[MUSIC] On the genesis of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

[rfmcdonald]

"Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah" (Watch on YouTube)

Writing in the Washington Post, Travis M. Andrews tells the story of how Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" came to be.

In the early 1980s, Leonard Cohen sat on the floor of a New York hotel room, wearing only his underwear and remembered “banging my head on the floor and saying, ‘I can’t finish this song.’”

He had been working on it for years.

Cohen, who died Thursday at 82, was many things: poet, writer and monk, among them. But the Canadian-born artist spent most of his career as a musician, one of the most influential songwriters of the past six decades.

During that career, he wrote many gorgeous songs, which he sang in his smooth, smoky basso. But, as every obituary written about the man (including The Washington Post’s) has led with, he attained fame with the song he was attempting to write in that hotel room, the song for which he wrote more than 80 verses before trimming down to five, the song whose third line reads, ironically, “You don’t really care for music, do you?”

The song is “Hallelujah,” which appeared on his 1985 record “Various Positions.”