Leonard Cohen: Album by Album Thread

Various Positions (Columbia Records 465569 2; Passport Records PB 6045)



Cohen’s 7th studio album was released on December 11, 1984, five years and almost four months after the release of Recent Songs (his longest gap so far between releases). Recording began in the summer of 1983, at Quadrasonic Sound, New York, and was finished 7 months later. The album was not released, however, until more than a year after that. Despite powerful artistic successes and 3 successful tours in ’79-‘80, the early 1980s was a deep commercial trough for Cohen. Recent Songs had not sold all that well (outside of Europe, where Cohen did still remain a star of considerable magnitude), and Columbia Records did not even want to bother releasing the new record in the U.S. In fact the conversation that Cohen had with Walter Yetnikoff, head of music division at Columbia, is the source of the oft quoted quip (a perfect bit of New York music biz tough guy wit): “Leonard, we know you’re great, we just don’t know if your any good.” Cohen wouldn’t prove to be any good for a few more years yet.

The LP was finally issued by Columbia, but only in Europe and in a few other international markets (and a CD version was also released widely, including one for the U.S. market—Cohen’s first release in the new format—although very few people were buying CDs at the time, given that players had only recently become readily available and sales of this one were apparently small). The U.S. release of the original LP version was licensed to a small independent label called Passport Records, and distribution and sales were poor. Another CD version was reissued by Sony in Japan in 1994 and in the U.S. and other markets in 1995, and this version has sold with steady modesty and has remained in print, released as it was after the cultural and commercial resurrection that Cohen experienced in the late 80’s and early ‘90s—and later on the strength of one of its key tracks, “Hallelujah,” which became something of a phenomenon on its own (more on that in a later post).

The album marks a reunion between Cohen and producer John Lissauer (producer of New Skin for the Old Ceremony), although the production style differs markedly from the earlier record (see below).

Original LP track listing:

Original Side A:

Dance Me to the End of Love
Coming Back to You
The Law
Night Comes On​

Original Side B:

Hallelujah
The Captain
Hunter's Lullaby
Heart With No Companion
If It Be Your Will​

Known Personnel:

Vocals: Jennifer Warnes, Leonard Cohen
Guitar: Leonard Cohen, Sid McGinnes
Backing Vocals: Anjani Thomas, Crissie Faith, Erin Dickins, John Crowder, John Lissauer, Lani
Groves, Merle Miller, Ron Getman, Yvonne Lewis
Bass: John Crowder
Drums: Richard Crooks
Fiddle: Kenneth Kosek*
Arrangements: John Lissauer

The songs on the album show an important advance in Cohen’s exploration of religious themes, among them “If it be Your Will,” the song he has since considered his finest composition. This song was also the first he composed, drafting an early version in December 1980. It’s very much of a piece with Cohen’s 7th book of poetry, Book of Mercy, which he began to compose a year or so later and which he would complete and publish at about the same time he was working on the album. The songs on the album as a whole indeed share a set of thematic preoccupations with the book, a sequence of 50 psalm-like prose poems, and together they comprise Cohen’s purest and most thorough attempt to express a desire for religious submission or, even better, return (the Hebrew term is “tshuvah”). The book and album both reflect a vigorous reengagement on Cohen’s part with traditional Jewish learning and practice—something he was driven to for a number of reasons we can discuss later. Some of the songs treat this desire for return with the same flesh/spirit ambiguity that Cohen had been examining and working since his first book of poems, but Book of Mercy and “If it Be Your Will” express something new and different for Cohen, and as context and final song they tilt things forcefully toward the pole of prayer and away from petition to and complaint to and about a lover.

Not that the album is without love songs. The opener, “Dance Me to the End of Love” is not only erotic, but epithalamic, treating the idea of a marriage and marriage bonds in a new and openly generous way—again the interest here is in a new kind of ease with and embrace of submission, of giving oneself over, despite fear, inevitable loss, age, imperfection—the ends of a thing and its ending are all one. “Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn” (a version of “Ring the bells that still can ring…”—a song that Cohen began writing and actually recorded during these sessions, although he wouldn’t finish it and record it successfully for another 7 or 8 years). It’s no surprise that “Dance me to the End of Love” has become a standard of a kind at weddings (I’ve performed it at weddings myself). It’s also Cohen’s most perfectly realized engagement with Yiddish music, and the song has been adopted into the repertoires of many bands in the Klezmer revival scene of the last few decades, most prominently in a version by Hankus Netsky’s Klezmer Conservatory Band, who released an album named for their cover of the song in 2000.

