This was the version I first go to know, when, 12 years ago, my designer Pam Uhlenkamp and I played it again and again in her second floor flat just off downtown Boulder, as we worked endless days and nights putting together an issue of Elephant (then Magazine).Īnd, then, most famously, by Rufus Wainwright, a version that made it into Shrek, the blockbuster children’s fave movie. Then, most memorably, sung by a young man who would, tragically, stay young forever, who would breathe out at the beginning of the song, and finally, never breathe in again. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances. I wanted to write something in the tradition of the hallelujah choruses but from a different point of view…It’s the notion that there is no perfection-that this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still that is no alibi for anything. It’s, as I say, a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion…It’s a rather joyous song. “And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand right here before the Lord of song, with nothing on my tongue but ‘Hallelujah’.” The most beautiful song, originally written and sung by none other than Buddhist, and Ladies’ Man, Leonard Cohen.
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