The Holy or the Broken - book about Hallelujah by Alan Light

[John Etherington]

Alan Light says "If Leonard Cohen was the author of “Hallelujah” and John Cale was its editor, Jeff Buckley was the song’s ultimate performer".

Nonsense! Leonard was the author and ultimate performer, John Cale's was the first and best cover version, and Jeff Buckley's an acceptable and poignant interpretation.

[MaryB]

The more I listen to Jeff Buckley's version, the less I like it.

[ilion]

I find I really like what Amanda Palmer says (which is unusual). I'm not sure "technical" is exactly the description I'd give it, but I think I see what she means.

Nothing tops hearing Leonard perform it live.

[sturgess66]

Article in NYDailyNews -
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_ ... -5-web.jpg

New book 'The Holy or the Broken' examines how Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' became a much-performed classic
It was originally on an album Cohen's record company didn't want to release, but Jeff Buckley's beautiful version in 1994 made it famous

By Jim Farber / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, December 3, 2012, 6:00 AM


Leonard Cohen first recorded “Hallelujah” in 1984 for the album “Various Positions.”
Photo - Debra L. Rothenberg


“The Holy or the Broken” is a new book about Leonard Cohen's song “Hallelujah.”

Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” was the one that actually inspired the multitude to follow.

How could someone write an entire book about a single song?

Not only has author Alan Light done just that, he actually got someone to publish it.

Of course, the song in question, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” has become one of the most performed and beloved compositions in contemporary life, standing as either a classic or a public menace, depending on your point of view.

There are enough points of view on the song — as well as a sufficient number of twists in its trajectory — to turn Light’s book into a combination mystery tale, detective story, pop critique and sacred psalm of its own.

“The Holy or the Broken” (Atria Books, $25), out Tuesday, tells the strange, contradictory and often beautiful story of a song originally rejected by its record company in the ’80s. The tune snaked through a tortuous series of improbabilities to become both a modern standard and a secular religious touchstone.

Along its path to greatness, “Hallelujah” has been sung by everyone from vocal masters (k.d. lang) to pop hacks (Jon Bon Jovi), from opera stars (Renee Fleming) to “American Idol” contestants (Lee DeWyze).

The song has even been sung for a cartoon character (Shrek) — to great commercial effect.

Author Light properly identifies three key conduits for the piece:

• Cohen, who wrote and first recorded the song in 1984 for an album his record company initially refused to release.

• John Cale, the ex-Velvet Underground member, whose 1991 version on a tribute album to Cohen inspired the recording most people have come to know.

• That would be the transcendent take by Jeff Buckley, which appeared on his 1994 debut, “Grace.”That last version has proven so poignant, many think that Buckley, not Cohen, penned the piece.

Light does a scholarly and insightful job of analyzing the key versions, not only in terms of their performance but also through their use of different lines and verses among Cohen’s original lyrics. By each singer’s delivery, and their editing choices, the song can be wry (Cohen), reverent (Cale) or even erotic (Buckley).

It’s the mixture of all those things that makes “Hallelujah” not just rare and brilliant, but a deeply strange choice for many of the singers who’ve blindly mouthed it.

You’d think the difficulty of the song’s lyric alone would place it off-limits to many stars. Most songs so frequently, and fervently, performed have a sentimental core, not to mention a clarity and singularity of purpose. Witness classics from “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to “Let It Be” to “Imagine.”

“Hallelujah” offers none of those things. It embraces faith and blasphemy, intellectual elevation and raw sexuality. There’s both doubt and fealty in it, along with enough shifting points of view and enigmas to baffle the multitudes uncomfortable with the complexities of poetry.

Yet, as author Light points out, the openness of the song made ituncommonly malleable. “There's no wrong way to sing ‘Hallelujah,’” he concludes.

Not on paper anyway. Anyone who has flinched through Susan Boyle’s take may argue otherwise. Also, the song’s ubiquity has made some want to issue a fatwa against anybody who would dare warble it again.

Even Cohen himself wanted to call a time-out on the thing at one point, though he has, since, come to be at peace with its many incarnations. It doesn’t hurt that “Hallelujah” has handsomely rewarded his bank account. No doubt it’s partially responsible for Cohen’s late-in-life ascent as a concert draw.

At 78, the bard has become a far bigger star on the stage than he ever was before. This month Cohen will headline both Madison Square Garden (Dec. 18) and the Barclays Center (Dec. 20).

No doubt he’ll perform “Hallelujah” at both, and it’s no wonder. It’s a song of both surrender and snark, a simultaneous anthem and admission, blessed with a power that has become as deeply embedded in our DNA as the title itself.

jfarber@nydailynews.com

[John Etherington]

One thing that mystifies me is who this book is actually aimed at, apart from a few obsessives and priests. I suspect most people will just want listen to their preferred version - be it Jon Bon Jovi or Shrek! Incidentally, I would say that Jeff Buckley's version is more ethereal than erotic.

