The original lyrics to this song are, of course, by Leonard Cohen. Generally, I am opposed to the rewriting of Good Songs. Perhaps the principle reason is that one is bound to muck up something that was perfectly good on its own. The second reason is that I think people should simply write their own songs. But a number of circumstances gave birth to the creation of this… version.

Bek had heard me play Hallelujah several months before; it had quickly become her favorite song. I had also been putting off writing a song for our wedding because I was suffering under the onus of creating something that significant. None of my ideas seemed appropriate for the occasion. Either she asked at one point or I suggested the idea of playing Hallelujah. It was a wonderful idea: the song was easy enough for me to play, it was in my range, and it dealt with both love and God.

Problem #1. We had to please more people than simply ourselves. There were certain objections to the sexual reference in the song and in the ambiguity about God in an otherwise very religious ceremony. I, too, had mixed feelings on this front. I loved the song as it was, but felt it possible that a song I performed at my own wedding should be more exactly representative of what I believed. Cohen’s song is not religious, and, in fact, one of the original lines he included sometime in performance was, “It’s not a cry that you hear at night, it’s not some gleeful Christian who’s seen the light…” So I suggested (to save the song), why not do a specific rewrite of certain verses to make it particularly ours and to help it fit with the ceremony?

Thus I beg Leonard Cohen’s pardon, but this version of the song is intended to be a large departure from his original intent. Regardless of how well crafted it is, it was crafted very specifically to touch upon what I found particularly significant in the original and draw it out in a way that resonated with my own faith. I hated the idea of a censored version, and wanted something that brought out something completely different in its new setting.

The first trouble with rewriting this song is that the original hangs together in strange ways. Cohen had all sorts of ways he’d perform the song, with verses added here, dropped there… Jeff Buckley assembled a particular formulation of these verses which Rufus Wainwright then used as well, years later. The “you” in each verse is constantly shifting, and Cohen drifts back and forth between different levels and types of metaphor. It’s this flexibility and complexity that makes him such a compelling songwriter to me, but I don’t find many of his aggregations of this song to be particularly good. It also left me with no specific trope to follow in writing new verses.

In the following song, the first two verses are Cohen originals, while the second two are original with certain borrowed lines. Most have been shifted and reinterpreted. The primary idea is to include Jesus as a decendent of David, echoing the song that David began. David was said to have been a man after God’s own heart, and thus this song attempts to ascribe the very possibility of this divine communion to the “broken hallelujah”, characterized by “longing” and “hope” as opposed to certainty and contentment (a “victr’y march”). David’s own woes are alluded to: Saul (who is given redemption through his namesake in Acts) and Absolom (the first son hung from a tree). Salvation is also alluded to, though before the death of Christ is explicitly mentioned: precisely because it is a hope and a promise rather than a simple fact.

Enough wearying analysis of my own shoddy verse.

Hallelujah
Lyrics by Leonard Cohen, original lyrics by Nathanael Eagle

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don?t care for music much, now do ya
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall and the major lift,
The baffled king composes hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof,
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to the kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew a hallelujah

I saw your flag on the marble arch
But Love is not a vict’ry march
It?s the longing and the hope by which he knew ya
As Saul would brush the scales aside
The curtain rips the temple wide
In a sudden and a blinding hallelujah

You call upon a god above
But all you’d ever learned from Love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya
Adrift upon the unparted sea
A second son hangs from a tree
Who, dying, voices your broken hallelujah

P.S. Update: Reading this almost five years after I wrote it, I must say that the biggest thing I’d change is “voices” to “cries”. For two stanzas of borrowed space in another man’s song, though, I think this holds up pretty well.