Hallelujah
- Þorkell Daníel Jónsson
- Nov 4, 2021
- 3 min read
Music and Lyrics: Leonard Cohen
Hallelujah is by far Leonard Cohen's best-known song. It was first released in 1984 on Choens' album Various Positions. The song attracted little attention, and even the publishing company that published Cohen's work thought little of it, so little that it didn't want to release it. Despite that, the song went on the album but it attracted little attention. Some people did though notice it and one of them was Bob Dylan who performed the song occasionally in concert, for the first time in 1988. John Cale of the Velvet Underground made the first cover of the song in 1991 after hearing it in concert with Cohen. That cover drew a bit more attention than Cohen's version. Jeff Buckley then heard Cole's cover and made his own. That cover went to his album, Grace, which sadly became his first and only. This version drew some attention but not immediately. It wasn't until after 2001 after it was used in the animated film Shrek, that the song got wings. Since then, an incredible number of artists have made covers of the song. Over 300 covers of the song are known and numerous well-known artists have made a cover of it. Buckley's version is the best-known.
Leonard Cohen was an educated literary scholar, poet and writer. He only started making music to earn some money for his livelihood. Nobody makes a proper living being a poet. Therefore it´s no wonder he took his time writing the lyrics. He, of course, wanted his lyrics to have some depth and significance. There is a story of a meeting with Bob Dylan in a Coffee house in Paris. Cohen told Dylan that it took him two years to write the lyrics to the song Hallelujah. That was a lie. He must have been ashamed of how long it took because the truth is that it took him five years. Dylan on the other hand boasted that it took him only fifteen minutes to write the lyrics for his song I and I. Another story says Cohen was sitting in a hotel room at the Royalton Hotel in New York desperately tapping his head on the floor as he was writing the lyrics. Apparently, he drafted eighty verses before the final outcome. In fact, there was no final result because he didn't always use the same verses when performing the song in concert.
Many of Choen's texts contain references to the Bible, and in Hallelujah there are several. However, the text must not be understood as being religious because that is not the purpose of the references at all. My understanding of the lyrics is that Hallelujah is primarily about love, loss, and how love can change and fade over time. The religious references are a brilliant way to shed light on the complex and often difficult human emotions that arise when it comes to love. The Hebrew word hallelujah is a religious word meaning praise to the Lord, but in the lyrics of the song, this is not necessarily the meaning. Cohen himself said in an interview that there could be other meanings to the word.
I got to know Cohen´s work years ago when I was struggling to learn a plucked accompaniment to Suzanne, another song that many artists have performed. Judy Collings was the first to perform it but then Cohen put the song on his own album, Songs of Leonard Cohen in 1967. The only other sons by Cohen I knew at the time were Dance to the End of Love and First We Take Manhattan. The song Hallelujah didn't really attract my attention until some colleagues at the school I worked in decided to form a band to accompany the students when they sang “friends songs” at the Day against Bullying in the school. One of the songs, was Hallelujah but with Icelandic lyrics. To my surprise I found a recording of this. You can see it here: https://vimeo.com/53948103 The song Hallelujah starts at 4.44 minutes.
I have always wanted to be able to arrange songs for fingerstyle guitar. To acquire these skills, you need to practice the art so I decided to find a song to arrange. I decided on the song Fire and Rain by James Taylor but for some reason, I ended up arranging the song, Hallelujah. The arrangement is of course very simple since I´m not very skilled in the art. I usually play the song in G major so I can hum along.
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