Jeff Buckley, a hungry young singer-songwriter from California, first heard "Hallelujah" on a Leonard Cohen tribute album he discovered in a friend's home while cat-sitting in Brooklyn in 1992. And even then, it failed to make an impression on the radio or the charts, where 50-year-old Cohen was competing against the likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna. Thus, "Hallelujah" wasn't even heard in the United States until Various Positions was released by another label. But when it reached Walter Yetnikoff, the president of CBS Records, Yetnikoff was puzzled: "He said, 'What is this? This isn't pop music.
"'Hallelujah' just jumped out at you," Lissauer told Light. reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah.'"Īccording to producer John Lissauer, the dramatic, synth-heavy original recording of "Hallelujah" was "gonna be the breakthrough" on Various Positions.
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Though he'd composed some 80 verses over the course of five years or so, according to Light, he whittled the song down to four for the final studio recording.Ĭohen has always been ambiguous about what his "Hallelujah," with its sexual scenery and its religious symbolism, truly "meant." "This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled," Cohen has said. Leonard Cohen's original appeared in 1984 as the first track on the second side of his album Various Positions. Light reverentially details every stage in the evolution-and along the way, he reveals the compelling stories behind some of its most iconic interpretations. "Hallelujah" has metamorphosed over the years from a cheesy, reverb-heavy B-side oddity on an album Cohen's label rejected to a mystical, soul-stirring pop canticle that's played today at just as many weddings as funerals. So when an obscure Leonard Cohen song from 1984 was resurrected in the '90s, then repurposed and reinvented by other artists so many times it became a latter-day secular hymn-well, that was kind of like a pop-music unicorn sighting.Īlan Light's new book The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah" traces the bizarre cultural history of that very unicorn: "Hallelujah," a song that lay dormant in Cohen's vast repertoire for more than a decade before its popularity surged up again with a posthumous Jeff Buckley single. If You Listen Closely, Taylor Swift Is Kind of Like Leonard Cohen
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