[sturgess66]

From Rolling Stone -
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ ... n-20121203

Exclusive Book Excerpt: Leonard Cohen Writes 'Hallelujah' in 'The Holy or the Broken'
The story behind the folk legend's most famous song


JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

December 3, 2012 4:40 PM ET

Leonard Cohen's career had reached a low point when he wrote "Hallelujah." It was 1984, and he had been out of the spotlight for quite a long time. His 1977 LP, Death of a Ladies' Man, a collaboration with Phil Spector, was a commercial and critical disappointment, and his next album Recent Songs fared no better. When Cohen submitted the songs for his subsequent LP, Various Positions, to Columbia, label execs didn't hear "Hallelujah," the opening song of Side Two, as anything special. They didn't even want to release the album, though it eventually came out in Europe in 1984 and America the following year.

Q&A: Leonard Cohen on His New Tour and 'Old Ideas'

It took a few years for "Hallelujah" to emerge as a classic. Bob Dylan was one of the first to recognize its brilliance, playing it at a couple of shows in 1988. The Velvet Underground's John Cale tackled it on the piano for a 1991 Cohen tribute disc, and three years later, Jeff Buckley took inspiration from that rendition and covered it on his 1994 album, Grace. It was that version that eventually created a huge cult around the song, and it's since been covered by everybody from Bono to Bon Jovi. It's far and away Leonard Cohen's most famous composition, even though many people don't even realize that he wrote it.

Alan Light dove deep into the history of the song for his new book, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of 'Hallelujah.' Here is an excerpt.

****

In June 1984, Cohen and Lissauer recorded the album that would become Various Positions in New York's Quadrasonic Sound studios. In the album's arrangements, for the first time on Cohen's recordings, synthesizers were prominent; they would come to define his sound more and more in the years to come. A group of musicians from Tulsa provided the backbone of the arrangements. Sid McGinnis – who joined the band at Late Night with David Letterman that same year and has remained with the show ever since, in addition to recording with the likes of Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Dire Straits – provided additional guitar parts.

Jennifer Warnes, who had sung backup with Cohen on previous albums and tours, was brought further into the spotlight as a featured vocalist, a counterpoint to the limited parameters of Cohen's voice. Hawaiian-born Anjani Thomas was one of the backup singers on these sessions; she would go on to become Cohen's longtime companion, and he produced an album of her singing his songs, Blue Alert, in 2006.

Lissauer, a Yale graduate who has gone on to a successful career scoring films, beamed when he spoke of these sessions that took place almost thirty years earlier. Seated in the larger of the two studio rooms he operates from his thirty-five-acre farm about an hour north of Manhattan, he described working on Various Positions as pure pleasure. "I've never had a more rewarding experience," he said. "It was so much fun; we had a great time. Leonard and I got along so well it's almost scary. There were no roadblocks, no disasters; it was great start to finish – it was high art, it was just thrilling."

The songs included several of Cohen's most lasting compositions. The selections that ultimately opened and closed the album, "Dance Me to the End of Love" and "If It Be Your Will," stand among his best-loved work.

Midway through the sessions – Lissauer can't remember the precise sequence, but it wasn't near the beginning or the end – Cohen brought in "Hallelujah" to record. Whatever torment he'd been going through with the song's lyrics over the previous months and years, he showed no sign of confusion or indecision in the studio. "I think it was as it was," said the producer. "There was no 'Should we do this verse?' – I don't think there was even a question of the order of verses, any 'Which should come first?' And had he had a question about it, I think he would've resolved it himself.

"He's not one to share his struggles," Lissauer continued. "If he wasn't up to recording, if he was still working on something, then we just wouldn't go in. But he'd never go in and act out the tormented, struggling artist."

Leanne Ungar, who engineered Various Positions and has remained part of Cohen's production team ever since, said that there was a pragmatic reason he would not have been experimenting with lyrics during the recording. "He wouldn't bring extra verses to the studio because of time pressure," she said. "The meter is running there." It seems that the breakthrough in Cohen's editing – the vision that allowed him to bring the eighty written verses down to the four that he ultimately recorded – was reaching a decision about how much to foreground the religious element of the song. "It had references to the Bible in it, although these references became more and more remote as the song went from the beginning to the end," he once said. "Finally I understood that it was not necessary to refer to the Bible anymore. And I rewrote this song; this is the 'secular' 'Hallelujah.' "

"Hallelujah" as it exists on Various Positions is both opaque and direct. Each verse ends with the word that gives the song its title, which is then repeated four times, giving the song its signature prayer-like incantation. The word hallelujah has slightly different implications in the Old and New Testaments. In the Hebrew Bible, it is a compound word, from hallelu, meaning "to praise joyously," and yah, a shortened form of the unspoken name of God. So this "hallelujah" is an active imperative, an instruction to the listener or congregation to sing tribute to the Lord.

In the Christian tradition, "hallelujah" is a word of praise rather than a direction to offer praise – which became the more common colloquial use of the word as an expression of joy or relief, a synonym for "Praise the Lord," rather than a prompting to action. The most dramatic use of "hallelujah" in the New Testament is as the keynote of the song sung by the great multitude in heaven in Revelation, celebrating God's triumph over the Whore of Babylon.

