Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen song)

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” first appeared on his 1984 album Various Positions, but it didn’t take off right away. The song gained real traction after John Cale recorded a cover in 1991, which then inspired Jeff Buckley’s 1994 version—later ranked number 259 on Rolling Stone’s 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Widespread fame came when Cale’s rendition was used in the 2001 film Shrek. By 2008, over 300 different versions had been performed or recorded. The song has since appeared in movies, TV shows, and talent competitions. After Cohen died in November 2016, “Hallelujah” saw a surge of interest, even entering the American Billboard Hot 100 for the first time. Cohen reportedly wrote between 80 and 180 draft verses for the song—though only seven were officially released—and claimed to have written 150. His notebooks, full of revisions, back this up. During one writing session at New York’s Royalton Hotel, Cohen famously sat on the floor in his underwear, filling notebooks and banging his head on the floor. According to Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, who made the 2022 documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, Cohen spent about five years writing the song and kept reworking it for performances. Despite its later popularity, “Hallelujah” started out on an album Columbia Records rejected. After an independent label released it, the song was largely ignored until Cale’s 1991 cover. It didn’t chart on the Billboard Hot 100 until after Cohen’s death. Columbia had told Cohen, “We know you are great, but don’t know if you are any good.”

Cohen performed the original version on his 1985 world tour, but by his 1988 and 1993 tours, he was singing a very different set of lyrics. Many later singers mix lyrics from both versions or make their own changes: Rufus Wainwright swapped “holy dove” for “holy dark,” while Allison Crowe used “holy ghost.”

Musically, the original “Hallelujah” is in ⁶⁄₈ time, evoking early rock and roll and gospel. It’s in C major, with a chord progression of C, F, G, A minor, F—matching the chords mentioned in its famous first verse. When Cohen first recorded the song at age 50, he called it “rather joyous,” coming from “a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way, but with enthusiasm, with emotion.” He later said, “There is a religious hallelujah, but there are many other ones. When one looks at the world, there’s only one thing to say, and it’s hallelujah.” Journalist Larry Sloman described the song as one part biblical, one part the woman Cohen slept with last night, citing an unidentified critic who said Cohen was most interested in “holiness and horniness.”

The original version alludes to biblical stories: Samson and Delilah (“she cut your hair”) and King David and Bathsheba (“you saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you”). Cohen’s idea that “many different hallelujahs exist” is reflected in the wide range of covers. John Cale’s 1991 version promoted “soberness and sincerity” compared to Cohen’s dispassionate tone. Jeff Buckley’s cover was more sorrowful, described by Buckley as “a hallelujah to the orgasm.” Allison Crowe saw the song as “very sexual” and about relationships. Rufus Wainwright offered a “purifying and almost liturgical” take. Guy Garvey of Elbow made the hallelujah a “stately creature,” incorporating a religious interpretation into his band’s recordings. Noting its use in Shrek and on talent shows, New York Times critic A. O. Scott wrote that “Hallelujah is one of those rare songs that survives its banalization with at least some of its sublimity intact.”

After Cohen’s death, k.d. lang said she considered the song to be about “the struggle between having human desire and searching for spiritual wisdom. It’s being caught between those two places.” Steven Page, who sang it at politician Jack Layton’s funeral, described it as “about disappointing [other] people.”

The song was the subject of a 2012 book, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of 'Hallelujah'; author Alan Light said Cohen’s “approach to language and craft feel unlike the work of anybody else.