Thanks to the likes of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, audiences were starting to expect artists to write the material they performed rather than playing songs written by others-the norm up to that time.
But he came to popular music just as the scene was undergoing a seismic shift. Though Cohen began his career as a poet and novelist, by the mid-’60s he’d turned his pen to the more lucrative work of songwriting, largely out of economic necessity. “Hallelujah” has become inescapable in large part because it doesn’t narrowly belong to anyone it belongs to us all. It’s a tale about the vagaries of recording history and the foolishness of industry suits, but it’s also about rediscovery and inspiration and reinvention. The new film Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song-inspired by a 2012 book by Alan Light-documents the record’s long, strange trip to ubiquity. And sitting in the middle of that albatross of an album-side two, track one-is one of the most frequently performed and recorded pop songs of the past half century.Īs any American Idol watcher or bar-karaoke singer knows, “Hallelujah” begins, “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord,” and for a time the universe seemed determined to keep all of the song’s chords a secret.
It opens with the sardonically gorgeous “Dance Me to the End of Love” and fades out on “If It Be Your Will,” which Cohen described as “an old prayer” that he was moved to rewrite. until 1990, features a handful of Cohen’s greatest songs. The album, which Columbia didn’t put out in the U.S. “But we don’t know if you’re any good.” Or as cartoonish execs say in the movies: I don’t hear a single. “Leonard, we know you’re great,” he said. That’s because it was included on Various Positions, Cohen’s seventh studio album for Columbia, which the head of the music division, Walter Yetnikoff, chose not to release in the U.S. “Hallelujah” would eventually join the pantheon of contemporary popular music at the time, though, the Canadian singer-songwriter may as well have dropped it off the end of a pier. In June 1984, at New York’s Quadrasonic Sound studios, Leonard Cohen laid down a song he’d spent years writing.
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