Cohen's song begins with an image of the Bible's musically identified King David, recounting the heroic harpist's "secret chord," with its special spiritual power ("And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took a harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him" – 1 Samuel 16:23). It was his musicianship that first earned David a spot in the royal court, the first step toward his rise to power and uniting the Jewish people.

"As a student of the sound, I understood the resonances of his incantation and invocation of David," said Bono, who added that he immediately responded to the "vaingloriousness and hubris" of the lyric. "I've thought a lot about David in my life. He was a harp player, and the first God heckler – as well as shouting praises to God, he was also shouting admonishment. 'Why hast thou forsaken me?' That's the beginning of the blues."

But this first verse almost instantly undercuts its own solemnity; after offering such an inspiring image in the opening lines, Cohen remembers whom he's speaking to, and reminds his listener that "you don't really care for music, do you?"

"One of the funny things about 'Hallelujah,' " said Bill Flanagan, "is that it's got this profound opening couplet about King David, and then immediately it has this Woody Allen–type line of, 'You don't really care for music, do you?' I remember it striking me the first time I heard the song as being really funny in a Philip Roth, exasperated kind of way – 'I built this beautiful thing, but the girl only cares about the guy with a nice car.' "

Cohen then describes, quite literally, the harmonic progression of the verse: "It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth / the minor fall, the major lift." This is an explanation of the song's structure (the basic chord progression of most pop and blues songs goes from the "one" chord, the root, up three steps to the "four," then up another to the "five," and then resolves back to the "one"), followed by a reference to the conventional contrast between a major (happy) key and a minor (sad) key. He ends the first verse with "the baffled king composing Hallelujah!" – a comment on the unknowable nature of artistic creation, or of romantic love, or both. In the song's earliest moments, he has placed us in a time of ancient legend, and peeled back the spiritual power of music and art to reveal the concrete components, reducing even literal musical royalty to the role of simple craftsman.

The second verse of "Hallelujah" shifts to the second person – "Your faith was strong but you needed proof." Apparently the narrator is now addressing the character who was described in the first verse, since the next lines invoke another incident in the David story, when the king discovers and is tempted by Bathsheba. ("And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king's house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon" – 2 Samuel 11:2.)

In a July 2011 service at St. Paul's Presbyterian Church in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, the reading of this story was accompanied by a performance of "Hallelujah." The Reverend Dr. R. M. A. "Sandy" Scott delivered a sermon with his explication of the David story and its usage in the song.

"The story of David and Bathsheba is about the abuse of power in the name of lust, which leads to murder, intrigue, and brokenness," said Reverend Scott. He recounted that until this point, David had been a brave and gifted leader, but that he now "began to believe his own propaganda – he did what critics predicted, he began to take what he wanted."

Reverend Scott calls the choice of the word baffled to describe this David "an obvious understatement on Cohen's part. David is God's chosen one, the righteous king who would rule Israel as God's servant. The great King David becomes no more than a baffled king when he starts to live for himself.

"But even after the drama, the grasping, conniving, sinful King David is still Israel's greatest poet, warrior and hope," Scott continued. "There is so much brokenness in David's life, only God can redeem and reconcile this complicated personality. That is why the baffled and wounded David lifts up to God a painful hallelujah."

Following the David and Bathsheba reference, the sexuality of the lyrics is drawn further forward and then reinforced in an image of torture and lust taken from the story of Samson and Delilah – "She tied you to a kitchen chair / she broke your throne, she cut your hair" – before resolving with a vision of sexual release: "and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah!" Both biblical heroes are brought down to earth, and risk surrendering their authority, because of the allure of forbidden love. Even for larger-than-life figures and leaders of nations, the greatest physical pleasure can lead to disaster.

"The power of David and the strength of Samson are cut away; the two are stripped of their facile certainties, and their promising lives topple into the dust," wrote Reverend Thomas G. Casey, S.J., a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University, of these first two verses. "The man who composed songs of praise with such aplomb and the man whose strength was the envy of all now find themselves in a stark and barren place."

Lisle Dalton, an associate professor of religious studies at Hartwick College, noted the many levels on which Cohen's linking of David and Samson works. "Both are heroes that are undone by misbegotten relationships with women. Both are adulterers. Both are poets – Samson breaks into verse right after smiting the Philistines. Both repent and seek divine favor after their transgressions.

"I don't know a lot about Cohen's personal life," Dalton continued, "but he seems to be blending these two figures together with, we presume, some of his own experiences. There's no 'kitchen chair' in the Bible! There's a biblical irony that highlights the tendency of even the most heroic characters to suffer a reversal of fortunes, even destruction, because they cannot overcome their sinful natures. The related tendency, and the moral message, is for the character to seek some kind of atonement."

In the third verse of "Hallelujah," Cohen's deadpan wit returns, offering a rebuttal to the religious challenge presented in the previous lines. "You say I took the Name in vain," he sings. "I don't even know the name." He then builds to the song's central premise – the value, even the necessity of the song of praise in the face of confusion, doubt, or dread. "There's a blaze of light in every word; / it doesn't matter which you heard, / the holy, or the broken Hallelujah!"

