Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen on Hallelujah

I love this song, nearly every version of it. In this article, Leonard Cohen talks about the song's meaning, sounding like the Zen priest that he is - awesome! Read all the way to the end - that's where the good stuff is to be found.

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen on Hallelujah

There has been a lot said about Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' ... some of it by me. But here is what the man himself thinks.

'I can't finish this song': Leonard Cohen

Cohen on his approach to composing:

"There are two schools of songwriting. The quick and me."

On the writing of Hallelujah

"The only advice I have for young songwriters is that if you stick with a song long enough, it will yield. But long enough is not any fixed duration, its not a week or two, its not a month or two, its not necessarily even a year or two. If a song is to yield you might have to stay with it for years and years. 'Hallelujah' was at least five years. I have about 80 verses. I just took verses out of the many that established some sort of coherence. The trouble that I find is that I have to finish the verse before I can discard it. So that lengthens the process considerably.

"I filled two notebooks with the song, and I remember being on the floor of the Royalton Hotel, on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor and saying, "I can't finish this song."

Asked why Hallelujah took so many years to write

"They all take quite a long time. And its no guarantee of their excellence. I have a lot of second rate songs that have taken even longer."

On Hallelujah's elastic rhymes

"They are really false rhymes but they are close enough that the ear is not violated. In English, we love to hear these coincidence that we call rhymes. It does delight us for some odd reason, we are delighted by inventive uses of sonic coincidences"

On Hallelujah's universal appeal

"I don't know. It has a good chorus. We basically all lead the same kind of lives, and the more authentically a song touches on those areas, which is gain and loss, surrender and victory, popular music has to be about those subjects.

On the meaning of Hallelujah

"Finally there's no conflict between things, finally everything is reconciled but not where we live. This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled 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.' And you can't reconcile it in any other way except in that position of total surrender, total affirmation.

"That's what it's all about. It says that none of this - you're not going to be able to work this thing out - you're not going to be able to set - this realm does not admit to revolution - there's no solution to this mess. 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 f***ing thing at all - Hallelujah!' That's the only moment that we live here fully as human beings."

And this post wouldn't be complete without a couple of different versions of the song.

Leonard Cohen Hallelujah Live


Jeff Buckely-Hallelujah


K.D. Lang sings Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah


"Hallelujah" by Rufus Wainwright (Irish performance)


Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen) - Allison Crowe live performance


John Cale - Hallelujah


Damien Rice - Hallelujah (Rock And Roll Hall of Fame)

Tags: Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, Music, Buddhism, culture, covers, Jeff Buckely, K.D. Lang, Rufus Wainwright, Allison Crowe, John Cale, Damien Rice