“If I knew where songs came from, I would go there more often.” So replied the late great Leonard Cohen in an apt twist on the answer to that annoying question everyone asks writers: “Where do you get your ideas?”

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song is an awkwardly titled documentary film about the late great Leonard Cohen, particularly about his best-known (and best?) song. Could it have been a book instead? Could it have been a podcast? I don’t think either would have worked, since the narrative, the interviews, and performances of music needed to be deeply intertwingled (to quote Ted Nelson in an entirely different context). The movie was the right medium, though IMHO it needs better or more frequent captions — at least for viewers who need multiple sightings of the same face before we remember who a particular person is.

You may guess from the image above that the movie includes interviews and performances by many artists. It does. It also includes some especially interesting interviews with people we don’t usually hear from. To quote the Wikipedia entry for the movie:

In addition to Cohen himself, various people affiliated with Cohen or associated with the song appear in the film, including artistic collaborator Sharon Robinson, John Lissauer (who produced and arranged of the original version of the song), Larry “Ratso” Sloman (a longtime interviewer), music producer Clive Davis, Rufus Wainwright, Brandi Carlile, Regina Spektor, Amanda Palmer, Eric Church, and other artists who recorded their own versions. The film draws from numerous unpublished conversations with Cohen collaborators Judy Collins, Dominique Issermann and others.

I learned a lot from this documentary. (Did you know that there were two different Suzanne’s?) Perhaps the most interesting tidbit was the connections between Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. I had long known that the two of them had some important connections, but I never thought about the significance: each of them was brought up Jewish, each became temporarily Christian at some point, each explored Buddhism, each ended up being a spiritual seeker wrapped around the role that Judaism did or did not play in their life. One outcome for Cohen was that there were two different versions of “Hallelujah,” a secular and a spiritual version. The many performances by tens, scores — maybe even hundreds? — of other singers included both versions.

Categories: Movies & (occasionally) TV