I know I said that we were doing Leonard Cohen month, but…I’m really not feeling like trying to write insightful stuff about anything right now. I’m still in “Let the world wash over me” mode. Here, instead, is “Spiegel im spiegel”–“The mirror in the mirror”–by Arvo Part.
Something for Thursday (Leonard Cohen edition)
For purposes of this weekly feature, let’s make the balance of September “Leonard Cohen Month”. Cohen was born in September 1934, and I feel like focusing on him a bit and waiting twelve years for his centennial doesn’t seem all that wise.
Let’s jump right in with his most famous song, “Hallelujah”. This is one of those songs that has become more famous in the hands of others than it ever did in the hands of its original artist, the man who wrote it and sang it and recorded it. Cohen wrote and recorded “Hallelujah” for a 1984 album, and it attracted attention from other artists, starting with Bob Dylan and moving on from there. My first encounter with the song came, as it did for many, via its use in the movie Shrek. “Hallelujah” would then come up all over the place. It was used in an episode of The West Wing, an episode of Scrubs, and perhaps most famously in recent years, in the cold open of the first episode of Saturday Night Live after the 2016 election. (On the subject of that one, SNL alum and generally much-more-unfunny-than-he-thinks actor Rob Schneider has been in the news of late for his notion that this moment “killed” SNL. I won’t dwell on that, other than to let Roger Ebert’s review of Schneider’s best-known film stand as the definitive rebuke.)
“Hallelujah” has become such a touchstone song that there’s actually a book out there about its composition and rise to prominence. (I have not read the book, having only learned it exists as I write this.) I did, however, read this article from The Atlantic about the song.
The article asks an interesting question about the song itself: What is it about “Hallelujah” that makes it so irresistible to singers? Its use across pop culture is one thing, but why is this song covered so much?
In June 1984, at New York’s Quadrasonic Sound studios, Leonard Cohen laid down a song he’d spent years writing. “Hallelujah” would eventually join the pantheon of contemporary popular music; at the time, though, the Canadian singer-songwriter may as well have dropped it off the end of a pier. That’s because it was included on Various Positions, Cohen’s seventh studio album for Columbia, which the head of the music division, Walter Yetnikoff, chose not to release in the U.S. “Leonard, we know you’re great,” he said. “But we don’t know if you’re any good.” Or as cartoonish execs say in the movies: I don’t hear a single.
The album, which Columbia didn’t put out in the U.S. until 1990, features a handful of Cohen’s greatest songs. It opens with the sardonically gorgeous “Dance Me to the End of Love” and fades out on “If It Be Your Will,” which Cohen described as “an old prayer” that he was moved to rewrite. And sitting in the middle of that albatross of an album—side two, track one—is one of the most frequently performed and recorded pop songs of the past half century.
As any American Idol watcher or bar-karaoke singer knows, “Hallelujah” begins, “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord,” and for a time the universe seemed determined to keep all of the song’s chords a secret. The new film Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song—inspired by a 2012 book by Alan Light—documents the record’s long, strange trip to ubiquity. It’s a tale about the vagaries of recording history and the foolishness of industry suits, but it’s also about rediscovery and inspiration and reinvention. “Hallelujah” has become inescapable in large part because it doesn’t narrowly belong to anyone; it belongs to us all.
Read the whole thing; it’s a good article, even if the author, Kevin Dettmar, is curiously dismissive of k.d. lang’s cover of the song, which is one of my favorites.
In considering the question of “Hallelujah”, it has clearly reached the point where it’s covered a lot because it’s covered a lot. Everybody knows it, so everybody feels they need to sing it. In this way it’s not unlike Etta James’s “At Last”, a song that you’ll hear probably a dozen times every year in the “Audition” phase of American Idol. But thinking about the ubiquity of “At Last” on the talent show scene gives a key to the answer of “Hallelujah”‘s appeal. “At Last” is a perfect vehicle for a singer to show off their instrument, isn’t it? It starts immediately with that first sultry syllable and then a leap into the singer’s upper register, from where the singer (it is to be hoped) fills the room with the soaring tones of their instrument. “At Last” is a vocal showpiece. “Hallelujah” is not.
“Hallelujah”, for all its wonders and gifts, is not a demanding song for the singer. Not technically, anyway. It doesn’t cover much range, and all of its rises and falls are stepwise, so there are no big leaps like the one at the beginning of “At Last” (or that notorious leap in “The Star Spangled Banner” that has all by itself convinced many singers that our national anthem should be changed). The melody repeats, and repeats, and repeats. The chorus is just the word “hallelujah”, sung melismatically four times. There is no ‘bridge’ section to “Hallelujah”.
