meaning of jeff buckley hallelujah lyrics

I had to find out how the song worked in synagogues or at klezmer festivals, in Hebrew and in Yiddish. I needed to know Cohen’s spiritual biography. I wanted to understand the song - what Cohen meant by it, and if that meaning was lost to other musicians. Online, debates about its meaning take on a Talmudic intensity. But like the story of David, the tune means so much to so many, that it’s hard to pin down a single interpretation. It’s too Jewish to work as a Christian-inflected hymn. The song is too accepting of fallibility to champion Trump. Both uses, played mere feet from each other on the National Mall, seemed to hit the wrong note. Not because all versions were created equal, but because in two decades the song has become so pervasive as to signify nothing and everything.Ī case in point: Just a few months after the Republican National Convention featured two unauthorized versions of “Hallelujah” set to fireworks, gospel singer Yolanda Adams performed a version approved by Cohen’s estate on the eve of President Biden’s inauguration, as part of a memorial to 400,000 dead of COVID-19. In some ways, as the poet sang, it doesn’t matter which you heard. Like most people, I haven’t been able to escape the song, an infectious melody with cryptic verses and a simple chorus of a sacred word and too many covers to name.

I was that 10-year-old kid, hearing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for the first time, and wondering what it had to do with the giant green guy I’d been watching for the past hour.

Meaning of jeff buckley hallelujah lyrics