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The holy or the broken : Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the unlikely ascent of "Hallelujah" PDF

165 Pages·2012·1.9 MB·English
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Preview The holy or the broken : Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the unlikely ascent of "Hallelujah"

Thank you for purchasing this Atria Books eBook. Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Atria Books and Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com CONTENTS Epigraph “Hallelujah” Introduction Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Acknowledgments Selected “Hallelujah” Discography Links About Alan Light Index For Suzanne and Adam, with all my love Hallelujah is a Hebrew word which means “Glory to the Lord.” The song explains that many kinds of hallelujahs do exist. I say all the perfect and broken hallelujahs have an equal value. It’s a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way, but with enthusiasm, with emotion. —Leonard Cohen Whoever listens carefully to “Hallelujah” will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth. The hallelujah is not an homage to a worshipped person, idol, or god, but the hallelujah of the orgasm. It’s an ode to life and love. —Jeff Buckley “HALLELUJAH” Words and Music by Leonard Cohen I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played to please the Lord but you don’t really care for music, do you? It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth the minor fall, the major lift; the baffled king composing Hallelujah! Your faith was strong but you needed proof. You saw her bathing on the roof; her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you. She tied you to a kitchen chair she broke your throne, she cut your hair, and from your lips she drew the 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 you? There’s a blaze of light in every word; it doesn’t matter which you heard, the holy, or the broken 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 to fool you. And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah! (Additional verses) Baby, I’ve been here before. I know this room, I’ve walked this floor. I used to live alone before I knew you. I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch, but love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah! There was a time you let me know what’s really going on below but now you never show it to me, do you? I remember when I moved in you, and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was Hallelujah! Now maybe there’s a God above but all I ever learned from love is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. And it’s no complaint you hear tonight, and it’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the light— it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah! INTRODUCTION The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum sits on the Columbia Point peninsula of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. It is housed in a striking I. M. Pei building, situated in dramatic isolation on a reshaped former landfill. This brisk February Sunday in 2012, President Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, is opening a ceremony by invoking one of her father’s speeches. “Society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him,” she quotes him as saying in a 1963 address at Amherst College, honoring Robert Frost. “The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself.” The occasion is the inaugural presentation of a new award for “Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence,” given by PEN (Poets/Playwrights, Essayists/Editors, Novelists) New England. The award committee, chaired by journalist/novelist/television executive Bill Flanagan, includes Bono, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Paul Muldoon (poet and poetry editor at the New Yorker), Smokey Robinson, Salman Rushdie, and Paul Simon. The first recipients of the award are Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen. The honorees are both dressed in their latter-day uniforms: Berry in a sailor’s cap and windbreaker, Cohen in a dark suit with a gray shirt, topped by a fedora. In truth, the spotlight mostly stays squarely on eighty-five-year-old Berry. Paul Simon presents Berry’s award—which the event program says “reflect[s] our passion for the intelligence, beauty and power of words” and celebrates these songwriters for “their creativity, originality and contribution to literature”—with a heartfelt, slightly rambling speech, reciting some of the rock and roll pioneer’s most evocative lyrics, which Berry admitted at the time he couldn’t hear. Costello performs an impassioned, slowed-down version of Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go,” and Flanagan reads a congratulatory e-mail from Bob Dylan, who calls Berry “the Shakespeare of rock and roll” (adding, “Say hello to Mr. Leonard, Kafka of the blues”). Instead of making a speech, Berry straps on Costello’s guitar and delivers a haphazard verse of “Johnny B. Goode.” The whole thing winds up with Costello and surprise guest Keith Richards—perhaps Chuck Berry’s greatest acolyte—swaggering through a glorious rendition of “The Promised Land,” with the beaming Rolling Stone

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