Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen claimed he wrote around 150 draft verses for Hallelujah, and his notebooks bear out a long struggle of revisions. The story goes that during one session at New York's Royalton Hotel he ended up sitting on the floor in his underwear, filling notebooks and banging his head on the floor. By some accounts the song took him about five years. He said it came from a wish to affirm his faith in life, not in a formal religious way, and its verses drift between the Bible, with nods to Samson and to King David, and the bedroom. Then almost nobody heard it. Columbia Records rejected Various Positions, the 1984 album it appeared on, with Cohen recalling that the label told him he was great but they did not know whether he was any good. Released by an independent label, it was largely ignored. The turn came when John Cale saw Cohen perform it and asked for the lyrics. Cohen faxed him fifteen pages, Cale picked the cheekier verses, and his 1991 version inspired Jeff Buckley's 1994 recording. Cale's take then reached millions through the 2001 film Shrek. By 2008 there were more than 300 known versions, and talent shows had made it a fixture. Cohen admitted in 2009 that he felt too many people sang it, then said in 2012 he was very happy it was being sung. It did not enter the Billboard Hot 100 until after his death in 2016. A song his label would not release became one of the most covered in popular music.