2020GQ mix: John Cale- Hallelujah

Ok- Hallelujah. Most things I love kind of stay mine: my tastes and proclivities tend not to line up with most folks’, so most of my joys don’t get worn out by mass culture. But this song, which I first heard in the early 90s and long would describe as maybe the greatest song ever written, caught mass cultural fire. It’s a testament to the resiliency of Hallelujah that it still can resonate even after being played Marianas-Trench-deep into the ground over the last ten or fifteen years, and through multiple iterations. I suspect the original, written and performed by Leonard Cohen, might not be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s not my favorite, honestly, though I love the big chorus. It’s a very different beast from what people love from Shrek and Rufus Wainwright, which is truly lovely. But I think that owes more to John Cale (Lou Reed’s friend and former bandmate) and this track than Cohen’s original. Cale’s is the version I heard, in the Basquiat soundtrack around 1990, and it remains my favorite. He invested it with a broken-hearted mournfulness that is what I think is at the heart of this song’s beauty. It’s been with me my whole adult life, has figured prominently into my personal soundtrack, and works for the sense of loss, big and small, that’s going around these days.