"A blaze of light in every word." That's an amazing line. Every word, holy or broken – this is the fulcrum of the song as Cohen first wrote it. Like our forefathers, and the Bible heroes who formed the foundation of Western ethics and principles, we will be hurt, tested, and challenged. Love will break our hearts, music will offer solace that we may or may not hear, we will be faced with joy and with pain. But Cohen is telling us, without resorting to sentimentality, not to surrender to despair or nihilism. Critics may have fixated on the gloom and doom of his lyrics, but this is his offering of hope and perseverance in the face of a cruel world. Holy or broken, there is still hallelujah.

Finally, the remarkable fourth verse drives this point home, starting with an all-too-human shrug: "I did my best; it wasn't much." Cohen reinforces his fallibility, his limits, but also his good intentions, singing, "I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you."

And as he brings the song to a conclusion, Cohen shows that for a composition that has often come to be considered a signifier of sorrowful resistance, "Hallelujah" was in fact inspired by a more positive feeling. "It's a rather joyous song," Cohen said when Various Positions was released. "I like very much the last verse – 'And even though it all went wrong, / I'll stand before the Lord of Song / with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!' " (While the published lyrics read "nothing on my lips," Cohen has actually almost always sung "nothing on my tongue" in this line.) Though subsequent interpreters didn't always retain this verse, its significance to Cohen has never waned: Decades later, when he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, he recited this full last verse as the bulk of his acceptance speech.

"I wanted to push the Hallelujah deep into the secular world, into the ordinary world," he once said. "The Hallelujah, the David's Hallelujah, was still a religious song. So I wanted to indicate that Hallelujah can come out of things that have nothing to do with religion."

"He's rescued the word hallelujah from being just a religious word," said the Right Reverend Nick Baines, Bishop of Croydon, in the BBC radio documentary. "We're broken human beings, all of us, so stop pretending, and we can all use the word hallelujah because what it comes from is being open and transparent before God and the world and saying, 'This is how it is, mate.' "

In the New Yorker, Leon Wieseltier would refer to the song as "a wryer sort of contemporary psalm with an unforgettable chorus." As Salman Rushdie would many years later, he also noted that "only Cohen would rhyme 'Hallelujah' with 'what's it to ya?' " In fact, every verse is built around the central not-quite-rhyme of "you" and "Hallelujah," as if the pronunciation of "you" that's necessary is a recurrent punch line built into the rhythm of the song. ("They are really false rhymes," Cohen has said, "but they are close enough that the ear is not violated.")

"I always picked up on at least two levels that Leonard's lyrics worked on," said Lissauer. "The obvious, the sexual undertones of so many of his things, and the alienation and loneliness that's often there. Plus, he was able to find unusual ways to talk about subjects that are not unusual. 'Hallelujah' had this unstoppable focus to it, and I knew right away that it was a cornerstone in his career.

Though almost everyone immediately concentrates on Cohen's lyrics, of course we wouldn't still be talking about "Hallelujah" without its simple yet unforgettable melody. It sways, gentle but propulsive, a barely perceptible waltz rhythm adding complexity to a singsongy lilt. "I might have contributed a little bit in that department," said Lissauer with a grin. "You can hear that it's not like a lot of things Leonard's ever done. He had a little help with the chords and the direction of the melody – we had worked together before and gotten comfortable doing that. But it's his song, I've always made that clear. And when we started to get the voicings and the chords and the melody, then it became blessed."

For some of the inheritors of "Hallelujah," it is explicitly the melody that speaks most strongly. Jake Shimabukuro is a young, Hawaiian-born ukulele virtuoso. He has built a huge online following through such mind-blowing, fleet-fingered performances as solo uke arrangements of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"; Guitar Player magazine called him "the Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele." But one of the highlights of his live show, and one of his more popular YouTube clips, is a simple, direct instrumental rendition of "Hallelujah."

"To me, it's not about the lyrics at all," said Shimabukuro. "I really think that it has a lot to do with the chord progression in the song. There are these very simple lines that are constantly happening . . ." and though we were seated in the restaurant of a midtown Manhattan hotel, he had to stop to get his ukulele out of its case and demonstrate.

As he ran through the song's chords, he said, "What I like about it is it picks me up. It's very uplifting, and I think it's the way that the melody moves, the way that the chords move. This is the line that made me want to cover this song on ukulele" – he played the melody for the second half of the verse, like the lines "It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth / the minor fall, the major lift; / the baffled king composing Hallelujah!" – "that ascending line just does something to me internally that makes me feel good. You're just playing the scale going up, that's all it is, but there's something about that combination of notes . . ."

"The way the melody is structured is quite genius," said David Miller of the popular classical crossover group Il Divo. "It builds, it lifts, then there's always the one word coming back down. It's almost like sex – it builds, it builds, there's that moment, and then the afterglow. To go on that journey, the whole thing taken as an experience, is wonderful."

As for the sound of Cohen's "Hallelujah" recording, producer Lissauer had a clear vision of his own. He had written the arrangement and the orchestration, and those didn't change after they got into the studio. "It was effortless to record; it almost recorded itself," he said. "The great records usually do. The ones that you have to go and beat to death and get clever and do this and that, somehow they just don't have that flow."

