What the word ‘Hallelujah’ means to Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen’s classic ‘Hallelujah’ isn’t so much a love song as it is a song about love and a simple declaration to all other artists who would try to cling to its coattails: why bother? However, its exacting nature – much like love – is a mysterious beast. Between the lines of poetry is a tale that sways out of grasp before falling back into clarity. This grey space was crafted very much by design.
When Cohen looked at this after the fact, he opined: “This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’” This is why the song comes together in the chorus for the reconciled chant of harmony.
As Bob Dylan said: “It’s a beautifully constructed melody that steps up, evolves, and slips back, all in quick time. But this song has a connective chorus, which when it comes in has a power all of its own. The ‘secret chord’ and the point-blank I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself aspect of the song has plenty of resonance for me.”
Written in the classic gospel timing of twelve-eight time and strewn with meta-references to musical structure, the song itself sings of a pious devotion to love, which is imbued by the religious metaphors that run throughout. This all amounts to an anthem that lifts love to rarefied heights and imparts music itself with a certain Godly hymnal salvation and its ability to offer a cathartic cleansing to a weary heart. He may well have been a poet first and a musician second, but ‘Hallelujah’ is undoubtedly his ode to sonic deliverance; even the exultant chorus is placed between personal hardships.
Such an opus is a measure of a lifetime’s worth of study in matters of the heart that only someone as scholarly in love as Cohen could manage. Throughout his career, he poured himself into the depths of relations with zealous devotion, and ‘Hallelujah’ is the sound of a lifetime wrung out in song. This crowded mess is surmised with the simple pointed truth of ‘Hallelujah’.
From the pages of poetry that he poured over, tomes of academia, sacred texts, second-hand tales, drunken scribbles on the back of toilet doors and his own experiential wisdom; he absorbed it all and did with it what fellow poet Stevie Smith claimed all great artists do, “Take what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can.” Only Cohen could conjure such a pastiche of life into something so beautiful.
