words to the song hallelujah by pentatonix

The selections that ultimately opened and closed the album, “Dance Me to the End of Love” and “If It Be Your Will,” stand among his best-loved work. The songs included several of Cohen’s most lasting compositions. There were no roadblocks, no disasters it was great start to finish – it was high art, it was just thrilling.” Leonard and I got along so well it’s almost scary. “I’ve never had a more rewarding experience,” he said. Seated in the larger of the two studio rooms he operates from his thirty-five-acre farm about an hour north of Manhattan, he described working on Various Positions as pure pleasure. Lissauer, a Yale graduate who has gone on to a successful career scoring films, beamed when he spoke of these sessions that took place almost thirty years earlier. Hawaiian-born Anjani Thomas was one of the backup singers on these sessions she would go on to become Cohen’s longtime companion, and he produced an album of her singing his songs, Blue Alert, in 2006. Jennifer Warnes, who had sung backup with Cohen on previous albums and tours, was brought further into the spotlight as a featured vocalist, a counterpoint to the limited parameters of Cohen’s voice. It’s far and away Leonard Cohen’s most famous composition, even though many people don’t even realize that he wrote it. It was that version that eventually created a huge cult around the song, and it’s since been covered by everybody from Bono to Bon Jovi. The Velvet Underground’s John Cale tackled it on the piano for a 1991 Cohen tribute disc, and three years later, Jeff Buckley took inspiration from that rendition and covered it on his 1994 album, Grace. Bob Dylan was one of the first to recognize its brilliance, playing it at a couple of shows in 1988. It took a few years for “Hallelujah” to emerge as a classic.

They didn’t even want to release the album, though it eventually came out in Europe in 1984 and America the following year. When Cohen submitted the songs for his subsequent LP, Various Positions, to Columbia, label execs didn’t hear “Hallelujah,” the opening song of Side Two, as anything special. His 1977 LP, Death of a Ladies’ Man, a collaboration with Phil Spector, was a commercial and critical disappointment, and his next album Recent Songs fared no better. Leonard Cohen’s career had reached a low point when he wrote “ Hallelujah.” It was 1984, and he had been out of the spotlight for quite a long time.

Words to the song hallelujah by pentatonix