Though the song potentially lent itself to a grand, anthemic treatment, and a note on the actual score indicates that the musicians were to perform the song in a gospel style, the producer wanted to hold it back. The drummer, Richard Crooks, played with brushes, not sticks; "we had to get strength without bashing," Lissauer said. The producer felt that a regular bass wasn't a big enough sound to match Cohen's vocals, low even by his usual standards, so he crafted a synthesizer bass part.

"We didn't want it to be huge," said Lissauer. "I didn't want to have a big gospel choir and strings and all that kind of stuff, so even when it got large it always had restraint to it. We decided to do this modified choir that was not gospel, not children; it was just sort of a people choir. We brought everyone in – the band came and sang, my ex-wife came and sang, I sang on it. In a way we were trying to get it to be a community choir sound, very humble.

"We didn't go for overpowering, hit-record-making strings and key changes, or any of the things that would've tweaked it. It got its strength from its sincerity and its focus. We just wanted it to be sort of everyman. And I still stand by that being what it was about – it wasn't about slickness or a gospel-y hallelujah; it was about the real hallelujah."

While this may have seemed like a simple undertaking to the album's producer, to Leanne Ungar, the recording engineer, this approach presented its own complications. "I think John knew just how special it was, because he took such care and extra time with every aspect of the arrangement and mix," she said. "For me, that song was a real struggle. I remember Leonard kept asking me to put more and more reverb on his voice. I love hearing the texture of his unadorned voice and I didn't want to do it. So I've never liked listening back to that recording, because I don't like the solution I arrived at.

"I remember wanting John to replace the synthesized guitar with a real one," she went on. "I also remember wishing we could record a large choir instead of layers of small groups. We wanted the song to keep growing bigger and bigger each chorus, but there are limitations of dynamic range on a recording, so the mix was very challenging."

Between the choir, the '80s-era synthesizer, and Cohen's studied performance, the studio "Hallelujah" is certainly dramatic, though, as with many of his recordings, it flirts with cheesiness. The production hits the goals it was aiming for, but there's a scope, a theatricality to the arrangement that puts it at a bit of a distance – as is often the case, Cohen's work feels a bit sui generis, something that a listener either gets or doesn't, and going back to this original recording, it's difficult to hear what would make the song connect to a universal audience.

For all of its elements, the most striking aspect of the original "Hallelujah" recording, beyond the lyrics, is Leonard Cohen's own vocal performance. Such lines as "I don't even know the name" or "I did my best; it wasn't much" are delivered with a wry, weary humor, creating a real tension between the verses and the soaring, one-word chorus. Those who know the song only through the covers that followed, many of which don't include this section, would be surprised by the additional complexities in the original. The singing creates the sense of struggle, conflict, and resignation that then pays off in the song's climactic, closing lines.

"This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled," Cohen has said, "but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah.' That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say, 'Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.'…

"The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say, 'Look, I don't understand a fucking thing at all – Hallelujah!' That's the only moment that we live here fully as human beings."

They finished recording the song, and the rest of the Various Positions album. "I said, 'Man, we're on top of this, this is really going to do it,' " John Lissauer recalled. " 'This is gonna be the breakthrough, this record is really going to be important.' 'Hallelujah' just jumped out at you, plus there was a lot of other great stuff on the album.

"And it went to Walter Yetnikoff, who was the president of CBS Records, and he said, 'What is this? This isn't pop music. We're not releasing it. This is a disaster.' "

Famous and infamous, music industry legend Yetnikoff had risen from the label's legal department to run the company, which he did from 1975 to 1990. His career (which is documented in Fredric Dannen's definitive study of the record business, Hit Men, and in his own freewheeling auto biography, Howling at the Moon) was marked by such earth shattering triumphs as Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., alongside a litany of accusations and allegations about his shady cohorts and abrasive style.

As Cohen recounted the story, when Yetnikoff told him that he was rejecting Various Positions, he said, "Leonard, we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good."

Lissauer suggests that perhaps the executives at Columbia (a division of CBS; soon to become part of the Sony Corporation) were expecting something more pop-oriented, based on the early reports from the sessions. "The '80s was an awful period for real, artistic singer-songwriters," he said. "The '70s had everything from Paul Simon's solo stuff, James Taylor, Joni, even Randy Newman. But the '80s was all bands and MTV, and Yetnikoff might actually have been looking for a way to weed out the Leonards of the world."

Ungar believes that the rejection of the album was less strategic than that. "I think it was the usual reason – they didn't hear a single."

Many years later, in a 2009 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company about the ongoing success of "Hallelujah," Cohen was sanguine about Columbia's decision. "There are certain ironic and amusing sidebars," he said, "because the record that it came from . . . Sony wouldn't put it out, they didn't think it was good enough. It had songs like 'Dance Me to the End of Love,' 'Hallelujah,' 'If It Be Your Will' – but it wasn't considered good enough for the American market. So there's a certain mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart."

