In June 1984, Cohen and Lissauer recorded the album that would become Various Positions in New York’s Quadrasonic Sound studios. This excerpt was originally published in December 2012. It’s far and away Leonard Cohen’s most famous composition, even though many people don’t even realize that he wrote it.Īlan Light dove deep into the history of the song for his book, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah‘ by Alan Light, copyright 2012 by Alan Light, Published by Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. It was that version that eventually created a huge cult around the song, and it’s since been covered by everybody from Bono to Bon Jovi. The Velvet Underground’s John Cale tackled it on the piano for a 1991 Cohen tribute disc, and three years later, Jeff Buckley took inspiration from that rendition and covered it on his 1994 album, Grace. Bob Dylan was one of the first to recognize its brilliance, playing it at a couple of shows in 1988. It took a few years for “Hallelujah” to emerge as a classic. They didn’t even want to release the album, though it eventually came out in Europe in 1984 and America the following year. When Cohen submitted the songs for his subsequent LP, Various Positions, to Columbia, label execs didn’t hear “Hallelujah,” the opening song of Side Two, as anything special.
His 1977 LP, Death of a Ladies’ Man, a collaboration with Phil Spector, was a commercial and critical disappointment, and his next album Recent Songs fared no better.
Leonard Cohen’s career had reached a low point when he wrote “ Hallelujah.” It was 1984, and he had been out of the spotlight for quite a long time.
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