What do Bono, Susan Boyle and Jon Bon Jovi have in common with Jeff Buckley? For better and for considerably worse, they are amongst the hundreds of musicians to have covered Hallelujah, the song originally written and recorded by Canadian bard Leonard Cohen for his 1984 album Various Positions.
Today, it's a staple of weddings, funerals, and – bizarrely, for a song by a Buddhist Jew – Christmas albums, and has been sung with unfettered gusto by enough Pop Idol hopefuls to make many of us never want to hear tell of David's "secret chord" again.
But Hallelujah was no overnight hit for its gravelly, golden-voiced maker; in fact, Cohen's record label, Columbia, declined even to release Various Positions in the United States, certain of its lack of commercial appeal. "Look, Leonard," Columbia CEO Walter Yetnikoff told him, "we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good." (The record would subsequently be given a limited US release through an independent label, to little fanfare.)
Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine's documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song – based on a 2012 book by Alan Light – charts the transformation of the track from deep cut to all-purpose anthem, and situates it within the broader context of the great singer/songwriter's life and career.
There's a decent amount of overlap with Nick Broomfield's 2019 documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, about Cohen and his relationship with long-time partner and muse Marianne Ihlen – as dolefully immortalised in So Long, Marianne, amongst other songs.
Like Broomfield, Geller and Goldfine trot out folk singer Judy Collins to reminisce about how her recording of Suzanne launched the poet's musical career, as well as Various Positions producer John Lissauer to relate how the record effectively ended his career at Columbia.
But only one of the two films features an interview with Vicky Jenson, co-director of Shrek.
While Marianne & Leonard does contain a potted version of the Hallelujah story, Cohen's belaboured writing process – a stack of notebooks was sacrificed to the cause – and the peculiarity of the channels by which the song came to reverberate through popular culture, more than any other he penned, certainly warrant the deeper dive that is Geller and Goldfine's mandate.
Hallelujah owes its second coming to John Cale of Velvet Underground fame, who chose it for his contribution to the 1991 tribute album I'm Your Fan.
First, working with a ream of alternate verses provided to him by Cohen, Cale swapped out the more spiritual stuff ("You say I took the name in vain / I don't even know the name") for what the Welshman calls "the cheeky verses" not featured on the recorded version ("Remember when I moved in you? / The holy dark was moving too"), foregrounding the carnal dimension of the enigmatic song.
Second, and most significantly, Cale discarded the dense layers of production – the synthetic drums, the gospel choir – reworking the song for just piano and voice. With his lucid patrician lilt, he conveys more emotionality than Cohen, who delivered the lyrics in the recitative style he would increasingly favour in the second half of his career.
"Cale really owned that song. He really made it personal," enthuses Larry "Ratso" Sloman, the music writer whose present-day commentary and archival interviews with Cohen make him something like the film's narrator.
It was Cale's Hallelujah that provided the model for Jeff Buckley, who then remade the song in his own swoony, sexy-angelic image; it was Cale's Hallelujah that came to Vicky Jenson's mind when, um, Shrek needed a dose of musical poignance.
Incidentally, the Rufus Wainwright version that appeared on the multi-platinum soundtrack album – it must be said, this writer's introduction to the tune – does not appear in the film. When, in the documentary, Jenson affirms that it was she who insisted on using the Cale version (denuded of its 'cheekier' parts) for a montage of the CGI ogre moping, I had to wonder how the Velvets alum felt about it.
I didn't get an answer. Though he speaks through archival materials, Cale doesn't seem to have been interviewed by Geller and Goldfine – which is disappointing, given his pivotal role in Hallelujah becoming a bona fide "standard". (Wainwright does, however, poke his head in.)
It falls instead to Irish folk-rocker Glen Hansard, one of several talking heads whose relevance to the song at hand seems rather tenuous, to articulate the significance of Cale's arrangement.
I know, this film isn't about John Cale. It's about Leonard Cohen, as seen through the prism of what is undoubtedly his most famous song. The trouble with this concept is that Cohen isn't the one who made the song famous.
And, with apologies to John Lissauer, that's not exactly the travesty of historical oversight the film makes it out to be. Like Elvis did with Hound Dog, and Jimi Hendrix with All Along the Watchtower, Cale and Buckley in turn took Cohen's song and reworked it into something that simply outstripped the magic of the original.
There's a tension at the film's conceptual level, not because Cohen's Hallelujah is less than great, but because other artists exert a stronger gravitational pull over it. That makes the song a wobblier peg on which to hang a tribute than So Long, Marianne or Suzanne, amongst others – songs that, for the myriad cover versions they've inspired, have remained distinctly his.
As a phenomenon, Hallelujah is fascinating – one of the film's most enjoyable sequences stitches together a slew of Idol performances. But an artist's greatness is derived from what makes them unique, not what makes them universal.
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song is in cinemas now.