But without the benefit of hindsight, consider Walter Yetnikoff's position. In September 1984, Leonard Cohen would turn fifty. Each of his last three albums – covering a time span that reached back a full decade – had sold less than its predecessor, even in the scattered countries around the world where he did have a following. He had never placed an album in the U.S. Top Ten.

Meanwhile, as Cohen was in the studio recording Various Positions, the summer of 1984 was perhaps the biggest season in the history of the record business. Over the course of a few months, Prince's Purple Rain, Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., and Madonna's Like a Virgin were all released, and each went on to sell over ten million copies. Michael Jackson's game-changing Thriller was still riding high on the charts, more than a year after it first came out. Since its launch in 1981, MTV had become the dominant force in pop music marketing, with a reach and an impact unlike anything the industry had seen before, and now the world's biggest superstars had figured out how to take advantage of the exposure and opportunities that it offered.

There could be no arguing that record sales had become very big business, and were getting bigger by the day. Stakes were high. And against that backdrop, it's not hard to imagine that a record company might have had a difficult time knowing what to do with a middle-aged artist, of an elite but very limited stature, at this precise moment in music history. It's perhaps even more difficult to see a label executive being able to hear clearly enough to believe that the simple song with the Bible stories and the one-word chorus might go on to some success of its own. And, to be honest, while the synthesizer sounds were considered state-of-the-art in 1984, they weren't edgy enough to win over younger listeners, and they soon sounded somewhat dated.

Various Positions was released overseas, and two months after CBS passed on it, the independent label PVC Records put it out in the U.S., at the end of 1984. (Columbia would later buy back the rights to the album when it rereleased Cohen's catalogue on compact disc.) But still, once the album reached the public, hardly anyone seemed to notice "Hallelujah," the first song on the LP's second side. Don Shewey's album review in Rolling Stone didn't mention the song, though it noted the album's "surprising country & western flavor" and singled out "John Lissauer's lucid and beautiful production."

Lissauer had never even seen that review until I sent it to him after our interview. In fact, he had no idea that Various Positions had actually been released in the U.S. until four or five years after it happened. When Cohen's manager at the time, Marty Machat, broke the news to the producer that the record had been turned down, he said that it wasn't worth bothering to execute their contract – and so, to this day, Lissauer has never seen a single cent in royalties for his work on "Hallelujah," about which he seems curiously at peace. "I still survive, everything is fine," he said, "but it would be nice to actually get royalties for an album with the most-recorded song in fifty years on it."

The experience essentially ended Lissauer's producing career. Baffled by the label's response to a project that he felt so positive about, he switched gears and turned to making music for films, which he feels has all turned out for the best. But he does express regret that the outcome of the Various Positions saga effectively meant the end of his relationship with Cohen.

"Once they went out on tour and then we got word that the record was a non-record, I didn't see him for fifteen years," he said. "I think we were both so embarrassed. I felt horrible. I felt like I'd ruined his career."

Excerpted from the book The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of 'Hallelujah' by Alan Light with permission from Atria/Simon & Schuster, out December 4th.

[jarkko]

http://seattletimes.com/html/entertainm ... lujah.html

Book traces odd journey of Cohen's song
It's hard to think of any song that has taken a stranger journey through popular culture than Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."
By DAVID BAUDER
Associated Press

NEW YORK —
It's hard to think of any song that has taken a stranger journey through popular culture than Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

Recorded in 1984, it was on the only Cohen album rejected by his record company. Virtually no one noticed when the song did come out on an independent label. Since then, through dozens of cover versions, high-profile performances and appearances on TV or movie soundtracks, "Hallelujah" has become a modern standard.

Author Alan Light reflected upon that while at Yom Kippur services in Manhattan two years ago, as he saw congregants in tears when the choir sang "Hallelujah." His curiosity led him to write "The Holy or the Broken," about the song's trajectory, about Cohen and about its most celebrated singer, the late Jeff Buckley. The book is out Tuesday.

"At a time when everything has fragmented so dramatically, it's sort of heartening to see that this song can connect as universally as it did," Light said.

Cohen labored over "Hallelujah," filling a notebook with some 80 verses before recording. The song has Biblical references, but Cohen's stated goal was to give a nonreligious context to hallelujah, an expression of praise. Some of those hallelujah moments are clearly sexual, given a lyric like "she tied you to a kitchen chair ... and from your lips she drew the hallelujah." The author's droll humor is present throughout in lines like "you don't really care for music, do you?"
Musically (and Cohen's lyrics even describe the melody), the verses build slowly to a release in the chorus, which is simply the title word repeated four times.

Cohen saw his composition as joyous, yet its placement on "ER," "The West Wing," "House" and many other TV and movie soundtracks has become a nearly universal signal of a sad moment. It is played at weddings, funerals, school concerts and all manner of religious services, the chorus lifting it into the realm of the spiritual.

The song's malleability is one key to its success, Light said. Cohen recorded four verses but sent several more to John Cale when Cale recorded "Hallelujah" for a 1991 tribute album. Seven were published in Cohen's 1993 book of lyrics and poetry. Verses can be dropped or given greater emphasis depending on the interpreter. And most everyone knows "Hallelujah" from an interpreter, from Buckley to Bono, from k.d. lang to Susan Boyle, to seemingly half the contestants in TV music competitions.

