Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen

I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah...

One of the greatest popular-genre songs of the 20th century, as far as my knowledge of music goes. It's on my mind 'cause Scott recently requested this song as his funeral dirge for when he sheds this mortal coil. (This was thankfully just in a Facebook meme and not in a serious conversation about his death.) Scott's death is not something I want to think about; nevertheless, I don't regret the song being in my head.

The version knocking around in there is really kind of a pure, stripped down version, just really Cohen's voice and the voices of John Cale and Jeff Buckley intermingled. Cohen's original album version (above) is too churchy-sounding for me, but the vocals, and of course the lyrics, are indelible.



Cale's version is the archetype of most of the cover versions, in its more bare instrumentation and choice of lyrics (Cohen's drafts evidently filled several notebooks; he took a year to write the song.) Buckley took Cale's version, which appears on a 1991 Cohen tribute album, as his original source material.



Apparently there are more than 150 known covers, but I thought these would be sufficient for your listening pleasure.

Year (original): 1984 Rating: Luke Hot
Year (Cale): 1991 Rating: Hot!
Year (Buckley): 1994 Rating: Hot!