Cohen’s persona also begins to express a decidedly middle-aged concern with the passage of time and youth, and the weariness that accompanies that concern is part of what makes submission and returning so attractive to the persona who sings these songs.

The production style of the record has often been criticized, despite a general recognition that it contains some of Cohen’s very best songs. It shares with many recordings made in the mid 1980’s a highly processed sound characterized by a heavy use of synthesizers (and the return of big reverb on the voice). The album also reflects the fact that Cohen had recently begun to compose on a small, inexpensive Casio keyboard rather than on his acoustic guitar. The sound of the original demos that Cohen created using the keyboard’s synthetic playback and accompaniment features were retained on the album, often very prominently and in strange contrast to the recorded sounds of the vocals and some of the other instruments. Lissauer has said that he tried to discourage Cohen from using the Casio for the album itself—even going so far as to haul his prototype Synclavier to the studio to show Cohen what could be done with more state of the art (for the day) digital equipment. But Cohen insisted that they mic up his little toy and build some of the tracks around its sound, and Lissauer finally gave in, most obviously on “Dance Me to the End of Love,” which is ruined for a lot of listeners by its rinky-dink keyboard rhythm (those who feel that way are directed to the lovely version of the song on Cohen Live from a Toronto show during the 1993 tour). Conspicuously absent is the sound of Cohen’s nylon string guitar, which only has a prominent, but never completely central, role in the arrangements of a few tracks (“Night Comes on,” “Heart With No Companion,” “If it Be Your Will”). All of this gives the record a dark, but also highly polished surface that many feel has a distancing effect. Some of the tracks feel close to contemporary dance music, although none of them are really that close. Cohen’s voice has also deepened, however, and it is recorded mixed with a great deal of presence (even with all the reverb) and with emphasis on the lower end of its frequency range. This gives it a slightly unnatural and even eerie, larger-than-life feel at times. It’s the first example of the vocal approach Cohen would stick to for the rest of his career.

Most of the songs on this album, especially “Hallelujah,” “If It Be Your Will,” “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “The Law,” “Heart With No Companion,” “Coming Back to You,” and “Night Comes On,” are worth extended comment, but I’ll leave that to later posts and to the ongoing conversation.

L.

 

Another great, great post, Louis. I have fewer thoughts about this album than I do about Recent Songs or the other 70s albums, I think because I sit on the fence about it. I don't want to say that you overstate its production liabilities relative to Cohen's earlier work, but I think another way of putting it is that its real liabilities tend to be overstated. You've identified all of them, but I think those issues really come to a head on I'm Your Man -- where Cohen seems to be making a deliberate effort to be as ostentatiously ornate and even tasteless as possible, to claw himself out of the "background music for a lonely boho evening" sonic profile that all of his albums bar Death of a Ladies' Man had possessed. Here, the continuities with New Skin and the earlier guitar albums are much clearer. As you suggest, one can almost draw a straight line between "Suzanne" and "Night Comes On," though the lyrical idiom is more mature and devotional. (The lines about playing hide and seek with his children are touching without having to be be particularly personal or losing their symbolic resonance.) The Casio keyboard is present, but much of the time it plays the decorative part that bouzouki and violin had on Recent Songs. There's no doubt, though, that the echoey 80s production style puts some space between Cohen and the listener to a degree that marked a break from his earlier work.

The voice has changed, deteriorated one might say, having taken a steep step towards the comically subterranean style that would make Cohen so ripe for parody. On the other hand, it lends itself much more than his old nasal approach to the wizened r&b usages that he tries on for the first time in "Coming Back to You."

You haven't really mentioned "The Captain," which I see as exemplifying some of what made Cohen's songwriting in this new (and I guess final) phase of his career fresh and distinctive -- the allegories may remain recondite, but the sense of humor is generous and broad at once in the high, self-effacing Jewish style: "Complain, complain, that's all you've done ever since we lost; / If it's not the crucifixion, then it's the Holocaust," goes one side of the dialogue; "May Christ have mercy on your soul / for telling such a joke!" goes the other.