That sets it apart from other modern standards, like "Imagine" or "Bridge Over Troubled Water," where greatness was apparent almost instantly and the original recording remains the definitive version.
Buckley's recording was a milestone; half Cohen's age when he made it, Buckley's take was more romantic and yearning than the reflective original. The song's inclusion on the "Shrek" soundtrack, its repeated replaying on VH1 after the 2001 terrorist attacks and 2010 versions by lang at the Winter Olympics and Justin Timberlake at a telethon for Haitian earthquake relief were other key moments for its visibility.

Light can't recall when he first heard it. His favorite version is by Cohen in concert at the 2009 Coachella festival, easily found on YouTube.

Credit one of the world's greatest living songwriters for first recognizing the potential of "Hallelujah." Bob Dylan performed it twice in concert during the mid-1980s, once in Cohen's native Canada.
"They're not very good but are heartfelt in a certain way," Light said. "I'm sure hardly anybody at the time who heard Dylan sing it knew what it was."

In writing a book on a single song, Light joins a very specific and small category of literature. Other notable examples include Dave Marsh's book on "Louie Louie," Robert Harwood's on "St. James Infirmary" and Ted Anthony's on "House of the Rising Sun" (Anthony is an Associated Press employee).

There is always a bigger story to tell. Harwood said that in writing about a song, an author must explain the environment in which the song appeared and how the song grew, changed and metamorphosed.
"That sort of information is more likely to have been discarded when it comes to popular culture than, say, if it was a historic political moment," Harwood said. "... In the end, though, popular culture is the story of our times."
Veteran music industry chronicler Light's recognition of the times in which "Hallelujah" first appeared play into him giving a pass to Columbia Records executives for rejecting the song. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Prince were at their peaks and selling boatloads of albums in 1984.

Cohen, then a 50-year-old singer-songwriter whose sales were steadily fading, would not have been a priority.
"At the time, they were just trying to print up enough copies of `Born in the USA' to keep up with demand," Light said.

One of Light's key interviews came late, when Bono agreed to speak about U2's little-known version. Light had just finished a draft of the book where he talks about the recording not being particularly good.
"What if he says how proud of it he is and I have to rework the whole thing?" he said.

That quickly proved not a problem: "The first thing he said on the phone was `I forgot what I said when I agreed to do this interview and then I remembered. It was to apologize to everybody.'"
Cohen gave Light his blessing to write the book, which helped open the door for some interviews, but didn't participate himself. He rarely does interviews anyway and has already spoken publicly a few times about the song's creation, and Light isn't sure how much more he'd have to say.

The author may be as mystified as anyone about the song's journey and not interested in disturbing the mystique.

[lizzytysh]

After I've ready Sylvie's book, then good, bad, or otherwise [the book or the fact that I'll put money out for it], I'll get and read this one.
With this exquisite song appearing to have become a bit of a thorn in Leonard's side, for the massive number of covers and uber exposure it's gotten as a result, I like that someone has addressed its ascent, with all the twists and turns, in writing. It has quickly become a classic, and I like that Leonard is able to see how seriously the world and the writer [and history?] have taken it. Who knows but what something may be revealed in the book of which Leonard was previously unaware. I'm going to withhold judgement as to whether the writer was opportunistic in seizing the [obvious?] chance. As for me, I wouldn't have thought to write a book about this grand song. So, until I read the book, I'll go with the writer's having believed the song deserved in-depth coverage of it and went for it.

I always wish that people wouldn't interrupt the solemnity of Leonard's recitation of A Thousand Kisses Deep with his layered lyric regarding men being handled like meat. Then, I remind myself... "Well... he's the one who wrote it [;) so, it's his own damn fault ] ~ surely, with his dry sense of humour and wit, he wasn't oblivious to the potential for laughter at that point and has chosen not to omit or alter it, despite the guaranteed laughter it now brings."
Likewise, I think of Leonard's intense effort to create the perfect song of "Hallelujah" ~ so would anyone find it surprizing [really?] that this song should command being explored further, as to how we've all come to know and love and continue to share it with others?

[musicmania]

Went looking for this in Toronto today and can't find it. Not amused.

[sturgess66]

Went looking for this in Toronto today and can't find it. Not amused.

Gwen - it's available at Indigo in the Eaton Centre - 220 Yonge Street - (416)591-3622
Or - Chapters - 20 Edward Street - (416)977-7009

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Hol ... kwsec=Home

[musicmania]

Thanks. Was told that at the concert last night and got it today. The plan is to try and sleep on the flight home but if not I'll read this.

[cohenadmirer]

Thanks. Was told that at the concert last night and got it today. The plan is to try and sleep on the flight home but if not I'll read this.

Hope you slept a little .Was nice to meet you in montreal

[Joe Way]

Yahoo news picked up the article from Rolling Stone and I stumbled across it while perusing their headlines. I always love when that happens, it is as if the world has recognized just a bit of my secret life. I always hope that someone else will also stumble upon it, read it, become curious about Leonard and end up a fan much as I did so many years ago.

