Do you feel a personal connection to the song “Hallelujah”? I certainly do, and to judge from Alan Light’s book The Holy or the Broken, so do millions of people all over the world.
Light is a longtime music journalist, former editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin magazines, contributor to The New York Times and Rolling Stone and author of some books including one about the Beastie Boys, and is co-author of Gregg Allmann’s memoir. In this book he deftly tracks down the genealogy of this odd song that is now a staple of film and television, “reality TV” singing contests, funerals, weddings and Olympic opening ceremonies. How did this song full of biblical and sexual imagery, dark irony and wry humor come to mean all things to all people?
It’s a good question, fascinating for a music nerd like me (and probably you if you’re reading this). Cohen was an obscure 50-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter when he recorded the album it was on, Various Positions, in 1984. He’d had a brief brush with popularity when Judy Collins recorded his “Suzanne,” and had sold a few albums through the 1970s. But his sales had been flagging, and in 1984, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was still high in the charts a year after its release, while Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. and Madonna’s Like a Virgin and Prince’s Purple Rain were hot new releases. Sony/Columbia declined to release the album. It came out on an obscure indie label, although Columbia bought it back when it began to release Cohen’s catalog on CD a few years later. But there “Hallelujah” sat, and hardly anybody noticed it.
It’s resurrection began in 1991 when former Velvet Underground member John Cale sang it, accompanied only by his own piano, on a Cohen tribute called I’m Your Fan. That’s where I encountered it, drawn to the record by Cohen’s name – I remembered “Suzanne,” and a former girlfriend had been a big Cohen fan – but mostly by the cover art, which was a detail of a picture by famous old-school New York photojournalist Weegie. It was the last song on the album and clearly the best. I’d never heard the song before and was floored by it: the words, the tune, the stark arrangement, Cale’s even more stark vocal, all of which enhanced the layers of deeply ironic yet deeply reverent meaning in the song. It almost immediately became one of my favorite songs of all time.
Not very many people heard Cale’s cover, but one who did was Jeff Buckley, angelic-voiced young singer and son of ’60s folk icon Tim Buckley. Jeff did his own cover of Cale’s cover, which (greatly simplifying here) gained greatly in popularity when the young singer died in a tragic accident just as his career appeared to be taking off. The placement of Cale’s version in the first Shrek movie and of Rufus Wainwright’s on the movie’s soundtrack album gave it a further boost into pop culture consciousness.
Light does a steady job of tracing the song’s now seemingly inevitable rise from obscurity to ubiquity through a series of coincidences, accidents, blind luck and astute decisions on the part of singers, producers, film-makers and more. Through judicious editing and good pacing, he kept me eagerly turning all but a handful of the book’s 230-some pages. I felt it bogged down a bit when it reached the point that the song was being sung repeatedely on “American Idol” and similar shows, but that could simply reflect my lack of interest in those programs.
All in all, Light succeeds in persuading you that the story of this song is an extremely rare one, and that its popularity says something encouraging about the human heart and its capacity to be moved to tears by a fortuitous combination of words and music, even if they’re accompanied by images of a cartoon ogre.
(Atria, 2012)
