Leonard Cohen: "Hallelujah"

I won’t spend too many words on this, because I think it’s safe to say songs like “Hallelujah” have their own life, and whatever I say now will just be a glimpse of what this song means to me at this moment in time.

For a while I was of the opinion that the original “Hallelujah” wasn’t as good as Jeff Buckley’s. Perhaps Buckley had more control over his own voice, and thus could hit that “secret chord” better than Cohen himself. For whatever reason, hearing him do it now, on Live in London, my position has changed. Maybe Cohen has finally grown into the song he wrote decades ago, perhaps the point was not to hit the “secret chord” but to sing about it in humble acceptance of one’s own limitations. When I hear “it’s not somebody who’s seen the light” now, I think of his reflection on being a monk in an interview with The Globe and Mail: “A monastery is rehab for people who have been traumatized, hurt, destroyed, maimed by daily life that they simply couldn’t master.”

Just think how irrelevant Cohen would be now if he had as perfect a voice as all those people who covered this song over the years.