I will also say that the portions that are quoted, particularly the interviews from everyone from John Lissauer to Bono are quite well done. The author seems to have a good perspective on what makes this such an extraordinary song and his use of the observations of others about it seems quite effective. While the idea of a whole book about one song was puzzling, this seems promising. I would no doubt have purchased the book regardless, but I now have hopes that it will be more than just a curiosity.

Joe

[musicmania]

I started reading it at Heathrow while I awaited my flight and the first thing I noticed I'd that like you say Joe it is well quoted. Looking forward to finishing it.

[sturgess66]

From JSOnline -
http://www.jsonline.com/entertainment/a ... 80391.html

Author Joins Chorus Praising, Analyzing Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah'

By Jim Higgins of the Journal Sentinel
Dec. 8, 2012 4:08 p.m.

Leonard Cohen has written many excellent songs: "Suzanne," "Bird on the Wire," "Who by Fire," "Dance Me to the End of Love," "Everybody Knows," "The Future," the recent "Going Home," to name a few. But "Hallelujah" has achieved escape velocity. As Alan Light chronicles in his richly detailed study of the song's long, strange trip to prominence, it has become a pop standard, a soundtrack staple and a vehicle for vocal pyrotechnics - pretty amusing when you consider how limited (if effective) a singer Cohen himself is.

In my mind, Cohen's only songwriting peer is Bob Dylan and, like Dylan, the Canadian singer is nearly always the best interpreter of his own work, no matter how many other singers record it. But both men have occasionally had a song elevated by an interpreter. Jimi Hendrix transformed Dylan's scruffy "All Along the Watchtower" from "John Wesley Harding" into an apocalyptic guitar anthem, influencing even the way Dylan would later play it (listen to Dylan and the Band's revised version on "Before the Flood").

Light credits performances of "Hallelujah" by John Cale and especially the late Jeff Buckley with resurrecting the song and making it the fixture it is today.

With its intricate braiding of the sacred and the erotic - the biblical David and Samson are invoked in two of the verses - "Hallelujah" is open-ended enough for many interpretations, by singers and listeners both. Singer k.d. lang's mother told her that her octogenarian friends loved the song, to lang's astonishment: Did the women listen to the lyrics about orgasm and being tied to a chair? Her mom replied that they just listen to the refrain. "Something as simple as saying 'hallelujah' over and over again, really beautifully, can redeem all the verses," lang concluded.

"Hallelujah" began its recorded life inauspiciously, on Cohen's 1984 album "Various Positions," which Columbia Records initially rejected; it was first released on an indie label. Cohen had worked on the lyrics for years, having written a reported 80 verses. (Cohen did not talk to Light directly for this book, but didn't oppose it.)

For a song that so eloquently invokes music itself, with the "secret chord" David played for the Lord, the "Various Positions" arrangement sounds overdone to me. Underneath the synthesizer and backing choir was a simple, beautiful melody; Light quotes ukulele star Jake Shimanbukuro, among others, as pointing to the melody as the source of the song's real power.

The first singer to liberate "Hallelujah" from potential obscurity was Dylan, who sang it twice on his 1988 tour and praised it. For an "Austin City Limits" taping, Light writes, Cohen sang it with a different combination of lyrics that made the song more carnal and bitter.

Cohen's star rose with his 1988 album "I'm Your Man." For the 1991 tribute album "I'm Your Fan," John Cale sang a solo piano version of "Hallelujah," selecting and editing Cohen's verses into a version that, in Light's words, "forever transformed the possibilities for this strange, elusive song."

If Cale was the song's editor, Light writes, the late Jeff Buckley was the song's ultimate performer. Buckley's short, dazzling career before his accidental death was so interwoven with the song that many listeners assumed that he wrote it. Light also sees a generational difference in approaches, with the older Cohen and Cale singing with voices of hard-earned wisdom, while Buckley delivered a youthful, lustful yearning.

"Hallelujah" showed up in films and on soundtracks, notably Cale's version in the animated film "Shrek," bringing the song to millions of listeners. The "Shrek" soundtrack recording, though, for business reasons, featured a Rufus Wainwright version that also become popular.

In the wake of Sept. 11, Buckley's version was used in a video of World Trade Center footage that played constantly on VH1. After 2001, Light writes, the song was established as the definitive representation of sadness for a new generation, as its use in "The West Wing," "Scrubs" and "The O.C." demonstrated.

The ultimate sign of the song's ubiquity? Its frequent appearance in "American Idol" and other TV singing competitions, in the United States and overseas. Light gives a complimentary nod to Jason Castro's 2008 performance on "Idol," describing it as "almost shockingly clean amid the overwrought melismas of most 'Idol' singers."

The "Idol" performances, some as short as 90 seconds, build support for Light's thesis that the flexibility of "Hallelujah" has made it an enduring favorite: "Since its best-known version was already a cover, and the song's author himself altered the lyrics almost immediately after recording it, it was somehow understood the words were never truly considered fixed or set in stone. With Cohen's tacit approval, and Buckley not around to object, verses could be cut, lyrics could be changed, with no real sense of betraying the song's meaning."