FEATURE:
Groovelines
IN THIS PHOTO: Jeff Buckley during the Grace shoot, Arcadia Studios, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Merri Cyr
Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah
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I do not include…
many cover versions in Groovelines. There is a special reason why I want to focus on Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Not only is it a definitive and beautiful reading of a song that, upon its original release, was not as adored and raved about as Buckley’s version. Included on Cohen’s 1984 album, Various Positions, it is still a brilliant song. Those incredible and vivid lyrics. Poetic and timeless. I think that Jeff Buckley brought something special from the song. His celebration of the orgasm, as he said. Cohen’s original version is deep-voiced and a little plodding. Not as evocative and hymnal as Buckley’s rendition. Of course, Buckley’s vocal was partly inspired by John Cale. His version of the song was included on the 1991 album, I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen. Hearing this tribute album, Buckley saw new potential in Hallelujah. A song he must have known about originally, John Cale definitely inspired him to tackle Hallelujah. Buckley’s version remains the finest and definitive version. It is sad how the song was murdered and drained of any beauty and meaning but endless cover versions! The overwrought and horrible versions that are comfortably into double figures. I hear buskers sing the song in London and it is always horribly over-dramatic and irritating. St. Vincent recently said how American Idol cover versions of the song were the “worst thing in the world”. She has a point! Artists have seen how people responded to Jeff Buckley’s version of felt compelled to have a go. Not that you can distil or eradicate the moving version Buckley performed. I just hope artists stop covering it, as it has been done too much and nobody will match Buckley’s take. All the ghastly and needless covers will not change the fact!
Another reason to focus on Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah is that the album it is from, Grace, turns thirty soon. Even though it was released in the U.S. on 23rd August, it was released in Europe the week before. So, on 15th August, we mark thirty years of Grace. You do get occasions where promising original songs are given new life and meaning by other artists. Doing something to the song that the author could not imagine. Buckley did that with Hallelujah. Taking Leonard Cohen’s perfect words and adding the needed tenderness and passion to the piece, we see this song in a different light. If Leonard Cohen’s original vocal was about the complexities of life and called for something more grave or darker, there is this sense of light and beauty from Buckley’s reading. Sadly, again, the version is overused on T.V. and film. Used almost as a sad and death song. Deployed when characters are dying or dead. It has never suggested itself as being about that. I am not sure why people think it is appropriate in that context! It goes to show that producers and filmmakers really need to learn what the song is about; what Jeff Buckley’s rendition is about and not lazily and incorrectly think it is this sombre and depressing. Listen to Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah and you will find so much more than that. I want to bring in a few features about Buckley’s cover of Hallelujah. Far Out Magazine took us inside the cover in 2020:
“Hallelujah’ is a definitive rarity for its ability to make people feel and truly emote in a way that other songs can’t. Buckley’s Gen-X crowds were often rowdy throughout his sets and he always used to make sure to leave this track until last. As soon as he sang the first note of ‘Hallelujah’, you could hear a pin drop as the audience was silenced by the emotion emitted from the stage. Cohen’s version has the ability to stop someone dead in their tracks and, although Buckley tackled the song from a different perspective, he manages to make listeners feel the very same raw emotions as the legendary Canadian does with his version.
Leonard Cohen later explained the meaning behind the song whilst leaving it open to interpretation in his trademark poetic fashion: “Hallelujah is a Hebrew word which means ‘Glory to the Lord,” he explained. “The song explains that many kinds of Hallelujahs do exist. I say: All the perfect and broken Hallelujahs have an equal value. It’s a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion.”
Whereas Buckley interpreted the lyrics in his own way, the late singer referred to his voluptuous rendition of the track as being a homage to “the hallelujah of the orgasm.” He explained in a Dutch magazine OOR: “Whoever listens carefully to ‘Hallelujah’ will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth.
“The hallelujah is not a homage to a worshipped person, idol or god, but the hallelujah of the orgasm. It’s an ode to life and love,” he added. Buckley also admitted to hoping that Cohen wouldn’t get to hear his version in case he was upset at his interpretation of the classic.
Buckley’s close friend Glen Hansard, who moved to New York with the singer, praised his friend’s effort to The Atlantic, stating: “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.” It was this transition which saw Buckley’s version of the track be counted as a true masterpiece and, at the very least, on a level footing with the original, if not better”.
Prior to coming to a feature from Classic Rock, I want to introduce this feature. They write how the potential of Hallelujah was not really seen and explored until Jeff Buckley covered it. Grace, sadly, an album many did not discover until after his death in 1997. An artist well ahead of his time. It is a shame that Buckley was never really as embraced, understood and celebrated in his life as he should have been. Hallelujah gained a whole new lease after Buckley died. As I say, it has been covered so many times. Used and played far and wide. Perhaps one of the greatest cover versions of all time:
“The most famous cover song on Grace (and probably Jeff Buckley’s most well-known song overall) opens up side two of the record, giving the backing band a break and putting the spotlight solely on Buckley’s voice and electric guitar. The song itself probably needs no introduction – it’s easily one of the best ever written, with its iconic opening lines (“I heard there was a secret chord/That David played, and it pleased the Lord/But you don’t really care for music, do ya?”) and its swaying melody being immediately recognizable along with its simple but effective one-word chorus. If you didn’t know this from Leonard Cohen’s original or John Cale‘s cover from 1991 (which directly inspired Buckley’s version), then you might be one of those folks like me who first heard it in the movie Shrek (which used Cale’s version in the actual film, even though Rufus Wainwright‘s version appears on the soundtrack album). Or else you heard someone attempt it on a reality singing show or cover it in concert. Suffice to say, it’s one of those songs that has reached near-total cultural saturation by now, to the point where it’s becoming a bit of a cliché to cover it.
