Article

Culture

Music

Sin

Suffering

2 December 2024

5 min read

The holy or the broken: Hallelujah at 40

What’s the magic sauce Leonard Cohen mixed into his masterpiece?

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A black and white photo shows, singer Leonard Cohen to the right hand side, eyes closed and head inclined slightly upwards.

Leonard Cohen, 2008

Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s summer 1984 – Richard Branson has just launched Virgin Airways, the Soviet Union have boycotted the Olympic games, the miner’s strike is still raging on, and Footloose is pretty much the only thing you can watch in the cinema.

Amidst it all, happening miles under the cultural radar, a songwriter of astronomical talent and middling success walks into a pokey studio in New York. He’s clutching a battered notebook which contains eighty verses of a song that he’s been writing and re-writing for multiple years. A song that has been driving him to utter madness, residing tormentedly in his mind. The metre is running in the recording studio, so the eighty verses are promptly whittled down to just four and the song is finally wrestled into existence.

A barely noticed existence, that is.

Those four chosen verses, the ones lucky enough to have escaped the confines of the notebook, continue to dwell in obscurity for a while yet. This seemingly cursed song is housed in an album that the record company have refused, claiming it to be of no real commercial value. Subsequently, it will enjoy a tiny release in Canada in December 1984, but nowhere else. It is, to sum up, profoundly ignored.

Now, let’s fast-forward exactly forty years.

That obscure, over-looked and under-estimated, little song has been covered by more than three-hundred artists, including Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, and Lou Reed. Its lyrics have been dissected and studied by the likes of Bono and Salman Rushdie. It’s a movie soundtrack favourite, a talent show staple, and a part of the furniture at weddings and funerals the world over. Books have been written about it, documentaries made about it. I don’t think it’s a major exaggeration to say that it’s in the cultural air we breathe.

A song that once had its maestro banging his head against the floor in frustration, now belongs to us all. Can you hazard a guess at which song this may be the origin story of? I can give you a hint, if you’d like? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor falls and the major lifts…

You’ve got it.

This humble tale is the story of ‘the baffled king composing Hallelujah’.

Generation after generation finds itself notably and profoundly moved by this song. We treasure it, we value it, we let far too many people cover it (looking at you, Justin Timberlake).

So, I guess I’m wondering - why?

It’s one of those odd questions to which everyone, and no-one, has the answer. And it’s not that I don’t recognise the outright genius of Leonard Cohen and accredit the success to his mastery, I do. But, apparently, not even Cohen himself fully understood why this song has become such a phenomenon. Its success is an oddity, really. So, we have every right to ask ourselves - what’s the magic sauce that’s mixed into this song?

Cohen... makes a bee line for the deep stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the stuff we keep hidden – and plants the word ‘hallelujah’ in there.

It opens with Cohen telling the biblical story of King David, who played the harp so beautifully it had a kind of mystical effect – it supernaturally calmed the spirit of the dangerously erratic Israelite king, Saul. David, who himself would go on to become the ruler of Israel, is the ‘baffled king’ about whom and to whom Cohen appears to sing. As Alan Bright notes,

‘He (Cohen) has placed us in a time of ancient legend, and peeled back the spiritual power of music and art to reveal the concrete components, reducing even literal musical royalty to the role of simple craftsman.’

The second verse mingles two further biblical stories together – that of (afore-mentioned) King David and Bathsheba, and Samson and Delilah. Both stories, both men, are brought to despair by abuses of power, moral failure, violence, and death. Their lives are truly toppled by their own brokenness and their own breaking-things-ness. To borrow a phrase from Francis Spufford, their stories act as a signpost for the ‘human propensity to f*** things up’.

These verses are so particular in their subject matter yet so universal in their resonance. Most people have a vague-at-best understanding of the biblical stories its lyrics are alluding to, but a precise-to-the-point-of-painful understanding of the way that old ‘human propensity’ can have its way.

And here is Leonard Cohen, using such despair and brokenness to house a sacred cry. Here’s Leonard Cohen, placing his finger on our vulnerability and telling us that it’s right there – right in the place of pain and shame – where we can engage with the divine. Here’s Leonard Cohen, telling us that if the God of the Bible exists, he can handle the very worst of us.

This song, whether we know it or not, steels past our defences. It makes a bee-line for the deep stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the stuff we keep hidden – and it plants the word ‘hallelujah’ in there. It tells us that brokenness is inevitable, but it can be made holy. Isn’t that our deepest desire? To know that we’re not too far gone? To be told that we’ll fail, all the time, but never one time too many?

I think, if you were to put that message in any context less real and raw, we’d be suspicious of it. If this song was less gritty, it would have stayed ignored. But it’s just messy enough to have us trust it, Cohen just about honest enough for us to believe him when he tells us that he ‘didn’t come to fool’ us.

So, long may it continue. Long may it sneak past our emotional barricades and wreak havoc in our guarded hearts. Long may the four-minute-long weep-a-thon reign (just, not Justin Timberlake’s version, I beg).

Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”