Hallelujah

One night last week I was sitting in front of my computer, too tired to do anything useful, so I went to Youtube and typed in "Hallelujah." Started checking out versions of Leonard Cohen's masterpiece. Jeff Buckley's is stunning. Rufus Wainwright's is beautiful, although he insists on losing the rhymes for the hook. I had never heard the John Cale recording before, and that was amazing (piano, fiddle, cello).

There's also a young woman named Alyssa Bernal who was a surprise. At a glance I assumed that she had acheived her popularity on her looks (sexist? I suppose, but listen/look at some of our other currently singers, make and female) . Turns out she has a great voice. On the other end of the scale we have Dylan's recording, which was not so impressive.

This all popped into my head because I happened to see a review of the movie Watchmen (which I haven't seen), by Marvin Olasky in a Christian magazine in which he complains that "It's pornographic in part, most obnoxiously in a sex scene that uses Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" as sacrilegious musical background."

My question is, does Olasky think Cohen's song is sacriligious, or is it just the use of it in a sex scene that he finds to be so? If the former, I'll grant him his opinon. If the latter, I think he's missing the point of the song, which seems to be about the spirituality of lust.

I may have missed one, but I don't think any recordings on Youtube included the last verse, which Cohen sang a live recording. It has the to-die-for line "I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch."

Watching the piano versions where Cale and Wainwright pour out endless sets of triplets I was thinking: Hmm, some Celtic band ought to record it as a jig. 6/8 time. Wouldn't that annoy people?

Here is Mr. Cale's version.

Carolina Chocolate Drops in Port Townsend

One of the first posts I made on this blog was about seeing the Carolina Chocolate Drops in Port Townsend at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes. Turns out someone was there with a camera. This is "Viper Mad," one of three videos from their performance that day. When the camera pans to the right it stops about a foot short of showing me in the audience; lucky for you, I guess.

Rhiannon Giddens (the female Drop) said their lawyer hates these amateur recordings showing up on the Web, but the band loves it. I'm sure it brings in a ton of new fans. If this performance doesn't knock your socks off your socks are made of stronger stuff than mine. Which may not make much sense but, as John Diamond said, "Desperate times call for desperate analogies."