When it’s 95 degrees and a million percent humidity, the only thing to love about the NYC subway system may be that inescapable space it gives you to read all the articles in the week’s New Yorker. I probably would have skipped Sasha Frere-Jones’s piece on Leonard Cohen (“State of Grace,” 9/24/09), and missed out on the chance to revisit some favorite tunes and pick up some Cohen wisdom. But it was still 30 minutes to Brooklyn and comfortably cool in the car, and so I settled in.
On Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah,” for instance, the verse melodies ascend, and the open-throated singing transforms the chorus into a kind of earnest incantation that the songwriter probably wouldn’t attempt himself. Cohen may sing about transcendence, but he seems never to fully endorse it.
Later, I dug around in the virtual cupboard and played some tracks once committed to well-worn mix tapes. For a moment I was 19 again, and then suddenly I felt so very much older.
“Cohen may sing about transcendence, but he seems never to fully endorse it.”
So Buckley is the naive waif and Cohen the cool cynical old fart? Please.
This song means a lot to me personally so I hope you’ll indulge me…
I got to see Jeff Buckley live twice up close and personal at the Howlin’ Wolf in New Orleans. I literally knocked on friends’ doors as soon as I heard he was coming to town telling them “You HAVE to hear this singer!!!”
He did Hallelujah at the first of the two shows. In performance, Buckley always improvised according to the vibe of the crowd and how he himself was feeling on any given night. I heard him change one line from Hallelujah to “I used to live with Leonard before I knew ya…” injecting a brief bit of humor and artistic self depreciation into the performance. There are many ways to sing each line of that song.
Apparently, Jeff comped together performances from several vocal takes to create the version of Hallelujah you hear on Grace. I think his live CDs (and bootlegs) are the place to go though to get some idea of how incredible a singer he was. His band was incredible too, they just tore it up at both shows.
I LOVE Leonard’s recorded version of Hallelujah and his live performance of the song on his recent Live in London DVD. Cohen brings SO much to his songs. There’s a sexual and spiritual component to his performances that isn’t cheap, fake, or adolescent. His lyrics are so literate, sad, and funny – it’s almost painful for me to listen to the lyrics of Hallelujah, you know what I mean? Like Buckley, he’s an incredible singer. Totally different, but not in the way Sasha describes…
Sorry to comment on two posts in one morning, but I saw Leonard Cohen at Oakland’s Paramount Theater last May. I have to agree with the commenter above about the sexual and spiritual component of the performance. I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat with my mouth open and tears streaming down my face for more of the show that I’d like to admit. It was oddly and profoundly transcendent for me. Also, in all my years of seeing live performances, I have never experienced a performer convey such profound gratitude to the audience or to his fellow performers. The emphasis in that sentence is on the word “convey” because his gratitude was just incredibly palpable.
Hmm, maybe I read it too fast, but I didn’t get that Sasha was trashing on Buckley’s versions at all. The comparison left me with interesting thoughts, not of a supremely this is this and that is that variety, just as something to ponder over. Maybe it all struck me a particular way because even though I heard a couple Buckley bootlegs and was entranced by the myriad ways he got to Hallelujah, it was still a few years before I heard Cohen sing it and understood the ways his delivery carried you to yet another end point.
That all said, I was mostly intrigued with the range of powerful interpretations the song has received (anyone know how it fared in TV competition?). That’s not something I typically get into very deeply in discussions of pop music, and I’d like to do it more often.