 

One very minor correction: I believe the information about the initial CD release of Various Positions on Discogs and other resources is incorrect, as a poster in another thread pointed out. Various Positions seems not to have been released on CD -- in the US or elsewhere -- until the complete first series of Columbia Cohen CDs came out, i.e. after I'm Your Man, probably in 1988 or 1989 (since I'm Your Man was included in the series). So it was distributed even less than you say: the Columbia and Passport releases were vinyl and cassette only. In addition to the familiar CD everyone has, I have a Columbia reissue cassette from the mid-1990s -- this was my introduction to the album, purchased for 25 cents (!) when Sam the Record Man was blowing out his back room in 2004.

 

Thanks for the correction. That's what I initially thought, but I was then misguided by the entries on Discogs that I came across yesterday. Do you recall the thread where the info about the CD was posted? I'd like to track down the facts on this, given that, as you say, it affects just how widely we can say the original release got distributed. Discogs reports CDs releases in Japan in '94 and the US in '95 in addition to those in several other markets from '84 and '85. The only date on my own copy of the CD is 1984, but it looks like that's just copied from the original LP cover. The disk itself and the inserts certainly don't look like anything that would have been manufactured and printed in 1984. And it's identified as "Sony Music," which would date it to at least after 1987, I believe (I just noticed that the same is true for the Australian CD identified on Discogs as released in '84 and the Japanese issue listed as '85--both Sonys). There is one Canadian CD listed at Discogs as of unknown date that looks like could be pre-Sony:

Leonard Cohen - Various Positions »

Wouldn't mind knowing more about all of this.

L.

 

Is this the post?

What's the oldest in-print CD that has the same configuration/mastering as when first released? »

I agree that the poster is probably right.

L.

 

I've always thought of Various Positions as being one of the strangest albums that I own. It contains some of my favorite Cohen tracks, yet as a whole, I find the album to be quite lackluster. No doubt that is due to the production of the record. Lyrically, Various Positions contains some of Leonard's finest work, in my opinion. I anxiously await the day when all ~80 stanzas of Hallelujah become available to read. I've always believed that will probably be something his children release when Leonard is no longer with us. I can't see him releasing such a thing. Anyway, back to the production of Various Positions... I find it curious that Leonard didn't seek the assistance of some of the musicians he was working with on his previous tours, for help in crafting a more polished sound with his record. Or, if they were unavailable, couldn't he have sought out other session players? There is something interesting about his approach toward making studio albums versus his live performances. It would be nice to hear his thoughts on why he approaches each so differently.

 

As I look over the other thread, I realize I misremembered its contents -- it was the Van Morrison CDs that came out later than I thought; no one had any definite ideas about Cohen. But 1984 is definitely wrong. I am almost certain they came out as a catalogue series after I'm Your Man.

The CD that you link to there is the same one I have, and it's post-Sony. Notice the inscription near the hub, MADE AT SMC? SMC stands for Sony Music Canada.

 

Sharp eyes!

L.

 

Maggie is right that I do overstate the liabilities of the production choices on the album, and I should add that I actually don't mind them so much myself. I think I understand why Cohen insisted that Lissauer find a way to integrate the Casio sound with the live musicians (most of the record's basic tracks were recorded live in the studio, according to the account Lissauer gave to Simmons). He composed these songs alone in his various sparsely furnished rooms using the keyboard, just as he had done for years with his guitar. He wanted the final recordings to retain some of the intimacy of that origin--the sound that in a sense gave birth to or made room for these songs to emerge. As Lissauer notes, the sounds of the little keyboard allowed Cohen to explore possibilities and structures he could never have arrived at with what Lissauer reports he called his "one chop" on the guitar. It also allowed Lissauer to expand and refine the keyboard-based sense of harmony and rhythm, pushing some of this record into a gospel/R&B feel that Cohen would never have arrived at otherwise. The prime example of this is "Hallelujah," which Lissauer reports as a particular instance of a song that needed a push into gospel territory, a matter of rethinking the original rhythm and giving a more dramatic and conventional shape to the chord progression.

L.

 

Ahhh! I was not aware of this. I had no idea how previous recordings were born, so to speak. In that case, I can now understand why the final productions have ended up the way that they have, in comparison to the live performances which often featured much more lavish arrangements. Now I feel like I have to go back and listen to all of my L.C. studio recordings again. Not that I'm complaining!

