Quote:
Originally Posted by jmcarter
Agree Jim, Leonard Cohen's melody is one of the most beautiful ever composed and it has seemingly endless variations with versions for Easter, XMAS, Veterans, etc. I enjoy Leonard's original lyrics as well, even in his human brokenness he still cries out Hallelujah. I can identify with that....
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I remember reading that the reason there are so many variations is that Cohen wrote between 15 and 80 verses for the song and when people record it, after the first verse they can just choose which verses they want to use. Cohen would change which verses he used when he performed the song. Other performers used different combinations of verses.
Musician John Cale said he asked Cohen for all the lyrics and Cohen faxed him 15 pages of lyrics. A post last year by the people who run Cohen's Facebook page says that all 80 verses have been found and are now at the University of Toronto.
The interesting thing about the lyric variations is that some of Cohen's lyrics for the song are pro-religion while others express doubts. So depending on the lyric choices, the song can have different meanings. It's also interesting that Cohen was Jewish and attended synagogue, but was also interested in Catholicism and was an ordained Buddhist monk. Ironically, when he was ordaine,d he took the name Jikan, which means silence.
That's probably more than you ever wanted to know, right?