The baffled king composing Hallelujah? It turns out it was Leonard Cohen.
Start here: From The Atlantic Monthly, How Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah Became Everybody’s Hallelujah. That article is an overview of a new book by Alan Light, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of Hallelujah.
My thinking is that books and articles about a song are as fulfilling as a index-card-box full of recipes is to dinner, as enthrallingly satisfying as a sex manual. Fortunately, both articles present embedded YouTube videos of striking covers of Hallelujah.
But I’m guilty, too. I’ve written about Hallelujah myself, specifically about the different versions of the song Cohen has recorded over the years, and how those versions were combined into the canonical Jeff Buckley rendition on the Grace album.
Leonard Cohen recorded two very different versions of this song at different phases of his career. The first is very reverent, almost aloof. The second is almost clinically sexual. Buckley combined these two sets (more…)
