Leonard Cohen got revenge on his label with just one song
There was a brief moment in his career when Leonard Cohen just wanted to make money.
“In hindsight, it seems like a mad decision that I was going to rectify my economic situation by becoming a singer,” he said, but in the early 1960s, the idea of moving to Nashville to write cash-grabbing country hits was appealing.
He didn’t make it there, though, and that was never who he was, and instead, he landed somewhere far more representative of his artistry, joining the poets and the players in the Greenwich Village folk scene.
It feels right that ‘Hallelujah’ would end up being Cohen’s best-known and biggest hit, because it feels like the song that best encapsulates the type of artist he was: he was a worker, stating once, “If it is your destiny to be this labourer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day”. He grafted at his art form, but it also came with an essential caveat as he added, “you also know that you’re not gonna get it every day”.
Those two things in conjunction formed his work ethic, and ‘Hallelujah’ represents it. Across five years, the artist was working on this song, creating somewhere between 80 and 180 drafts. At one point, he reportedly had written over 80 verses for the song, taking his time patiently and devotedly drafting it, editing it and drafting it again. The process started in 1979, and it took until 1984 for him to finally take it to the studio.
Eventually, when he was finally happy with it, ‘Hallelujah’ came out on the tracklist of Various Positions. However, despite the song now being a looming and timeless track, known and loved by pretty much everyone, either through Cohen’s original or some cover along the line, it was initially ignored.
“There were certain ironic and amusing sidebars, because the record that it came from, which was called Various Positions, a record Sony wouldn’t put out,” he told The Guardian. The artist was signed to Columbia, owned by Sony, and initially, they really pushed back against Various Positions. They didn’t see the value in it or believe in Cohen’s evolving artistry, but they reluctantly and lazily released it anyway, putting no effort in and leaving it to flop with this diamond of a song left in the dirt.
Luckily, though, the music world took note, as in 1991, John Cale released a cover of it. At first, it was a cult favourite amongst his fans and peers, but then in 1994, when Jeff Buckley shared his hugely successful version, it rightfully became the hit it always deserved to be.
Not only was the process of making ‘Hallelujah’ encapsulating of Cohen’s artistry, but that story is encapsulating of how he was treated past the 1960s. Naturally, his label would come to regret not supporting the song, but through that process, a fire was lit in Cohen. “They didn’t think it was good enough, “ he said, “So there was a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart”, spurring him forward to make more.
