Naturally, it was a grand slam on The X Factor. Jeff Gutt ( A Detroit Christmas, 2014): Dreadful, straining delivery, disastrous AOR arrangement that somehow gets worse and worse (hear those chugging, sub-Creed guitar licks?).
This list is of course open for debate and is necessarily far from exhaustive, and we are primarily sticking to renditions that are commercially available, as well as a few notable live performances.Ħ0. Here, we celebrate the 30th birthday of "Hallelujah" by listening to 60 notable recordings of it that are readily available online and ranking them from worst to best. It is "something of a musical Rorschach test," Light writes, invented anew by all who attempt the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall.
Tallying versions by Cohen and plenty of others, Light estimates "Hallelujah" has been listened to hundreds of millions of times on YouTube alone. It was a spate of cover interpretations-first by John Cale and Jeff Buckley, then by dozens and hundreds of others-that lifted the song out of obscurity, though it was something more mysterious that cemented its status as a modern standard, appearing on American Idol and in synagogue services in equal measure. (He has said he wrote as many as 80 verses, then whittled it down to four for the album version.) The album on which it appeared, the murky, mid-career Various Positions, had been rejected wholesale by Columbia Records in the U.S., and when it finally was released, "the song was still generally ignored," as Alan Light notes in his 2012 book The Holy or The Broken.įrankly, it's no wonder: "Hallelujah," as it sounds on that record, is a barely recognizable blur of '80s keyboards and overwrought backing vocals that Cohen further confused by changing up the lyrics when he began singing it in concert. He didn't know the song would make much of an impact at all. He didn't then know the song would wind its way into the deepest reaches of popular culture, spirituality and, uh, Shrek. Thirty years ago this weekend, Leonard Cohen first performed a song called "Hallelujah."*
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