace album, 1994) really did re-contextualize the song, and in many ways made it easier for younger listeners to relate to it. But Grace wasn’t actually a hit, either. So it was the combined associations of Buckley’s death in 1997 and the new resonance that gave to the song, and the right evangelists at the right time, that started the snowball rolling.
Though he has never officially recorded it, Bob Dylan was ahead of the pack in recognizing Hallelujah. Dylan isn’t known for doing a lot of contemporary covers; what’s your theory on his affinity for the song?
What Cohen says is that Dylan liked the “uplifting” feeling of the song, especially of the original last verse. But it is extraordinary, isn’t it, that Dylan picked up on this song so much earlier than the rest of the world. I suppose as someone who has explored biblical imagery so frequently, he would take notice of the writing — and, I imagine, like so many other singers, he found something in this remarkable melody that he could connect with.
I’ve always felt John Cale has been under-credited as an evangelist for Hallelujah. How would you describe the role of his version in the song’s history?
Cale’s role was absolutely pivotal in the progression of Hallelujah. He did the edit of the song that shaped it into the form we have grown most familiar with — the structure that Jeff Buckley utilized and that, in turn, has become the usual text of Hallelujah most people now know. Cale distanced himself from some of the song’s more grandly spiritual notions and made it something more tangible, the song of a younger man than what Cohen created, of someone grappling with the pain and disappointment of life and struggling to still find hope and faith, rather than the song of a survivor looking back on a life that he is trying to make sense of. I love Cohen’s last verse — the “Lord of Song” verse — but it makes sense that it’s not something Cale would have felt as comfortable with.
Given the ever-growing list of covers, not to mention the countless amateur renditions on YouTube, it has become something of a parlour game to list favourites. Do you ever find yourself doing that? If so, what would be your personal Top Five?
My favourites change constantly. I think the way that Cohen sang the song on the last tour (and, I assume, on this one — I haven’t seen a show yet, since he’s not in NYC until later in the month) is pretty definitive, and incorporates so much of what’s been found in the best interpretations while also retaining that wonderful final verse. k.d. lang does a pretty great version. Cale’s, as you say, was revelatory. But then I’ll find something like the version sent to me just as I was finishing the book, by three teenage girls in—no kidding—North Pole, Alaska, who recorded it for a Christian website and did a really beautiful rendition of the song. I also love the ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro’s instrumental version, if only because it’s so easy to spend all your time talking about the lyrics and forget that any truly great song first resonates with listeners for its melody.
Sylvie Simmons, in her new Cohen biography I’m Your Man, calls Hallelujah “an all-purpose ecumenical/secular anthem for the new millennium.” I’m especially intrigued by that “all-purpose” idea. In your view can an interpreter err in either the ecumenical or secular direction? Is there such a thing as a wrong reading of the song?
It’s hard to talk about a “wrong” way to sing Hallelujah. I think that part of the incomparable story here is the way in which the lyrics and the interpretation have been given permission to shift as necessary. The malleability of the words, and the ability to turn up or turn down the different elements of the song — the spiritual side or the heartbreak or the sexuality, the celebration or the sorrow — has been central to its universal embrace. It seems like the only way you can really mess it up is to try something extreme, like Bono’s awful trip-hop version or Susan Boyle’s nonsensical edit of the lyrics. If you just deliver the song itself, it still basically always works. And it’s amazing to me that it has retained its sense of solemnity without having been brutally parodied in some way that really popped its bubble ... maybe not a Weird Al Yankovic version, but some kind of spoof that would mean it had to go on the shelf for a while. But that just hasn’t happened yet.
Can you think of any near-equivalents to the Hallelujah phenomenon in popular culture? I can’t.
Not really. The unprecedented trajectory of the song is why I wanted to write the book. Is there a cult movie that wasn’t released but then discovered decades later and became a hit? At least it’s not the full Vincent Van Gogh situation — Leonard Cohen was alive to watch the song reach the larger world. There are some other songs that have become modern global standards — Bridge Over Troubled Water, Imagine, maybe A Change is Gonna Come — but unlike Hallelujah, those were all recognized when they were first released, and didn’t take 15 or 20 years to get recognized.
Cohen himself has hinted that perhaps the song has been overcovered. Can there be too much Hallelujah?
I think there are some uses that need to be retired for a while. I don’t think there’s much to be gained from more uses of the song as the music for the Big Emotional Climax of TV dramas. But it’s kind of astonishing that something about the song still feels like a discovery, still seems cool, and powerful, and meaningful, to so many people, and that people can still find new meanings and new structures for it that work.
In some ways, the biggest revelation for me came in talking to regular people who have embraced this song as something really significant in their lives — people who used it at weddings, funerals, religious services, very central and important moments. It’s very easy to be cynical about music today, and to decide that it’s been so commodified and cheapened that it’s just not as important as it used to be, that people don’t care about music the way they used to. But talking to people about Hallelujah, it’s evident that a truly great song can still be incredibly meaningful, and can still connect in a way that no other art can do.