Which is your fav Hallelujah cover?

[Sophistikitten]

I don't own any Tim Buckley but I have listened to a handful of songs and have really enjoyed. Especially, "Song For Jainie" (is that what it was called?) and "I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain". I'm not really into downloading music but I once found an mp3 of Jeff doing "I Never Asked...". He sang the song at a church on the anniversary of Tim's passing. It's quite passionate and dark - and a bit eerie when you play both back to back. They have that simular sound in their voices. The show must have been something else. I've never been to the Commodore but heard many things about it!

If you are a fan of Tim, you might be interested in this book called "Dream Brother". It's a combined biography of both Tim and Jeff and how their lives were quite parallel. I didn't know much about Tim at the time so it was quite an interesting read.

[linda_lakeside]

Thanks SK - (if you don't mind the shortened version of your rather longish moniker).

I read quite a bit but I'm living in a rather small, unfortunate town, so books of a non-Harlequin nature are hard to come by. I don't mean it quite that literally but I don't think I'll find their bio's here. I will keep my eyes open, though. I was struck (just by their ages at death) that they followed similar paths. I think that's true of a lot of kids of the R&R crowd. Knowing nothing, really, of Jeff I've always wondered how old he was when Tim died and whether or not Tim took him on the road, etc. Anyway, there's this new invention - it's called a computer. Apparently if I put their names into a 'search engine', I'll probably get their life stories. Amazing isn't it? Maybe I'll try it. What a ninny I am! The book does sound interesting though. Tks for the tip. The tip of what? Oh, never mind. Most of the people I know slap me when I say things like that.

[Sophistikitten]

I think Jeff was either 27 or 28 when he died. I don't think Tim had much to do with Jeff's life so he didn't go on tour with him. I'm sure if you try out this new invention (the computer!) you will find all the facts you need!

Is there a library in your town? I don't know much about Williams Lake other than the fact that my friend was going to move there last year. I know back home in my small town, at the library they did inter-library loans...so you might want to check that out - see if they can order you up some good books from other libraries in BC. If you were in the same town, I'd lend you it!

Linda "SK"

[linda_lakeside]

Hi Linda SK,

A library! So many new inventions to discover! Why, yes, I believe I remember seeing a one-story, kind of flat-looking building. I'll check that out, as well.

As far as you lending me a book (if you had the right one) the trouble is, you'd probably never get it back. That's something else I'm usually slapped for.

See ya.

[linda_lakeside]

Hi Linda SK,

If your friend ever loses his/her mind again and says, "I think I'll move to Williams Lake". Please have them taken for immediate psychiatric counselling! This is a one horse town - so unless your friend shoes horses for a living...no fun.

[Sophistikitten]

Well, my friend was contemplating moving there because she wanted to train as a paramedic and she knew someone there who could get her into the programme no problem. I'm kind of glad she changed her mind and decided to enroll in Winnipeg's programme instead. She does like one horse towns though, oddly enough!

[linda_lakeside]

The reason they're probably training more paramedics here is that it is sooo very hard to stop your vehicle on glare ice when a drunk comes stumbling across the highway at you. Hey, who's saying nasty things about the place I've become a prisoner in?

[Sophistikitten]

You know, I come from a smaller city near Winnipeg - just under 10,000 folks from my hometown. We pretty much say the same things as you remarked, about the drunks. Ah, life in a small Canadian town.

Once I felt I was a prisoner in mine too, but you can't imagine how many moments I have where I wish I could be in that small town peace and quiet and fresh air again!

[linda_lakeside]

Hi Linda SK:

Well, it seems you did it the other way 'round. I started in Vancouver (how I miss the rain!) and moved to this more rural area. I suppose all our small Canadian towns are similar.

One thing that's become apparent since I've moved out of the city is just how much damage we've done to the enviornment. Once out of the city, the small things become much more obvious. Not to mention the thousands of logging trucks travelling (fully loaded) to and fro. B.C. is such a beautiful Province, I hope I'm dead when they finally drive it to complete ruin.

I've only been in Quebec once (on my way to Haitii I stayed at the hotel at Mirabel). So, I can hardly say I saw much of the Province. I did, however, see some of Montreal (very nice and bigger than I had thought). I was supposed to stay at that hotel (Mont Royale?) but by the time I got back from Haitii, I had one dollar in my pocket and a ticket to Toronto (the dollar came in handy for bus fare!). This was a few years back but I bet it hasn't changed much - except for the fact that Mirabel is no more (I don't think it is anyway).

Seems I'm taking up all your board time - small town Canadians sharing their sorrows! Even as I say this, the snow is piling up outside (that's part of a song and I can't remember which one!). So, Adieu for now.

~ Linda ~

[Byron]

linda at the watershed of song........when you enter Heaven, the first voice you'll hear is Jeff Buckley singing Hallelujah. nuff said.

[linda_lakeside]

Well, I'll be. I haven't see that Bear in quite a while. Hopefully, I'll hear the song before I meet St. Peter.