“Hallelujah” is, though, an interpretational challenge, a musical challenge, of the highest order. If you come to “Hallelujah” and you want to do it justice, you’d better have done your homework. Cohen’s lyrics are full of Biblical allusion, emotional depth, and outright eroticism. (Some singers leave out those verses, and my reaction to such is, “You weenies.”) Everybody knows these couple of verses:
Now I’ve heard there was a secret chordThat David played, and it pleased the LordBut you dont really care for music, do you?It goes like this, the fourth, the fifthThe minor falls, the major liftsThe baffled king composing HallelujahHallelujah, HallelujahHallelujah, HallelujahYour faith was strong but you needed proofYou saw her bathing on the roofHer beauty and the moonlight overthrew youShe tied you to a kitchen chairShe broke your throne, and she cut your hairAnd from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
But how about this verse? What do you do with this?
There was a time you let me knowWhat’s really going on belowBut now you never show it to me, do you?And I remember when I moved in youAnd the holy dove she was moving tooAnd every single breath we drew was Hallelujah
And if you do include those, how do you make them an organic part of the whole song? Because now Cohen isn’t talking vaguely about King David’s minor fall or major lift, and he’s not alluding obliquely to Samson. He’s talking to a lover where the flame isn’t there anymore. And if you’re the singer, you have to make this verse a part of the same song as the first two verses, the ones everybody knows. (By the way, the latter verses, which are almost accusatory of failed love, really make it seem all the more odd that in recent years “Hallelujah” has actually been getting airplay in December as a Christmas song.)
I think singers gravitate toward “Hallelujah” precisely because it is such a profound challenge to sing convincingly. There’s nowhere to hide; you can either interpret it, or you can’t. Singers come to “Hallelujah” to take their measure, much as a conductor comes to Beethoven’s Seventh or Mahler’s Ninth.
And now, finally, here is Mr. Cohen.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Here’s a sad song about a relationship coming to an end. Gordon Lightfoot wrote “If You Could Read My Mind” about his own divorce, and the lyrics are shot through with the bitterness of a man who realizes that the woman he married is now almost a complete stranger:
I never thought I could act this wayAnd I’ve got to say that I just don’t get itI don’t know where we went wrongBut the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back
Confessional songs always have a tough path to walk: they have to convey the emotions and the heartache, but they always run the risk of going too far, either into “too much information” territory, or they somehow don’t go far enough, relying on clichés and too much easy language to make the point. Lightfoot’s lyrics for this song are interestingly complex: “If you could read my mind” itself, the way the song begins, conveys his desire for his wife to understand him, even though he later acknowledges that he can’t find his way back to how he used to feel.
What I love most about this song is the way the melody interplays with the lyrics. Lightfoot’s words make clear that there’s no way, the love is gone, it’s gone forever–but there’s something in the melody, the way it occasionally yearns upward, that feels like maybe Lightfoot doesn’t quite believe that the love is gone yet, even though he’s heartbroken that “he just can’t get it back”. The melody here deepens the lyrics and exposes them. That’s what a good song can do.
Here is Gordon Lightfoot with “If You Could Read My Mind”.
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Something for Thursday
I heard this song…someplace online, a week or two ago. I honestly don’t recall where. I think someone used it as a background on their video about something else. But I love this singer’s voice–husky and soulful in her lower register, but she can also rise up and do some belting–and the song itself is quite beautiful. Here is Katrina Stone with “I Hope So”.
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Something for Thursday
I saw Grease when it came out. I was no older than 7. I went with my sister. We were living in Elkins, WV at the time. That was the first time I saw Olivia Newton-John.
Now, Newton-John was never a celebrity crush of mine; I was slightly too young for that kind of thing. But come to that…Goldie Hawn and Foul Play were to come very soon thereafter, so…I dunno. Maybe I thrown off the scent by the fact that Newton-John was a teenager in the movie, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to notice a bunch of people in their late-20s playing teenagers.
I also wasn’t sophisticated enough to get any of Grease‘s risque humor. Years later I would be dating The Girlfriend (now The Wife), and she would tell me that she wasn’t allowed to see Grease until she was in high school because of how dirty it was! Now, at that point I hadn’t watched Grease all the way through since grade school, so I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. We eventually did watch it–it’s become a favorite of ours–and yes, it’s loaded with some pretty risque (if still safely PG, as 1970s PG-material goes) stuff. But when I was seven? Lines like “I feel like a defective typewriter. I missed a period” went right over my head. All I saw was something that looked like kind of a Happy Days episode with songs in it.
But anyway, Olivia Newton-John…I always knew she had a killer voice which was an incredibly versatile instrument. She could do the “belter” thing, or she could be tender and plaintive…sometimes in the same song. And testimonials about Newton-John down through the years seem to have done nothing but bolster her image of being a genuinely nice person whom everyone loved.
I celebrate Olivia Newton-John, along with a few others, every year on September 26, because we share that as a birthday. I’m sad, though, that Olivia Newton-John is now gone, taken by the cancer she so ably battled.
Her movies and songs remain, though. We can return to them any time we wish. Maybe that makes us…hopefully devoted.
