“I heard there was a secret chord…..”

Even if you’re a fledgling music geek, newly hatched and tentatively exploring the boundless musical landscape, you probably know “Hallelujah,” a song that well deserves its status as a modern standard, but it certainly didn’t start out with that reputation. In fact, it took about 25 years, the efforts of four major artists, and a plethora of amateur reality contest vocalists to vault this song into the hallowed halls of the greatest songs ever written. And the way you probably know the song isn’t even how it was originally released. Let’s break it down.

It all begins with bass-baritone singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who wrote the song over the course of five years in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I don’t mean he wrote a couple of verses and then got stuck on a word for six months. No, he wrote an estimated 150 verses for “Hallelujah” over that period of time before finally settling on its semi-finished form (which he would often change in concert) and recording it for his 1984 album, Various Positions — an album his record label, Columbia, rejected as not good enough and refused to release in the US. It eventually came out on a small indie label, no one bought it, time moved on.

In 1991, former Velvet Undergrounder John Cale released his version as part of a Leonard Cohen tribute album. Cohen actually sent him all the unreleased verses and Cale picked out a couple of his favorites and mixed them in with the original. Lyrics-wise, this became the version we’re all familiar with today. Cale also released a slower, more relaxed version on his 1992 live album, Fragments Of A Rainy Season (which is where I first heard it), but “Hallelujah” still remained a cultish, word-of-mouth song. 

Then Jeff Buckley came along.

Buckley was the son of the limber-voiced avant-folkie Tim Buckley — who had a small but dedicated audience in the 60’s and 70’s — and now the offspring was attempting his own thing, making waves in the New York clubs with his soaring, angelic vocals. His debut album, Grace, was released in 1994 (ironically, on Columbia, the same label who had refused to release Cohen’s album 10 years prior) and his spare, haunting, tour de force take on “Hallelujah” introduced the song to a much wider audience — of music geeks, that is. Buckley was well-known to people who paid close attention to music, but this still wasn’t exactly mainstream.

Tragically, Jeff Buckley died in 1997, accidentally drowning in the Mississippi River while working on his second album in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 30 years old. ”Hallelujah” now took on a deeper resonance.

The song’s commercial breakthrough came in 2001, when it appeared in the blockbuster animated film, Shrek, and was subsequently heard by millions. Cale’s version (somewhat surprisingly as a non-household name) plays over a scene in the movie while Rufus Wainwright tackled the song on the multi-platinum soundtrack, and all this Shrekxposure (sorry) finally pushed Jeff Buckley’s 1994 album to gold record status, half a million sold.

We’re almost there!

In 2008, on Season 6 of the singing competition American Idol, a young unknown named Jason Castro sang “Hallelujah,” the first time anybody performed the song on a reality show singing competition. That performance caused viewers to look up Buckley’s version and propelled it to #1 on Billboard’s Digital Songs chart — the chart keeping track of the most downloaded songs — and then later that year, Alexandra Burke, a contestant on The X Factor in the UK, scored a Christmas #1 with her own version. ”Hallelujah” went on to become a staple on reality singing competitions, as well as in numerous films and TV shows, to the point where Cohen himself said maybe people should take a break from it.

And all it took was one guy who needed five years to write it, another to edit it and finalize the lyrics, another to record it and die, another to record it for one of the most popular soundtracks of the decade, and another to perform it on one of the most popular TV shows ever. Simple. Instant classic.

So play the chord and please the Lord … with Jeff Buckley.