[Byron]

There has been a shifting in the mind-set of everybody on this forum since Boxing Day and I did not want to raise my head above the parapet, until we had all had time to come to terms with the enormity of our collective grief. I could only watch and sit, stunned, as the world was turned on its head before our disbelieving eyes.

[linda_lakeside]

Linda SK:

I was going to mention earlier in our discussion that you could do a lot worse than listening to old blues material. The cornerstone of R&R. I would add that my record (I mean Cd) collection also has much blues.

[linda_lakeside]

Byron, I understand completely. I don't think any of us (meaning the world at large) will be able to come to terms with the enormity of this tragedy.

[Adrian]

The Sunday Times (of London) just (yesterday) published this thought-piece on the enduring power of Hallelujah:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... _1,00.html

Hallelujah - a song that outgrew itself

January 09, 2005

The Sunday Times

Hallelujah!

One haunting ballad has been the soundtrack to many
lives recently. But why? Bryan Appleyard on Leonard Cohen's uber-song

Songs are everywhere. We buy them and play them, of
course, but we are also subjected to them in pubs, cafes, lifts and
shops. You see people in cars singing along to the radio, and on trains
they nod and rock to their MP3 players. Unthinkingly, we stroll along
humming the latest pop pap. A visiting alien might reasonably conclude
that we are sustained by songs rather than air, food or water. Songs are
thus the dominant expressive form of our time. Yet most of them barely
exist in our consciousness at all. Mass-produced drivel, they drift
around the charts for a week or two, insinuate themselves into some
particularly indiscriminating part of our brain for a while, and then
are gone. Some have an afterlife as instant mood music for television
shows, films or advertisements. But, by and large, songs are the
supremely disposable art form of our time.

The exceptions are obvious. A few songs or
performances are good enough to last, and some are just bad but
evocative, and are therefore continuously recycled. Abba's songs aren't
as good as everybody says they are, but they work in a way that makes
them eminently usable. Equally, almost any rubbish that struck it big in
the late 1960s can now be used to sell stuff to the moist-eyed
middle-aged, who have discovered, to their infinite sorrow, that they
were not, in the event, born to be wild.

All of which brings me to the story of one particular
song that seems, through some mysterious alchemy, to have done
everything a modern song can do. Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah has been
papped, drivelled, exploited and massacred. It has also produced some
very great performances, and it is, in truth, a very great song. In a
fundamental sense, at least partly intended by Cohen, it is a song about
the contemporary condition of song.

Even if you think you haven't heard it, I can
guarantee you have. It has been covered by, among many others, Allison
Crowe, kd lang, Damien Rice, Bono, Sheryl Crow and Kathryn Williams.
Bob Dylan has sung it live, a performance that has, apparently, been
bootlegged. It has been used in films and on television. Rufus
Wainwright sang it on the soundtrack of Shrek, Jeff Buckley's version
was used on The West Wing and The OC, John Cale sang it on Scrubs, and
so on. Cale's is the best version I have heard - pure, cold and scarcely
inflected at all, it sends shivers down the spine.

Other songs may have been covered more - in Cohen's
oeuvre, Suzanne, with 124 versions, and Bird on the Wire, with 78, come
out ahead of, at the last count, Hallelujah's 44. And other songs may
have made it onto more soundtracks. But there is something unique about
Hallelujah, something that tells us a great deal about who we now are.

Cohen recorded it on his 1985 album Various Positions.
It seemed destined, at that point, to remain in the same memory vault as
most of his work. Fans would love it, aficionados would acknowledge it
as a fine piece of songwriting, but otherwise it would just be an
addition to the repertoire of great Cohen songs, a large though highly
specialised musical sector.

Then, in 1994, Jeff Buckley released a version on his
album Grace. This sold millions worldwide, and Grace's status was
finally and fully elevated to "legendary" when Buckley drowned in the
Mississippi in 1997. He was the son of Tim Buckley, an extraordinary
singer-songwriter who had also died young in mysterious circumstances. A
wild and fatal romanticism seemed to hang over the family, over Grace
and over the song that everybody found themselves singing from that
album, Hallelujah. It was, unquestionably, Buckley's version rather than
Cohen's that was to make the song universally recognisable.

This is fair enough. Buckley, like his father, had a
phenomenal vocal range, and Cohen, famously, has not. Many of Cohen's
best songs - Alexandra Leaving, Famous Blue Raincoat - are exactly
suited to his low groan. But Hallelujah is not. It needs to be sung, and
Buckley really sang it, whispering and screaming his way through its
bitter verses. His interpretation is a little lush for me, but it was
better than Cohen's, and it was exactly that lush- ness that projected
it onto all those soundtracks and caught the attention of all those
other singers.

