Singing The Praises Of ‘Hallelujah’ With A Film About Leonard Cohen’s Classic Song – Contenders Documentary
04.12.2022 - 19:51
/ deadline.com
Leonard Cohen’s signature song, “Hallelujah,” had its journey to music immortality stopped almost at birth by a record executive. The chief of Cohen’s label, Columbia, vetoed the finished album containing the track in 1984 because he considered it unmarketable in the United States.
An intervention by an influential labelmate of Cohen’s, one Bob Dylan, helped “Hallelujah” to escape front-office purgatory and, over time, become the soaring secular hymn that musicians love to cover and listeners play at both weddings and funerals.
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Dylan, in fact, might have been the first to cover the song. “Dylan loved ‘Hallelujah,’” filmmaker Dayna Goldfine said at Deadline’s Contenders Documentary event. Goldfine and her husband, Daniel Geller, are co-directors and co-writers of Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song, from Sony Pictures Classics.
Pairing archival footage of Cohen himself with interviewees including Brandi Carlisle, Eric Church and Judy Collins, Hallelujah looks at the late Cohen, who died in 2016 at 82, “through the prism of his most famous song,” Goldfine said.
“So it’s both an exposition of the unbelievably bizarre and dramatic arc that that song took out into the world,” she said, “and also a look at Leonard Cohen the man, the spiritual seeker and the artist.”
A poet and novelist before he took up songwriting in the 1960s, with folk singer Collins as one of his early champions, Montreal native Cohen worked on “Hallelujah” for years before recording it. As a Rolling Stone writer interviewed in the film found out, Cohen also penned dozens of new verses for it afterward as he reconsidered — or rued — some of the original recorded lyrics.
“So of all