While Buckley’s version helped to popularize the song, it’s notable that his version is quite stark in comparison to Cohen’s original, given the complete lack of accompaniment that allows his watery guitar chords to ring out against a backdrop of utter silence. There are several seconds before, between, and after the verses where he deviates from the rhythm entirely and just sort of noodles on his guitar and croons a bit, giving it the feel of a stripped-down live performance. (I don’t know this for sure, but it seems like the sort of thing that might have been recorded in a single take.) This track runs for nearly seven minutes as a result, yet none of it seems wasted, because Buckley is so utterly lost in the moment that it’s hard not to get swept up in the sheer passion of his performance. I’m sure many essays have been written on the possible interpretations of this song, which uses different characters from the Bible as analogies for a present-day relationship that is utterly broken, recasting the central refrain in more of a context of crying out to God in the midst of grief and helplessness, rather than the usual “praise the Lord”-type context you might hear in Christian music. I think that’s what makes the song so striking to such a wide variety of listeners, regardless of their own religious or non-religious inclinations. There’s no way I’d ever come up with anything innovative to say about it, but I know I’ve loved it from the first time I heard it, and it’s easy to see why Buckley’s version (along with Cale’s) is now seen as definitive.
Grade: A+”.
I am going to end with a feature from Classic Rock. I did not know that there have been hundreds of covers of Hallelujah. It is both touching and depressing. What I really love is that people can recognise Jeff Buckley’s version. How it has and will never be bettered. Even though the endless string of covers has been a bit annoying and needless, you have to concentre on the oriignal version and Jeff Buckley’s cover:
“But in the end only two versions really matter: the original, on its writer Leonard Cohen’s Various Positions album of 1984, that gave the song life, and Jeff Buckley’s spellbinding one-man tour de force, released a decade later on Grace. Both still force all else into the background.
Hallelujah was obviously an itch to scratch for Cohen, who drafted 80-some verses and tortured himself over the lyrics, famously sitting in his underwear at New York’s Royalton Hotel, notebook in hand, banging his head on the floor.
It paid off. Up to a point. While the Hallelujah lyrics evolved with every tour, Cohen’s original studio version remains a powerful piece of writing, steeped in the scriptures and full of indelible lines (‘Your faith was strong but you needed proof/You saw her bathing on the roof/Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you’). But the track suffers, almost terminally, from its dated synth and dour lead vocal, further dwarfed by the gospel choir.
Buckley had a bolder plan. In early days, the singer-songwriter had made New York’s Sin-e club shiver with a reading that he said nodded to “the hallelujah of the orgasm”. And in late 1993, when Grace was recorded, he hammered home that sensual treatment (the track even begins with an audible sigh).
“Whoever listens closely to Hallelujah will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth,” Buckley once said. “It’s an ode to life and love.”
There was a little of the Cale version (from 1991’s I’m Your Fan) here, but whereas the Velvet Underground man had led with the piano, Buckley elevated the song with a showcase of solo electric guitar, starting out rich, sad and slow, then blossoming into a shimmering instrumental passage that stopped all the clocks.
“I hope Leonard doesn’t hear it,” he once said – but that could only have been to spare the older songwriter the ignominy of hearing his own song perfected and wrestled away from him.
Released between grunge and Britrock, Buckley’s Hallelujah seemed a fragile anomaly, too good for this world. So too, it transpired, was Buckley. By the time the 30-year-old’s body was dredged from the choppy waters of Tennessee’s Wolf River in May 1997, the song had taken on an almost unbearable poignancy.
“There’s a spiritual quality in Hallelujah that touches people,” Buckley’s one-time collaborator Gary Lucas once told this writer. “There’s a holy quality in that song. But it’s like they said about Sinatra: Jeff could have sung the phone book and made it sound great”.
On 15th August, it will be thirty years since the sensational Grace was released in Europe. It came to the U.S. on 23rd August. I wanted to spend some time with Hallelujah. Perhaps the centrepiece and focal point of Grace, it has this huge power and meaning today. I don’t see it as sad and maudlin. It is this celebration and incredible stirring song, performed with such beauty and, yes, grace! No matter how many people – from the streets to studios – tackle Hallelujah, nobody will ever come remotely close to matching. Jeff Buckley’s version. It buckles the knees and makes the heart stop. Surely one of the most astonishing cover…
EVER committed to tape.