How ‘Hallelujah’ Became a Classic

R emember the chills you got when you first heard Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” way back in 1984? No, you don’t, because that version was forgettable, marred by chintzy synthesizers that undermined its frank rawness. Did you finally notice it when John Cale’s reworked version appeared on the 1991 tribute album, I’m Your Fan? Probably not. That didn’t take off, either. How about the famous Jeff Buckley cover, recorded in 1994? Even that version you may not have heard until years after its release.

The reason “Hallelujah” is one of the most revered songs of our time is because of a woman named Vicky Jenson. Jenson, an animator, loved Cale’s version when she was working on Shrek in 2001. So she removed what she calls “the naughty bits” (“She tied you to a kitchen chair”) and put the song in the kids’ movie. A generation of young people who loved Shrek started performing it on American Idol and other singing-contest shows, and a blowout version by The X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke hit the top of the UK charts in 2008, with Jeff Buckley’s more intimate version right behind it at number two.

The song keeps inserting itself at every conceivable reference point, from the sublime (Adam Sandler’s comical but moving rendition at the concert for victims of Superstorm Sandy in 2012) to the ridiculous (Kate McKinnon’s embarrassing tribute to the disastrous Hillary Clinton candidacy on Saturday Night Live in 2016). Today, “Hallelujah” is nearing the end of its life cycle as everyone’s favorite contemporary hymn, having become so overplayed it’s on the verge of becoming a joke. Even Cohen once said he thought people should stop singing it for a while.

It doesn’t take two hours to describe how “Hallelujah” became what it is, but the most fascinating parts of the documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song explain the song’s unique path to its current exalted position as the most beloved secular prayer. It was even featured at the memorial ceremony for the first 400,000 Covid victims in the final hours of the Trump administration.

Yet when Cohen originally recorded it for the album Various Positions in 1984, Columbia Records chief Walter Yetnikoff hated the entire L.P. so much that he refused to release it, and the song’s producer-arranger John Lissauer says that Columbia fired him in the process. In 2019, Lissauer was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for his role in creating the song.

Cohen spent years tinkering with the lyrics to “Hallelujah,” but it took a team effort to make it his magnum opus. Bob Dylan was one of the few artists who appreciated it from the beginning, and performed it on tour in the 1980s. Cale greatly improved it by stripping it down and making it a plaintive piano number, combining the original lyrics with the new secular and more sexual rewrite that Cohen was performing in the late Eighties. Buckley made Cale’s minimalist approach work brilliantly in his 1994 cover, further improving it with an angelic vocal that became a valediction when the singer drowned three years later. Buckley’s album Grace was a critically acclaimed flop, though, and the singer didn’t really become a name until his death. Cohen, meanwhile, was not helping advance either the song or his career, taking five years off to live in a Zen Buddhist monastery on California’s Mt. Baldy.

Directed by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, the documentary doesn’t provide a full picture of Cohen’s complicated life. Previous films, notably 2019’s Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love, did a better job delving into Cohen’s character. By contrast, the new film takes the tone of a worshipful celebrity-magazine profile, with talking heads heaping praise on the subject and avoiding unpleasant matters.

Still, as Alan Light laid out in the 2012 book that provided the blueprint for the movie, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah,” the song’s remarkably slow build finally delivered some measure of commercial justice for Cohen, who not inaccurately described himself as having a “marginal presence on the edge of the music scene for the last 30 years.”

After a financial manager cleaned out Cohen’s bank account in 2005 and he responded to financial pressure by re-dedicating himself to writing, recording, and touring at a pace previously alien to him, he discovered that he was now a universally adored figure. By 2010, he was more popular than ever, one of the highest-grossing acts on tour. His albums started hitting the top of the charts overseas. With his undertaker’s singing voice and his chilling lyrics, he had been a niche figure for his entire life, but few men are as triumphantly vindicated as he was in those final years. He released his last record two weeks before his death in 2016.

Though he was born in 1934, Cohen remains a man of our times. His gravity, his intensity and his earnestness remain appealing. But what created a deep sense of connection with his fans was how he combined humility — “I did my best, it wasn’t much” — with an open yearning for spiritual peace that took him from Judaism to the tangential doctrine of Kabbalah and then all the way up that mountain in pursuit of Zen enlightenment. Cohen was a wandering poet searching for answers, and many were glad to follow along on his journey.