Everyone has a special place in their heart for the late Leonard Cohen – from his 80-something contemporaries to middle-aged musos to teenage girls.
The last – quite unusual for an artiste of Cohen’s generation, especially one so apparently glum, uncommercial and downbeat – is largely thanks to his composition ‘Hallelujah’, which was what Alexandra Burke sang to win the X-Factor final in 2008. It was memorably covered for Generation X by the doomed Jeff Buckley in an angelic rendition on his 1994 album Grace. Oh and also it appears in a very sad moving scene in Shrek.
And it’s not even Cohen’s best song. Cohen himself thought little of it when it trickled out on his 1984 album, Various Positions. His career was going through a low patch: in fact his label, Columbia, didn’t even want to release the LP. Since then though the song has been covered 500 times by everyone from Dylan to Bono and John Cale, to the point where Cohen actually began pleading not to hear it done again.
Like a lot of Cohen’s work it’s simultaneously deep and very accessible, mystical and yet grounded.
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