Leonard Cohen lives in the verse. I firmly believe that he’ll continue to do so infinitely. And his greatest song — the part gospel, part personal Hallelujah — has more than 150 of these verses, ones that were once elusive to the musician. And it took him many a breakdown (he reportedly banged his head against the floor in his underwear at New York’s Royaltan Hotel), commercial disappointments, absolute rock bottom, depression and about seven years to put together the spare yet profound piece, Hallelujah (which is Hebrew for ‘praise the lord’).
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The result of those knotted years, the song rolled together love and loss, faith and chaos, melancholy and rapture in its warm hands and lighted up something unknown every time one heard this “modern prayer”. Being agnostic has never mattered with Hallelujah. It manages to get into the crevices of the being from one or the other point of view. The fact that this song was rejected for not being good enough and inadequate when it came to salability, is a thought that still remains vexatious and unfathomable. Walter Yetnikoff of Columbia Records famously told Cohen, “Leonard, we know you’re great, we just don’t know if you’re any good.”
Emmy-winning directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s tribute documentary, Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen: A Song, A Journey, keeps rejection of what became an iconic piece, as the mid-point to the before and after of the song while calibrating the life and times of a rare artiste, who was a passionate writer, an unenthusiastic popstar, who fought a lonely battle with his own self to deliver songwriting that’s worthy of every possible hall of fame. It also maps the journey of a little-known song finding collective ownership among people of the world through the intensely personal journeys of other artistes.
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Geller and Goldfine quickly take us through Cohen’s affluent and conservative Jewish upbringing in Montreal, being awed by the Torah, his passion for writing poetry and how he turned musician quite late, at 30, and brought out his first record, Songs of Leonard Cohen (Columbia Records) at 33. They put on display the witty, warm, intelligent, fun Cohen and quickly go over the tumultuous bits, not delving into much of the inner strife and its reasons that led to Hallelujah or shaped Cohen’s life in general. The most candid statement about Cohen, in fact, comes from singer-songwriter Judy Collins, “I knew dangerous when I saw it,” she says in the film.
The narrative is also steered by journalist Larry Sloman, and Cohen’s long-time love interest and French photographer Dominique Issermann, about whom Cohen says in an interview: “I never knew love till I was 50”. The line sticks. He’d met Isserman in Greece then.
There are musicians such as Brandi Carlile, Regina Spektar, Eric Church, Sharon Robinson and Rufus Wainright speaking about their respective relationship with the song, besides John Lissauer who arranged the original Hallelujah, after being ghosted for eight years by Cohen. Paired with archival footage comprising interviews and concert footage, the film is a compelling watch for Cohen fans.
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The rejection of Various Positions, the album that held Hallelujah on Side B, by Columbia Records led to a quiet release in America under a non-descript label, Passport Records in 1985. The album failed to even be a blip on the charts. As the story goes, it was the other troubadour Bob Dylan, seven years Cohen’s junior, who first covered Hallelujah. Famously enough, when Dylan asked Cohen how long he took to write his Hallelujah, Cohen lied and said two years because seven seemed a bit much to admit. Dylan said it took him 15 minutes to write his pieces. He was kidding, of course, Sloman points out in the film.
While Dylan’s version remained in his shows, it was John Cale’s pared-down Hallelujah with a piano, which had the song noticed years later. But it was Jeff Buckley’s version along a guitar in 1994 that was to “elevate the plateau of visibility for that song to the rest of the world in a more popular vein”. The song was also covered by U2, Aretha Franklin, R.E.M., Trisha Yearwood, and Elton John, among others. From weddings to funerals to Presidential inaugurals, the documentary successfully captures the arc of the song that is “symbolist”, as Issermann puts it, “a bird that is flying in a room and sometimes touching the walls of the culture”.
The film also records the last few years of Cohen, when he began touring again, the highpoint of his career. He always closed with Hallelujah — the sublime ballad going way beyond the concept of god, “which is now its own person,” as Carlile says in the film, which continues to live and thrive as a secular anthem, even years after Cohen’s death in 2016 at 82. Ironically, Cohen never knew where it came from. “If I knew where songs came from, I’d go there more often,” he’d say.
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Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen: A Journey, A Song
Rating: 3.5/5
Directors: Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine
Streaming on: Bookmyshow Stream
