![]() This crowded mess is surmised with the simple pointed truth of ‘Hallelujah’.įrom 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. 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]() 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. ![]() 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.” But this song has a connective chorus, which when it comes in has a power all of its own. In the Christian tradition, hallelujah is a word of praise rather than a direction to offer praise which became the more common colloquial use of the word as an expression of joy or relief, a. As Bob Dylan said: “It’s a beautifully constructed melody that steps up, evolves, and slips back, all in quick time.
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