Cold and broken
Poetry, above all things, is a beautiful painting whose tints, to minute inspection, are confusion worse confounded, but start boldly out to the cursory glance of the connoisseur.
"Letter to Mr. — —", Edgar Allan Poe.
Listening to a Leonard Cohen version of "Hallelujah", I noticed that the first verse which I'd quoted the other day (from listening to the Jeff Buckley "Live à l'Olympia" version on infinite loop) was ... "missing". I'm not a big Cohen fan, otherwise I probably would have known the answer.
It took the resourceful Tara to find this:
You know, I wrote this song a couple of ..., it seems like yesterday but I guess it was five or six years ago and it had a chorus called Hallelujah. And it was a song that had references to the Bible in it, although these references became more and more remote as the song went from beginning to the end. And finally I understood that it was not necesary to refere to the Bible anymore. And I rewrote this song; this is the "secular" Hallelujah. «Baby I've been here before..»
Personally, I prefer the mix of the secular and the sacred. Feels much naughtier somehow.
Posted by sniffles at October 30, 2003 10:54 AM