It would be really nice to know what the sales figures of Various Positions were before and after the appearance of Hallelujah in Shrek and whenever the infatuation with the Jeff Buckley version began. For some reason, I can't remember what sparked the popularity of Buckley's version.

 

I may be wrong, but I believe a performance on "Hallelujah" in Buckley's arrangement on an early 2008 edition of American Idol was largely responsible for the renewed interest in the Buckley version (not hurt by persistently strong sales of the album Grace in the years following Buckley's death; "Hallelujah" had finally been released as a single in 2007). I would say there is also some degree of confusion between the Rufus Wainwright version (featured on the multi-platinum Shrek soundtrack but not in the movie!) and the Buckley version that has driven sales of the latter.

 

Various Positions did slip out on CD in Europe before that complete wave. It was issued on CBS Records (an arm of Columbia Records before Sony bought them out) in the mid-80s. I know this because I own it. It does have a different mastering to the later standard Sony CD. They don't seem to have manufactured many of them, it was made in Holland.

Various Positions is my second favorite album in the entire Leonard Cohen discography. It was one of the last albums by Leonard I discovered and was immediately taken with its songs, which tend to be musically lighter in tone and spirit than the preceding albums I had heard before. There isn't a single poor song on this album, which can't always be said for Cohen's other albums.

If It Be Your Will is a masterpiece of economy. I've always wondered why Hallelujah ended up being Leonard's most famous song to the masses, though I realize Buckley's cover seems to have been the primary driver behind that outcome.

The tours around this era are enthusiastic and welcoming, if not quite the same level of musicianship found on earlier tours. Many of Various Positions' songs received more rocking arrangements on tour.

 

I guess the earliest CD release for Various Positions was CDCBS 26222. The CD was made in Japan and the artwork printed in Holland.

 

@Maggie Now that you mention it, I think you're 100% correct. I do believe it was American Idol that prompted the enormous interest in the song Hallelujah. Thus began the run of Hallelujah appearing as background music on every TV show that had a sad scene. I also remember the issue with Hallelujah, requiring a different version for the soundtrack compared to what appeared in the film. What I didn't remember was if there was an overall jump in popularity of the song after the movie. Boy, time flies...My memories get muddled these days.

@PhantomStranger Hmmm...part of me agrees with you on Various Position not containing a dud at all. Yet, for some reason I don't rank the album so highly among the rest of Cohen's efforts. As I stated in a previous post, there's something about the production of this record that bothers me. I don't mind records with sparse instrumental efforts - his first record certainly wasn't lush with vast arrangements - so it's not that. I've never actually analyzed the why before, so I hope I can articulate it for this thread. You can see a progression in Cohen's albums. Not counting Death of a Ladies Man, there is like a stepping progression of complexity to the music on Leonard's albums. I don't know if it had to do with Leonard's growing confidence in himself as a singer/songwriter/PERFORMER or what...but I feel that progression when I listen to his albums in chronological order. Then, with Various Positions, especially considering the fact that we're now talking about 1983-1984 compared to 1966-1973 and there are all sorts of technological advancements in recording technology, production techniques, etc., it almost seemed like this would be a first effort from an unknown artist. Yes, the songs themselves are brilliant lyrically, but it doesn't surprise me at all that the record company didn't forsee this album doing well at all in the U.S. In 1969, Various Positions would get a wide release, probably. There's gotta be something comparable to that Casio keyboard Leonard loved so much...isn't there?

Of course, these ramblings aren't to try and dissuade you in any way. I'm glad you love Various Positions the way that you do. I wish I could get over this prejudice I have for the album because several of my favorite L.C. songs are on this gosh darn album! How weird is that?! If It Be Your Will might be my favorite of all his songs. Dance Me to the End of Love, Heart With No Companion and The Captain are songs I could listen to every day for the rest of my life and never tire of hearing. I do go through periods when I'll listen to The Law probably 28 days out of the month. I just love that refrain!

 

Various Positions is a very good album, however many of the songs on it are ruined by weak 80s production. It's one of his best for me.

