Hallelujah: "a blaze of light in every word"

Neil the hippy on the Young Ones once worried that he was "beginning to feel like a Leonard Cohen record, cause nobody ever listens to me".

And then, of course, Shrek came along and everyone got into Hallelujah.

It was the greatest song in the world when I first heard it, and it is the closest I have ever been to liking music that LauraHD likes.

You may think there's the Leonard Cohen version and the Jeff Buckley version. But no. Apparently, the song has a long history.

A looooong history.

To read it all, every last bit of it, every last moment of its life from its early live appearances to its use in Scrubs and the OC, read Clap Clap's exhaustive history of Hallelujah, including graphs for the number of cover versions and the rise and wane of radio plays.

In fact, the graphs are so geeky, I post one of them here... with a few helpful lines added by me...
A graph

Okay. Not so helpful.

2 comments:

Sarah said...

I was reading the post wondering where I had first heard the song, and how I had come to love it so much.

Ah yes, the OC.

But I love it because... it makes sadness feel beautiful and love feel worth more for its complexity and difficultness.

Which is kinda what the OC was all about, but less classy...

rach said...

Ah - it was "the future" and "waiting for the miracle" on the natural born killers soundtrack that did it for me...