What then became really odd about the song was the
utterly contradictory way in which it was used and understood. This was,
in part, due to the fact that Cohen seems to have written at least two
versions. The first ended on a relatively upbeat note:

"And even though it all went wrong, I'll stand before
the Lord of Song With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah!" It was this
ending, curiously, that Dylan especially liked, as he told Cohen over
coffee after a concert in Paris. Cohen sang him the last verse, saying
it was "a rather joyous song". (Incidentally, during the same
conversation, Cohen told Dylan that Hallelujah had taken a year to
write. This startled Dylan. He pointed out that his average writing time
was about 15 minutes.) Anyway, for once, Dylan's taste had led him
astray, because the bleaker ending in the Buckley version is much
better, in the sense that it is more consistent. There is no redemptive
Lord of Song, the only lesson of love is "how to shoot at someone who
outdrew you" and the only hallelujah is "cold and broken".

Encouraged by this apparently official duality,
subsequent covers tinkered here and there with the words to the point
where the song became protean, a set of possibilities rather than a
fixed text. But only two possibilities predominated: either this was a
wistful, ultimately feelgood song or it was an icy, bitter commentary on
the futility of human relations.

It is easy to justify the first reading. There are the
repeated hallelujahs of the soothingly hymn-like chorus, and there is a
gently rocking tunefulness about the whole thing. This, if you didn't
listen too closely, was what made it such perfect material for that
supremely vacuous show The OC. Young, rich people - especially in
California - often feel the need to look soulful and deep on camera, and
the sound of doomed, youthful Buckley sighing Hallelujah as they all
pondered the state of their relationships must have seemed about right.

But, of course, Cohen doesn't write songs like that.
What he most commonly does is pour highly concentrated acid into very
sweet and lyrical containers. Never in his entire career has he done
this as well as he did in the second version of Hallelujah. The song
begins with a statement about the pointlessness of art. Addressing a
woman, Cohen writes of a secret chord discovered by King David. But he
knows the woman doesn't really care for music. Nevertheless, he
describes the lost music, as if to Bathsheba, the woman whose beauty
overthrew David:

"Well, it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth The
minor fall and the major lift The baffled king composing hallelujah."

The art is futile, because the woman doesn't care.
Instead, she humiliates and destroys the man, though, even as she does
so, "from your lips she drew the hallelujah". Man needs woman more than
he needs art. The ejaculated hallelujah - a cry of praise to the Lord -
is drawn forth not by David's secret chord, but by his subjugation to
Bathsheba. The remainder of the song brilliantly weaves this theme
through a cinematic description of a failed affair, combined with
strange but delicate images of a military parade, a "holy dove" and a
western shoot-out. The fourth verse comes close to a genuinely
optimistic eroticism.

"But remember when I moved in you And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was hallelujah."

But the lover concludes that there is nothing more to love than a
"cold and broken hallelujah". Sexual love is, sadly, what we need, but
is it what we want? It is hard to imagine a more bitterly subversive and
countercultural question.

The aesthetic trick at the heart of this is the undermining of the
word hallelujah. It means praise to the Lord, but it is, basically, just
a musical sound, like lalala or yeah, yeah, yeah. Describing the chord
structure in those three lines in the first verse makes the words, sort
of literally, into the music. Similarly, the chorus, which consists
simply of the repetition of the word, is pure song, in which the words
and music are inseparable. And it is a pure pop song or contemporary
hymn - a catchy, uplifting tune and a comforting word. It has almost a
sing-along quality. The words become the happy tune, the tune gets into
your head and, once there, reveals itself as a serpent. For what you
will actually be singing along to is arid sex, destroyed imagination,
misogyny and emotional violence.

All of these have to be gone through to get to the "hallelujah": a
romantic affirmation, certainly, but only of the pain of our
predicament. After that conversation with Dylan, Cohen compared himself
to Flaubert, meaning only that he was a slow writer. But he was more
right than he knew. Like Flaubert, he sees the erotic as a kind of
poison, deadening the artist and dragging him back to earth; and, like
Flaubert, he delights in describing this awful insight.

So, the Hallelujah that adorns the flaccid sexual crises in The OC
and adds soul to the babbling shenanigans of The West Wing is a
brilliant fake. It sounds like a pop song, but it isn't. Like the Velvet
Underground's Heroin, Bob Dylan's Leopard-Skin Pill- Box Hat, John
Phillips's Let It Bleed, Genevieve or even Frank Sinatra's I Get Along
Without You Very Well, it is a tuneful but ironic mask worn to conceal
bitter, atonal failure.

Of course, this is such an effective aesthetic trick precisely
because of the way songs have seeped into our lives. Instrumental
versions of Heroin or Let It Bleed, Genevieve - the first advocating the
nihilism of addiction, the second about a man who cares nothing for his
girlfriend miscarrying in the basement - would go perfectly well in a
lift or clothes shop, just as Hallelujah can slot into almost any
television show you can imagine.

These works use familiarity, even banality, as a weapon. They
remind us that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, there is a
real world beyond the pap, that perhaps we should try listening rather
than just hearing, that words like hallelujah just need a brief touch of
genius to be brought back to life, and that Leonard Cohen, who was 70
last year, needs to be with us for a good few years yet. Check out the
Cale version: erotic failure never felt so good.