My Top 1000 Songs #850: Hallelujah

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Probably goes against the intentions of this list to include a track I'd probably be perfectly content never hearing again. Indeed, few tracks these days are as difficult to assess objectively as musical works given their vast cultural baggage. A go-to for lending emotional heft to popular media dating back to Shrek and The West Wing and Watchmen and probably a million other movies and tv shows; countless covers ranging from sublime to atrocious; heck, my cantor sings it (marvelously) at temple on the High Holy Days.

But if we work really, really hard to set all that aside, and just listen to the song in whichever iteration we find most epic... can its greatness be denied? Those evocative lyrics? That indelible melody? No way.

It has the feel of a song that's been around forever, so it still seems kinda weird to remember it's from the 80s, off Leonard Cohen's 1984 LP Various Positions (which I'm guessing isn't otherwise one his better-known albums; I certainly have never played it). And while Cohen's original is brilliant, I suppose we all have our own preferred version. For me, though John Cale's take is close (and perhaps best known, as the version used in Shrek--though, oddly, they substituted Rufus Wainwright's cover for the soundtrack album), I'm firmly in the Jeff Buckley camp. And I'm not even much of a Buckley fan--sure, I can appreciate 1994's Grace, but it's always been just a little histrionic for my taste. Yet just a little histrionic is probably the best approach to "Hallelujah."

Leonard Cohen original:

Buckley:

Cale:

Made a brief playlist awhile back, so you can pick your own favorite (or most hated) take on the tune: