Author | Alan Light |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Atria Books [1] |
Publication date | 2012 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | |
Pages | 254 pp [1] |
The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of 'Hallelujah' is a 2012 non-fiction book written by Alan Light. [1]
A look into the enduring popularity of the Leonard Cohen song "Hallelujah" and Jeff Buckley's cover version of it.
The book is the basis for the 2022 biographical documentary film Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song created by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine. [2] Light served as a consulting producer for the film. [2]
Jeffrey Scott Buckley was an American musician. After a decade as a session guitarist in Los Angeles, Buckley amassed a moderate following in the early 1990s by performing cover songs at venues in East Village, Manhattan, such as Sin-é, while gradually focusing more on his own material. After rebuffing interest from record labels and Herb Cohen—the manager of his father, singer Tim Buckley—he signed with Columbia, recruited a band, and recorded what would be his only studio album, Grace, in 1994.
Grace is the only studio album by American singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, released on August 15, 1994 in Europe and on August 23, 1994 in the United States by Columbia Records. The album had poor sales and received mixed reviews at the time of its release. However, in recent years, it has dramatically risen in critical reputation. An extended version of the album, celebrating its tenth anniversary, was released on August 23, 2004, and peaked at number 44 in the UK.
Hallelujah is an interjection from the Hebrew language, used as an expression of gratitude to God. The term is used 24 times in the Tanakh, twice in deuterocanonical books, and four times in the Christian Book of Revelation.
Songs of Leonard Cohen is the debut album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released on December 27, 1967, on Columbia Records. More successful in Europe than in North America, Songs of Leonard Cohen foreshadowed the kind of chart success Cohen would go on to achieve. It peaked at number 13 on the UK Albums Chart, spending nearly a year and a half on it. In the US, it reached number 83 on the Billboard 200.
Various Positions is the seventh studio album by Leonard Cohen, released in December 1984. It marked not only his turn to a modern sound and use of synthesizers, but also, after the harmonies and backing vocals from Jennifer Warnes on the previous Recent Songs (1979), an even greater contribution from Warnes, who is credited equally to Cohen as vocalist on all of the tracks.
Live from the Bataclan is a live EP by singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, released in October 1995 . It was recorded at the Bataclan in Paris, France, in early 1995.
"Hallelujah" is a song written by Canadian singer Leonard Cohen, originally released on his album Various Positions (1984). Achieving little initial success, the song found greater popular acclaim through a new version recorded by John Cale in 1991. Cale's version inspired a 1994 recording by Jeff Buckley that in 2004 was ranked number 259 on Rolling Stone's "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
Live À L'Olympia is a live album by Jeff Buckley, released in 2001. It is the second posthumous live album released since his death in 1997. The CD consists of performances taken from two separate concerts Buckley and his band played on July 6/7, 1995 at Paris Olympia. The French crowd were very receptive as he was well regarded there, as shown when he was awarded France's prestigious "Grand Prix International du Disque" earlier that year. Buckley paused midway in some of the songs to address the crowd and "Hallelujah" features ad-libbed lyrics in response to their enthusiasm. The album also features a version of a song from Nina Simone's repertoire, "That's All I Ask". It is one of two versions of the song officially released, the other appearing on a three-track bonus disc issued with Australian copies of Buckley's Mystery White Boy live album. Buckley played the song at various concerts on his 1995 European tour.
Live in Chicago is a live DVD by Jeff Buckley, recorded on May 13, 1995 at Cabaret Metro during the Mystery White Boy tour. Soul Coughing co-headlined the show, and only audio of their set was recorded. Originally broadcast on Chicago music video program JBTV, it was released on DVD and VHS on May 9, 2000. In 2007 it was re-released with a different cover to accompany the release of So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley.
Anjani Thomas is an American singer-songwriter and pianist, best known for her work with singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, as well as Carl Anderson, Frank Gambale, and Stanley Clarke. She became a solo artist in 2000.
Jason René Castro is an American acoustic/folk-pop singer, songwriter, and real estate agent. He was the fourth place finalist on season seven of American Idol. After Idol, he signed a recording contract with Atlantic Records, and his self-titled debut album was released on April 13, 2010.
Alan Light is an American journalist who has been a rock critic for Rolling Stone and the editor-in-chief for Vibe,Spin, and Tracks.
Leonard Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter and poet who was active in music from 1967 until his death in 2016. Cohen released 14 studio albums and eight live albums during the course of a recording career lasting almost 50 years, throughout which he remained an active poet. His entire catalogue is available on Columbia Records. His 1967 debut Songs of Leonard Cohen earned an RIAA gold record; he followed up with three more highly acclaimed albums: Songs from a Room (1969), Songs of Love and Hate (1971) and New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), before allowing Phil Spector to produce Death of a Ladies' Man for Warner Bros. Records in 1977. Cohen returned to Columbia in 1979 for Recent Songs, but the label declined to release his next album, Various Positions (1984) in the US, leaving it to American shops to import it from CBS Canada. In 1988, Columbia got behind Cohen again and gave full support to I'm Your Man, which brought his career to new heights, and Cohen followed it with 1992's The Future.
Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist. Themes commonly explored throughout his work include faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, and sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. In 2011, he received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize.
Holly Lerski is an English singer and songwriter known both for her work with Angelou and for her solo career.
Greetings from Tim Buckley is a 2012 American film directed by Daniel Algrant starring Penn Badgley and Imogen Poots. The film follows the journey Jeff Buckley took in grappling with the legacy of his late musician father, Tim, leading up to and culminating with his performance of his father's songs. The film premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2012 to generally positive reviews. The film was released on May 3, 2013, in a limited release.
Jordan Jansen is an Australian pop singer from Gold Coast, Queensland.
A secular hymn is a type of non-religious popular song that has elements in common with religious music, especially with Christian hymns. The concept goes back at least as far as 17 BCE when the Roman emperor Augustus commissioned the Roman poet Horace to write lyrics by that title. The idea has been recognized in popular music at least since the late 1960s and early 1970s when people began to see a pattern in songs, such as "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon and Garfunkel, "Let it Be" by the Beatles, and "Fire and Rain" by James Taylor, which came out at about the same time. "Hallelujah" has since been called perhaps the quintessential secular hymn despite the lyrics containing strong Jewish themes.
John Lissauer is an American composer, producer, and performer. At the age of 19, he arranged the first recordings of Al Jarreau. Lissauer went on to produce and arrange a pair of Leonard Cohen albums, including the song "Hallelujah" which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2019. He has been a composer or music producer for record albums, films, and radio and TV commercials. Lissauer received a Clio "Campaign of the Decade" award for his work for Polaroid.
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song is a 2022 feature-length documentary biographical film created by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine describing the story of Leonard Cohen, focusing on his song "Hallelujah". The film is based on Alan Light's 2012 book The Holy or the Broken.