Hallelujah

Throughout much of my young life my music love built around people and groups such as Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons Project, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Jethro Tull, Lou Reed, Simon & Garfunkel, k.d.lang, Yes, Santana, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen – pretty much excellent musicians and around my own age. I heard them often, and had some favourites from most musicians. The one which stuck inside me from Leonard Cohen was “Hallelujah”.

Very recently a friend sent a YouTube video of some children singing in the Russian The Voice competition (very much like the USA) and I loved listening to them. It brought back memories of Leonard Cohen and what Hallelujah means to so many people.

Cohen was born into Judaism on 21 September 1934 in Westmount, Quebec, Canada. From 1948 he attended Westmount High School, studying music and poetry. After leaving school he moved to Montreal's Little Portugal on Saint-Laurent Boulevard where he read his poetry at various clubs and wrote some of his earliest songs which would become some of his most famous.

In 1951 he enrolled at McGill University, where some of his poems were published in March 1954 in the magazine CIV/n. His first published book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), contained poems written largely when he was between the ages of 15 and 20. Cohen dedicated the book to his late father. He was 22 when I was born, but that didn’t mean anything to me – except that he knew music and poetry!

After completing his degree, Cohen moved to Columbia University in the USA and returned to Montreal in 1957. He worked in odd jobs and focused on writing fiction and poetry, and his next book was titled The Spice-Box of Earth (1961). Cohen’s father had died and left a small trust income for him, and he was able to pursue his literary ambitions at that time.

He continued to write poetry and fiction throughout much of the 1960s and he bought a house on Hydra, a Greek island in the Saronic Gulf. Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966) and Parasites of Heaven, a book of poems in 1966. Beautiful Losers and Parasites of Heaven received mixed reviews and didn’t sell many copies.

Cohen became involved with Buddhism in the 1970s, but the New York Times described him as a Sabbath-observant Jew and said that he “keeps the Sabbath even while on tour and performed for Israeli troops during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.” Cohen became a Buddhist monk in 1996 but still considered himself Jewish. He said in an interview that he was quite happy with Judaism. "Leonard Cohen: Poet, Prophet, Eternal Optimist" Myjewishlearning.com

In 1978 he published his next book of poetry, Death of a Lady's Man, which had been kept aside for many years. It was another few years, until 1984, when Cohen published his next book of poems, Book of Mercy, influenced by the Hebrew Bible and Zen writings and referred to by Cohen as "prayers".  The book contained 50 prose-poems and won the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Poetry.’’

That same year Cohen released the song Hallelujah, which, initially for me, meant religion. I had become atheist back in early 1970s, and this word was used far too often, I felt. I ignored it for a long time, and turned away from Cohen. Yet he was still a poet, and was still publishing poetry. I had a look through the words of Hallelujah, and it didn’t look religious to me. I began to like it… a lot.

In 1993 Cohen published Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. It was 10 years since I’d decided I didn’t really “know” Hallelujah, but this gave me another reason to look at the lyrics for that song. I had heard so many people, especially men, these days would swear with religious profanities and never give that a thought. Now I believed that there was no religion – for atheists - within this song and I really liked it. It grew on me.

Cohen is still alive… 81 and going along. In 2006, after more years of delays, additions, and rewritings, he released another book, Book of Longing, dedicated to poet Irvine Layton and in 2011 he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Awards for literature.

According to Wikipaedia,Hallelujah has been “performed by many and various singers, both in recordings and in concert, with over 300 versions known. The song has been used in film and television soundtracks and televised talent contests.”

This truly is a wonderful song, and Leonard Cohen is a very gifted man.