Is ‘Hallelujah’ a break-up song or a love song?
Because of how deeply rooted it is in culture and society, few actually ever truly contemplate the deeper meaning of the song ‘Hallelujah‘. While they may linger on how it makes them feel from time to time, its explosive impact on art has strangely surpassed the need for deeper exploration, its oversaturated presence reducing its meaning to merely a vague sense of longing or beauty.
However, the song itself is anything but simple, and actually tackles a multitude of existential musings concerning romance, loss, love, and belonging. For Leonard Cohen, the song, for the most part, felt like embarking on a laborious uphill battle. With over 150 drafts and reworks over five years, not to mention the label’s rejection, it seemed that ‘Hallelujah’ simply wasn’t meant to be at first.
However, in the 1990s, John Cale and Jeff Buckley reimagined the song by giving it a distinctively refined purpose, particularly Buckley’s, which somehow made it seem more polished and accessible in a way that gave it cultural meaning. As a result, many suddenly found themselves visiting Cohen’s version for the first time, some digging deeper beneath the surface and trying to figure out what it all actually meant.
When he first recorded the song, Cohen reportedly referred to it as “rather joyous”, explaining that it came from “a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way, but with enthusiasm, with emotion”. While some view the term itself as one with religious connotations, Cohen wasn’t necessarily in this mindset when he wrote it; instead, he was interested in the different variations of both secular and spiritual “holiness”.
What is ‘Hallelujah’ about?
While some shoehorn it into simple categories like “break-up song” or “love song”, ‘Hallelujah’ represents the complex nature of finding meaning and connection when all else fails. In a way, therefore, it’s both a song about moving on and finding love, with elements of heartbreak, loss, and longing intertwined in a way that feels more spiritual than tangible, like Cohen was feeling everything all at once, even in the haze of ambivalence.
“This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled,” he once said, adding, “But there are moments when we can reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah’.” Thus, ‘Hallelujah’ was not intended to be interpreted one way or the other; instead, it represents a fuller spectrum of emotions and feelings that can all be condensed into one cathartic word.
According to Bob Dylan, the song’s true power lies in how it grasps then lets go of everything it claims to tackle, with the verses exploring Cohen’s subject matter in a more liberating way before pulling it back with a unifying chorus. Enhancing this is its gospel time signature and overlayer of commercial sensibilities, the religious metaphor giving it a sense of grandeur while keeping it rooted in something inexplicably universal.
In the end, it’s neither optimistic nor pessimistic, instead regarding the fleeting nature of love and all its overwhelming qualities as something to behold, even when we want to push it away and feel nothing at all. This, among many other reasons, is why it withstands the test of time, even though it initially took a lot of heavy lifting to get it off the ground.
