The song “Hallelujah” achieved overwhelming global success, and dozens of copies were made in many languages… But this famous work by Leonard Cohen was ignored in the United States when it was released nearly 4 decades ago… An unusual track narrated by a new documentary in American cinemas.
In the minds of many, the song is still associated with the version presented by rock singer Jeff Buckley, who died in 1997 at the age of 30.
But from Bob Dylan to Bon Jovi, to Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli, a host of superstars have put their voices to it.
In 2008, with the rerun of the song “Gospel” by Alexandra Burke on the British talent show “The X Factor”, the song “Hallelujah” took the top three places in the English Song Race, respectively for Burke and Jeff Buckley and then for the original song by Leonard Cohen.
“I don’t see any other song that has had a similar track,” music journalist Alan Light, author of a book regarding the song “Hallelujah” released in 2012, told AFP.
On the sidelines of his participation as a consultant and producer during a presentation in New York of the documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a journey, a song,” Light said, “It took 10 or 20 years with all these different versions for the song to make its debut and grow into a snowball.”
But Columbia Music Productions refused to release the “Ferious Positions” disc, which included the song, in the United States in 1984.
A few years later, Bob Dylan brought the song out of oblivion and presented it with a remake of the blues rock format. Then John Kyle, one of the founders of the band The Velvet Underground, brought it back with a more exciting version in 1991, before it was released with a new, more suggestive version with the voice of Jeff Buckley on the album “Grace” (1994).
The documentary shows how the song “Hallelujah”, discovered by later generations in the 2001 animated film Shrek and then in the 2016 movie “Sing”, became a staple of popular culture.
And in 2010, Canadian K. Dr.. Lange presented her strong voice during the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. After 11 years, the song also attended a ceremony honoring the victims of “Covid-19” in Washington, in the presence of US President Joe Biden.