Here’s Olivia Newton-John.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i52mlmJtyJQ
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
In 1980 Queen provided one of the best-known examples of a rock band providing significant amounts of music for a genre movie, the grand pulpy-sci-fi flick Flash Gordon. Several years later they did a similar task for an equally pulpy and campy epic fantasy film, 1986’s Highlander. Oddly, in terms of greater cultural visibility, Flash Gordon is probably better known than Highlander, despite the fact that Highlander actually spawned a franchise that may or may not still be going strong, where Flash went sequel-less and then the property has just kind of sat there, occasionally getting revisited but never in a big way. It’s weird how this stuff works.
Highlander has never been my favorite flick–it’s kind of thick and ponderous and its tone is, for me, wildly inconsistent (it would have benefitted greatly, I think, from the kind of commitment to camp that Flash undertook)–but its music, consisting of a score by Michael Kamen, is a grandly epic score full of sweeping melodies that are often better than the sequences they accompany. And then there are the songs by Queen, which aren’t quite as strongly central to the film as the ones for Flash; in the earlier film, the songs are part of, if not the main part, of the movie’s music in general. For Highlander the songs are more in the background. But they’re still good, because they’re by Queen. I don’t think Queen had it in them to do bad songs.
Here’s “Who Wants To Live Forever” by Queen, from Highlander, a movie about immortal combatants who can only dispatch each other by beheading, until only one remains to claim The Prize. (That’s about as much sense as it makes in the movie, I swear.)
https://youtu.be/TqFoiM0zxdY
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Something for Thursday
Roger wrote about cover songs last week, which is a big topic of its own! We could go on for days about favorite cover songs, which cover songs we prefer to the originals, and so on. Do we ever talk about songs we didn’t know were covers until we knew the covers well, so that the existence of an original came as a surprise? I haven’t seen that come up much, but here’s one of mine.
I’ve featured the band Blackmore’s Night in this space more than a few times; I’m coming up on twenty years of being a fan of theirs. Headlined by former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and vocalist Candice Night, Blackmore’s Night is a rock group with a folk-Renaissance focus. Both Blackmore and Night had a love of traditional Renaissance music, which they channeled into their new group when they formed it in the 1990s. The result is a group whose music combines modern sound and very old musical forms and melodies and rhythms. It’s this blend of rock, folk, and Renaissance music, that makes them so refreshing to listen to a lot of the time. Listening to Blackmore’s Night always puts me in mind of a late afternoon or early evening at the Sterling Renaissance Festival, when we’re sitting in the golden sunlight of the waning day watching the joust and munching our roasted turkey legs.
Most of their songs involve a feel of antiquity and old-school romance; think a more rock-oriented Loreena McKennitt. But one of their albums contained a song whose title flummoxed me: “Celluloid Heroes”. And the lyrics are as far from Renfest-stylings as you can get:
Everybody’s a dreamer and everybody’s a star
And everybody’s in movies, it doesn’t matter who you are
There are starts in every city
In every house and on every street
And if you walk down Hollywood Boulevard
Their names are written in concreteDon’t step on Greta Garbo as you walk down the Boulevard
She looks so weak and fragile that’s why she tried to be so hard
But they turned her into a princess
And they sat her on a throne
But she turned her back on stardom
Because she wanted to be alone
I couldn’t fathom why there was this song about the names on the sidewalks of Hollywood in the middle of a folk-rock album, even if the theme of the song is pretty universal: the fleeting nature of fame and our tendency to make marble idols of people who were, as the song describes “dearest Marilyn”, “only made of flesh and blood.”
It turns out that “Celluloid Heroes” is a cover of a song originally recorded by The Kinks. I don’t know much about The Kinks at all–in fact, as of this writing, I haven’t even listened to their original version of “Celluloid Heroes”–so all I do know is that the song was written as part of a concept album called Everybody’s In Show-Biz. Apparently the album’s lyrics focus on the difficulties and stresses of the life of a touring rock band. In that context, “Celluloid Heroes” makes sense…and maybe that explains why Blackmore’s Night recorded it. They’re touring musicians as well, and both have been around much longer in that life than just the current band’s existence. Blackmore’s been at it for many, many years.
I wish my life was a non-stop Hollywood movie show
A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes
Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain
And celluloid heroes never really die.
This also reminds me of the permanent figures in Keats’s Grecian urn. The celluloid heroes don’t age, they don’t suffer, they just are. (Even if, these days, they’re not even celluloid heroes anymore. We’ll have to update the song to digital heroes.)
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Something for Thursday
I was going to return to the “Conversation Songs” theme this week, but then today news arrived that actor James Caan has died. Caan was just a terrific actor, always solid and reliable and skilled. He was always believable: you believed he was a prominent member of the Corleone family, or that he was a bestselling writer who happened to fall into the clutches of a crazy fan, or just about anything else he did. You never saw James Caan in a movie and thought, “Oh, come on, what were they thinking casting James Caan as that?!”
His most famous work is certainly The Godfather, so here is a selection from that film’s score, by composer Nino Rota. Well done, James Caan! Your body of work will live on.