 

Something definitely did happen, fairly recently, that turned "Hallelujah" from an already fairly well-known Leonard Cohen classic into a ubiquitous standard. The key thing is, it was very sudden, and very recent: I hardly recall hearing anyone singing the song 10 years ago, but then suddenly everyone was familiar with the song and even tired of it, and I recall there being groans when it appeared during a love scene in Watchmen (which came out in early 2009). The mania had begun scarcely a year before that, but it already seemed a cliche by then. Of course, kd lang's performance at the Olympics in 2010 was also an important moment for contemporary Canadian nationalism, and (in Canada at least) I have heard fewer groans since then.

 

The rise of “Hallelujah” from obscure album cut on a record bought by only a small number of fans (and hardly anyone at the time in North America) to universally beloved standard is a complicated and very interesting one. It’s been told in detail by Alan Light in his 2013 book, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah," but here’s the Cliff’s Notes version:

First of all, the song’s failure to catch on even in the small world of Cohen fans at the time has something to do with Cohen’s own ambivalence and uncertainty about the song as it was originally composed. Cohen performed his original version of the song, singing the 4 verses he finally chose after a long period of composition that involved composing verse after verse after verse and then winnowing, during his 1985 tour, but in 1988, he introduced a new set of lyrics, retaining only the original final verse and stripping the song of much or its original religious resonance and biblical imagery. A version with the alternative lyrics can be heard on Cohen Live. More later on why Cohen made this change (it has to do with changes in his own outlook and aesthetics, a transition from the devotional Cohen of Various Positions to the more cynical and darker Cohen of I’m Your Man).

It was Cohen’s own revision of the song that led John Cale to ask Cohen about which lyrics to sing when he wanted to cover the song for the 1991 tribute album, I’m Your Fan (Live Cohen had not yet been released, but Cale knew that Cohen had been singing different lyrics in concert). Cohen reportedly sent him pages and pages of lyrics by FAX (legend has it that Cohen has some 80 alternative verses in notebooks and that he sent Cale all of them) and told him to sing whichever ones he wanted. But it’s pretty clear that Cale did not comb through 80 verses to choose the ones he liked best. Instead, he chose the first two from the original version of the song plus the three new verses from the 1988 rewrite (he did not sing Cohen’s original 3rd or 4th verses). This selection of verses has remained the most influential version of the song, and it forms the basis, with some variations, of most of the many subsequent covers. Cale’s version was featured on I’m Your Fan (and a year later in a live version on Fragments of a Rainy Season), and this is the version that Jeff Buckley found and on which he based his own cover about 2 years later.

So Cale’s choice of the song for the tribute record and his selection of verses are ground zero for the song's later explosion (and the fact that there actually was a tribute record in 1991 already shows how dramatically Cohen’s cultural cache had changed in the wake of I'm Your Man and the release of Jennifer Warnes' collection of covers). The only major performer to cover the song before Cale was Bob Dylan, who only performed it live a couple of times. Dylan sang it in its original album version (with only a few lyrical revisions--or maybe errors) at concerts in Hollywood and Montreal (the latter, from July 8th, 1988, can be found on youtube, and it’s worth hearing). Cohen himself later combined verses from his two versions of the song, settling on verses 1 and 2 from the original, followed by all three of the 1988 verses, but ending almost always (contra Cale) with the 4th verse of the original. Performances with this set of lyrics can be heard on Live in London and Songs from the Road. The version on Live in Dublin uses the first two original verses, skips the 2nd of the ’88 verses (“Maybe there’s a God above…”) and adds back the original 3rd verse (“You say I took the name in vain…”). A lot can be said about the significance of these selections, and the fact that the song seems to exist as an open invitation to such selection, but we’ll save that for later posts and conversation.

The next step in the ascent of the song was Buckley’s cover, which got a fair amount of attention when Grace was released in 1994, and then, unfortunately, Buckley’s death did even more for the song, not only focusing attention again on Grace, but giving the gorgeous and ghostly cover a new mystique, like a voice of youth and longing echoing from the grave (or muddy river). Next was the inclusion of Cale’s version on the soundtrack to Shrek in 2001 (along with the version by Rufus Wainwright on the soundtrack album). By 2003 that soundtrack album with Wainwright’s version had gone double platinum, and God knows how many people heard Cale’s version over and over again, given the popularity of the film on DVD. Since it was a kid’s movie, it got played incessantly in probably millions of homes in the early oughts and on after that. My son was born in 2001, and I can tell you from experience that whole chunks of the film’s dialog and music, including the sentimental “Hallelujah” sequence, got lodged in the brains of a whole generation of kids and parents of a certain class and background permanently (kid’s like repetition). When I taught Cohen’s song in a Freshman Seminar a few years back, all of my students reported having heard the song on both the DVD and the soundtrack CD over and over again in their childhoods, and all of them knew the song very, very well—even if few of them had ever stopped to consider what its lyrics meant (that in itself is an interesting phenomenon). But this, of course, was also after the next set of steps in the song’s rise in the later oughts.

