‘The News You Really Hate’: Leonard Cohen’s first draft for ‘Hallelujah’
Any fans of Leonard Cohen already know that the artist took things slow. While some people think of inspiration as a kind of lightning strike where suddenly a song or a poem falls into their lap as a fully formed thing, Cohen saw it as a job. His artistry was an ongoing study; his pieces were meticulously crafted as he put his hands to work, chipping away at songs or pieces of writing draft after draft, sometimes even year after year. The story of ‘Hallelujah’ is the most extreme example of this, with early attempts to find the right words, even outdating his first draft of the song with one poem acting as an initial entry to the idea.
To others, Cohen’s process was an extreme form of perfectionism as he seemed incapable of trusting his work to be good or to have found the right words without checking it over again and again. But to Cohen, that was what being an artist was. He once sang, “I’m just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song,” seeing his job as just as much of a laborious task as any other worker’s, with the same bills to pay and the same higher-ups to please.
He furthered that suggestion in an interview, stating, “Why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with my payload.”
So, to Cohen, inspiration wasn’t a one-and-done strike but an ongoing conversation with his muses or a dripping tap of ideas and phrases. Something would come into his head once, like a gift from whatever divine controls art, but then it was up to him to make something of it.
In the case of ‘Hallelujah’, it took him over four years and somewhere between 80 and 180 drafted verses to make something of it. It was a song that he worked on for years trying to get it right, but it’s an incredible display of dedication and devotion that he stuck with it, finally presenting it to the world in 1984 once he’d got it exactly right.
But even before those four years began and he started filling his notepads with verses to suit the necessary rhythm and rhyme scheme or phrases that moved perfectly towards his simple and central chorus of “hallelujah”, the initial spark of the idea is found elsewhere.
In 1978, there seems to be the first sign of the song but in a poem. In a collection titled Death Of A Ladies Man, with no real connection to the 1977 record beyond the titular poem, there’s a piece called ‘The News You Really Hate’.
It’s a spiteful little piece, beginning, “You fucking whore”. However, as Cohen works through his rage, a series of images and ideas that take space in ‘Hallelujah’ come into play. “The trumpets cry up inside me and my king is home. I am judged again with mercy,” he writes, existing in the same realm of divine imagery used to explain a complex inner world as is present in lines in ‘Hallelujah’ like when he sings of a breakout by crooning, “And even though it all went wrong / I’ll stand before the lord of song / With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah”, celebrating the majesty of love even in the pain of it.
However, the most interesting moment in the poem is Cohen’s early exploration of music as a metaphor. While Cohen changed up the lyrics of ‘Hallelujah’ in his performances, often borrowing lines from alternative verses, the first always stayed the same. “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord / That David played and it pleased the Lord / But you don’t really care for music, do ya?” he sings, with that “do ya?” standing out as the one modern and incredible direct line in the song. It’s an odd line out, but when reading ‘The News You Really Hate’, perhaps that’s the line that started the whole thing as he writes in this earlier piece, “You fucking whore, I thought that you were really interested in music. I thought your heart was somewhat sorrowful.”
Only Cohen could truly unpick what any of his words meant, but it appears as if here, he’s using this idea of someone not liking music as a metaphor for deceit or as a way of saying that his lover can’t be pleased and will never be happy with him. “We are different from you. That’s the news you really hate,” he writes in the poem, shining a light on the uncrossable division between people.
In ‘Hallelujah’, that’s really the core of the song. Throughout its various verses and versions, Cohen is saying that no matter what, this love is doomed to be over, but yet no matter what, he thanks God he had it in the first place. It’s a beautiful yet complex song that grapples with love and the need to keep loving even through the pain of heartbreak.
‘The News You Really Hate’ hasn’t quite got there yet, as the overarching tone is one of anger. But in that line about music, it seems that the seed was being planted that, over time, would be reworked into ‘Hallelujah’ just as the bitter feelings that prompted the poem would gradually soften into the song’s more sincere and emotive sound
Read Leonard Cohen’s ‘The News You Really Hate’
“You fucking whore, I thought that you were really interested in music. I thought your heart was somewhat sorrowful. I might have gone with you under the desk and eaten a soft-boiled egg. I’m going to tell my baby brother not to do what I have done. I’m going to tune you until the string breaks. The Communists do not know how evil you really are.
“We are different from you. That’s the news you really hate. That’s the news to ring the bells and start the fires while your boyfriend serves you the hairball lunch. I have been admitted through the stained-glass shadows where your stench is unwelcome. How dare you pay us any attention? I’m going to eat now. I have declared war on you forever and ever. Disguised as a hat I will rip off your eyebrows. I am going to be here in the sun for a long time. The fragrance comes up again. It does not reach you. It does not invite you to close your eyes in the storm. The trumpets cry up inside me and my king is home. I am judged again with mercy.”
