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See return policy for details. See the return policy for complete information. More to consider. From the manufacturer Loading, please wait Show more. Write a review. Get top deals, latest trends, and more. Email address. Sign up. About Target Careers. Email Signup. Target Brands. So when an obscure Leonard Cohen song from was resurrected in the '90s, then repurposed and reinvented by other artists so many times it became a latter-day secular hymn—well, that was kind of like a pop-music unicorn sighting.
Alan Light's new book The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah" traces the bizarre cultural history of that very unicorn: "Hallelujah," a song that lay dormant in Cohen's vast repertoire for more than a decade before its popularity surged up again with a posthumous Jeff Buckley single. Light reverentially details every stage in the evolution—and along the way, he reveals the compelling stories behind some of its most iconic interpretations.
Leonard Cohen's original appeared in as the first track on the second side of his album Various Positions. Though he'd composed some 80 verses over the course of five years or so, according to Light, he whittled the song down to four for the final studio recording. Cohen has always been ambiguous about what his "Hallelujah," with its sexual scenery and its religious symbolism, truly "meant. According to producer John Lissauer, the dramatic, synth-heavy original recording of "Hallelujah" was "gonna be the breakthrough" on Various Positions.
This isn't pop music. We're not releasing it. This is a disaster. Thus, "Hallelujah" wasn't even heard in the United States until Various Positions was released by another label. And even then, it failed to make an impression on the radio or the charts, where year-old Cohen was competing against the likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna. Jeff Buckley , a hungry young singer-songwriter from California, first heard "Hallelujah" on a Leonard Cohen tribute album he discovered in a friend's home while cat-sitting in Brooklyn in He began performing the song regularly in New York's East Village clubs, and called it "a hallelujah to the orgasm Buckley's close friend Glen Hansard—who went on to win an Oscar in for his song "Falling Slowly," from Once —had moved to New York with him, and described Buckley's rendition of "Hallelujah" as a loving critique of Cohen's somewhat stoic original: "He gave us the version we hoped Leonard would emote, and he wasn't afraid to sing it with absolute reverence.
Jeff sang it back to Leonard as a love song to what he achieved, and in doing so, Jeff made it his own. Buckley's rendition made it onto his only full-length album, 's Grace.
The song and the album went largely unnoticed until —when both took on a new, haunting significance after Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River in Tennessee. For a Leonard Cohen tribute collection called Tower of Song , U2's lead singer Bono took advantage of the opportunity to record one of his favorite then-underappreciated Cohen compositions. The U2 frontman went a counterintuitive direction with it, enlisting the help of a Scottish remixer named Howie B. 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.
It got its strength from its sincerity and its focus. We just wanted it to be sort of everyman. I remember Leonard kept asking me to put more and more reverb on his voice. 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.
Blessed is the name. They finished recording the song, and the rest of the Various Positions album. This is a disaster. 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. Ungar believes that the rejection of the album was less strategic than that. In September , 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. Top Ten. Meanwhile, as Cohen was in the studio recording Various Positions, the summer of was perhaps the biggestseason in the history of the record business.
There could be no arguing that record sales had become very big business, and were getting bigger by the day. Stakes were high. 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. But he does express regret that the outcome of the Various Positions saga effectively meant the end of his relationship with Cohen.
I felt horrible. Watch here.
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