The first of these later steps was K.D. Lang’s 2004 cover, which is what I think made the song into a “singer’s cover.” Lang’s version is different that Cale’s, Buckley’s, or Wainwrights. It’s got its profundities, but it also issued a sort of athletic challenge to singers and turned the song into a vehicle for showing off one’s pipes. It’s that steady rise to the major III chord at the climax of each verse that’s so irresistible, just tough enough to make it a challenge, but not so difficult that it’s out of most singers’ reach. Perfect. Lang has performed the song is several prominent contexts (including the Olympics performance maggie has already mentioned). Buckley’s version was also finally released as a single in 2007.

After that its appearance on American Idol and a short time later on The X Factor were only a matter of time, and then the song exploded in ways that become hard to track.

More on why the song is so attractive to so many people and in so many contexts and what Cohen and others do with the lyric soon….

L.

 

"I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it and the reviewer said – 'Can we please have a moratorium on "Hallelujah" in movies and television shows?' And I kind of feel the same way...I think it's a good song, but I think too many people sing it." - LC

 

Not that he minds cashing all those royalty checks! And why should he?

L.

 

After getting screwed the way he did financially, wiping out his retirement plan, Leonard gets a free pass from me on selling out!

 

I believe many, many musicians likely first heard Hallelujah from Cale's Fragments of a Rainy Season. The song finishes the concert in grand style. It became a very popular album in the 1990s to that crowd. It's very likely how Buckley picked up on the song.

 

I think your right that Cale's live version on Fragments version reached more ears than the studio version on I'm Your Fan, but I believe Buckley has specifically cited the studio version as the one he heard initially. Light gives the details, but I'm snowed-in today and can't get to my copy to check. FWIW, I like the live version a little better than the studio cut. They're not that different, but the live version is a little slower (at least at the start), more meditative and then more dynamic and dramatic. Cale hangs on the climaxes of each verse with more urgency before releasing them. Here's the track from the original DVD release:



L.

 

Coincidentally, I listened to this album yesterday. I remember its release in the UK in early 1985, when I had only just become a Cohen fan. I thought it was a strong album at the time and in recent years I've come to think of it as his strongest album, taken as a whole. It's perfectly sequenced and none of the songs outstay their welcomes (which a few of the tracks on I'm Your Man and The Future do). The 80s production may now sound cheap and sterile (and I probably prefer the version of DMTTEOL on Cohen Live) but it doesn't undermine the songs. A great record all round. Just a shame no one was listening!

 

An account of—and some reflections on—the varied states of “Hallelujah’s” existence as a song (or some of them):

First, for reference, here is a transcription of the lyric as it’s actually sung on Various Positions:

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord,
But you don’t really care for music, do yuh?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall, the major lift,
The baffled king composing Hallelujah!

Hallelujah….

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof;
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew yuh.
She tied you to a kitchen chair;
She broke your throne; and she cut your hair,
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah!

Hallelujah….

You say I took the name in vain;
I don’t even know the name.
But if I did, well, really, what’s it to yuh?
There’s a blaze of light in every word;
It doesn’t matter which yuh heard,
The holy, or the broken Hallelujah!

Hallelujah….

I did my best; it wasn’t much.
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch.
I’ve told the truth; I didn’t come to fool yuh.
And even though it all went wrong,
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!

Hallelujah….​

And here are the lyrics of the revised version from late in the 1988 tour as it’s sung on Cohen Live:

Baby, I’ve been here before.
I know this room; I walk this floor.
I used to live alone before I knew yuh.
Yeah, I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch,
But listen love, love is not a victory march,
No, it’s a cold and it’s a very broken Hallelujah!

Hallelujah….

There was a time yuh let me know
What’s really goin’ on below,
Ah, but now you never show it to me, do yuh?
Ah, but I remember, yeah, when I moved in you,
And the holy dove, she was moving, too,
Yes, and every single breath that we drew was Hallelujah!

