I heard there was a secret chord...

 I came late to the appreciation of Leonard Cohen.  Well, perhaps that isn't really true.  I was enamored of several of his songs way back in the 70s, but I had no idea who he was and I never bothered to find out.  They were songs.  Songs I liked a lot.  "Suzanne" and "That's No Way to Say Goodbye."  Who wrote them?  I couldn't tell ya.

Life plunged on and I heard some others of his songs, still never registering from whom they came.  I was travelling on the big highway of the USA...highway 80, and in a Starbucks somewhere.  All the stops look the same, so I have no recollection of which one it was, but a song was playing.  Starbucks offered CDs for sale and the one playing was "featured."  I literally lingered inside with my coffee just to hear it to the end.  To the end..."Dance Me to the End of Love"...this one by Madeleine Peyroux.  I was mesmerized.

I was an habitual viewer of NCIS while living in NYC and New Jersey.  On Tuesdays, after a stressful, interminable day at the hospital, I would fervently wish that I would be on a train, and another train and catch a bus home, if all went well, without unforeseen disasters, just to be able to sit down by 8pm and watch an episode.  One episode, at the very end, where everything was tied up  neat and tidy, there was a scene of a man singing a song.  It sounded, perhaps, vaguely religious, but....not entirely.  And it, too, was somehow hypnotic.  I later learned it was Cohen's "Hallelujah."

The truth is, I really only learned about him with his death.  Suddenly, there was so much to read about him, so much to understand.  I regret I had not known sooner.

I am currently obsessed with "Hallelujah."  I was walking on the passaggiata the summer or fall before Covid hit and there was a mother and child in the playground that runs along the side of the walkway.  The little girl was on a swing and singing "Hallelujah."  That was when I realized that the song had been co-opted by the religious.  Certainly, a six year old child could not understand the metaphors and nuances of that song....no, of course not.  They changed it.  They changed the lyrics to suit their purposes.

There are allusions to religious figures in the song...the word itself (hallelujah) appears to come saddled with religious baggage.  It doesn't have to, and it doesn't in this song.  It is an....epiphany, of sorts...an offering of gratitude, perhaps....a celebration....but not of a religious figure or a single flavor of god.  

I read that Cohen had many, many, seventy or eighty...verses of this song and finally honed them down to 4 or 5.  I would love to read the others.  It is a song about a songwriter who is an unsung hero.  The artist painfully self aware that he does not have the recognition he deserves.  It is also about sex.  It is also about loneliness, love and loss.  It most definitely is not about a church..any church...THE church. It makes me angry that that section of society copped this song, changed it and yet, if not for that, the song might never have become well known.  How ironic. 

I had been listening to Cohen's own version of it......and then I discovered KD Lang.  She knocks this puppy right out of the ball park.  Close your eyes and listen.  Hallelujah.

KD Lang "Hallelujah"