The latest episode of Ugly Betty ended with Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. I was entranced. I ran to YouTube to hear the whole thing:
What a great performance! Could anyone else come close? I usually like Rufus Wainwright:
Not close.
K. D. Lang?
No.
Leonard Cohen himself?
Well, the best of the rest.
I am a lot more interested in Jeff Buckley than I was an hour ago. From Wikipedia: “The night before his death [by drowning], Buckley excitedly told his girlfriend Joan Wasser that he believed he had found the cause of his dramatic moods, namely bipolar disorder.”
Thanks for this great selection of “Hallejulah” versions. As a fan of Leonard Cohen, I prefer his own performance of it, and there is a huge fan base for for him where I come from.
What about John Cale’s version? Btw., often the live versions of songs you find on youtube often don’t represent what people are used to hearing on the radio/their cd players. For the Cale cover, this one sounds like it has the standard CD-version (so just ignore the animated video part). I assume it’s being on youtube is a violation of some copyright tho.
I’d rank them Cale (favorite), Wainwright, Buckley, Cohen, Lang.
Interesting that there are so many covers of the song and so many are so good. What other songs have been covered as often and as well? Something by Dylan maybe?
Oops…the url in my previous post was omitted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekHeeJWsNJA
I didn’t listen to Cale — there were so many I had to stop somewhere. Now I will, thanks for pointing it out.
I can’t get myself to like any Leonard Cohen performances after 1972 or so. Still a great songwriter (as this song shows), but it’s always bizarrely overproduced and just not as good as the song itself.
If you are looking up songs in YouTube you might like this new site: https://www.songza.com/ — though you’d miss out on the awesome background to L.C.’s version
If you liked that, listen to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Last Goodbye’.