Hallelujah….

Maybe there’s a God above,
As for me, all I ever seem to learn from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew yuh.
Yeah, but it’s not a complaint that you hear tonight,
It’s not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light, heh
No, it’s a cold and it’s a very lonely Hallelujah!

Hallelujah….

I did my best; it wasn’t much.
I couldn’t feel, so I learned to touch.
I’ve told the truth; I didn’t come all this way to fool yuh.
Yeah, and even though it all went wrong,
I’ll stand right here before the Lord of Song,
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!

Hallelujah….​

In a form more fitting for the page, these are the seven verses Cohen also printed in Stranger Music, where the original four are presented as the song/poem itself, followed by the other three presented as “additional verses.” This set of seven has become the canonical song, from which most performers, even Cohen himself, have tended to select the ones they've wanted to sing. Very few if any versions actually use all seven (that’s a lot to sing, and a lot for a listener to take in—especially if you also want to use one go-though of the verse form for an instrumental solo). On his recent tours, Cohen has usually sung six of them, leaving one go-round for an appropriately churchy organ solo. However, in 1985 Cohen sang the original four verses in a version very close to the one on the album, and for the tour of 1988 he created a new version of the song using the three “additional” verses. For the first, European leg of that tour he sang only the three new verses followed by a big rave-up of an electric guitar solo and ended with a repetition of the “Baby I’ve been here before...” verse, although he usually repeated the lines about the holy dove in place of a repetition of the marble arch bit. For the first half of that European leg, the song was the main set closer, and Cohen used the big stop time bit during the the final hallelujahs for a “thank you ladies and gentlemen….” On at least one night he used an organ solo instead of the guitar, and he also tried a few other variations, including a substitution of “Forgive me Lord, if you’re up there above” or even “I know that there’s a God above” for “Maybe there’s a God above” and adding that he’s “not some new-born Christian who has seen the light” or “It’s not the gleeful laughter of someone who has seen the light.” This version of the song was a fairly complete rejection of the original, and he did not revert to the compromise position of ending with the original fourth verse (“Lord of Song…”) until the North American leg of the tour. Even the version with the original ending removes much of the song’s religious resonance save for the concluding, poet’s proclamation of praise and acceptance of the requirements and the judgment of the “Lord of Song”—something higher than erotic love or any of the activities of ordinary life, of which he confesses he’s made a mess, anyway—a statement about vocation, a devotion not to any object or objective but only to the work of singing. And an embrace and acceptance of its costs.

As I noted in my earlier post, Cale selected the first two original verses followed by all three of the “additional” ones, and Buckley and many others have done the same. Lang, presumably because she’s a woman and a lesbian, sings the verse with the beauty of the bathing woman in the moonlight and her kitchen chair, but not the “holy dove” verse where the singer sings “I moved in you” (see Babette Babich’s detailed account of the song and Lang’s cover in her The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice, and Technology for some interesting reflections on such differences and what they suggest in terms of gender and sexuality).

The most orphaned verse for most singers, including Cohen himself until the most recent tour, is the original 3rd (“You say I took the name in vain…”), which is probably just too poetically abstract for most singers to sing with any clear conviction, although combined with the evocation of David’s secret chord and the original final verse’s standing before the “Lord of Song” profoundly reinforces the song’s sense of what’s at stake in the power of language to express the holy or the broken (or both).

A colleague of mine named Raphael Shargel has written at some length about the power of the original version, and of this verse in particular, but I don't believe he ever published the essay he shared with me (it helped me to see the strength of the original version). But there’s a blaze of light in every word of the seven verses if they are all taken together (a holy number, on top of everything else), but it’s a blaze that few singers other than Cohen himself have ever tried to feel or touch—either they’re afraid of getting burned or they’re just not interested. The sexual side of the song and what Cale has called its “cheeky” bits are easier to carry and explore, less peculiar to Cohen’s own vision.

L.

 

I don't know if it's because it was the first version I regularly heard of Hallelujah, but I prefer the album version myself. It's far easier to imagine Cale's preferred verses celebrating the more carnal aspects of Hallelujah.

I think it's a singer's song in that many vocalists enjoy testing their chops on Hallelujah. Considering how few modern Pop songs allow a singer to showcase their full abilities, it's an anachronism in today's music scene.