The Holy or the Broken Quotes

“There is a religious hallelujah, but there are many other ones[....] When one looks at the world, there's only one thing to say, and it's hallelujah. That's the way it is.”
― Leonard Cohen, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah"

“Hallelujah is a Hebrew word which means “Glory to the Lord.” The song explains that many kinds of hallelujahs do exist. I say all the perfect and broken hallelujahs have an equal value. It’s a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way, but with enthusiasm, with emotion. —Leonard Cohen


Whoever listens carefully to “Hallelujah” will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth. The hallelujah is not an homage to a worshipped person, idol, or god, but the hallelujah of the orgasm. It’s an ode to life and love. —Jeff Buckley”
― Alan Light, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah"

“It's funny, I've decided 'Hallelujah' is a kind of Rorschach test for people, because everyone has a different reaction to it and to what I'm doing. I just sang it, and whatever came out was just natural and spontaneous and maybe that's the best thing, because there's a kind of enigma, both in the meaning of the words and the way Leonard Cohen said them, that catches people's attention.”
― Renée Fleming, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah"

“it’s a hymn of the heretic, a piyut [liturgical poem] of a modern, doubtful person.”
― Alan Light, The Holy or the Broken

“This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled,” Cohen has said, “but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’ That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say, ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.’ . . . “The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say, ‘Look, I don’t understand a fucking thing at all—Hallelujah!’ That’s the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.”
― Alan Light, The Holy or the Broken

“Needless to say, the song ["Hallelujah"] was now a climax in every show [of the 2009 Leonard Cohen tour], received like holy scripture. It belonged in a category with seeing Bob Dylan sing "Like a Rolling Stone" or watching Bruce Springsteen perform "Born to Run"—it was an event that people simply wanted to witness, to say they had seen. It took on a power that had to do with the song's history first, its feeling second, and its details hardly at all. Every performance carried with it a sense of where this song had been, who had sung it,where and how every listener had first encountered it; it had reached a place where it was something to be experienced, rather than listened to.”
― Alan Light, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah"

“Though most cultural observers hadn't noticed it yet, everything was now in place for "Hallelujah" to sweep through the pop landscape. It was a song that had multiple strong, emotional connections with millions of listeners. Its mood was both fixed and malleable, universal and specific. It was familiar enough to resonate, obscure enough to remain cool. Though its most celebrated performer was gone forever, its mysterious creator had come back to the spotlight just in time.
After 2001, whether it signified an individual's solitude (human or monster or otherwise) or a population in mourning, "Hallelujah"—now far removed from Leonard Cohen's initial," rather joyous" intent—was established as the definitive representation of sadness for a new generation.”
― Alan Light, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah"

“It’s a rather joyous song,” Cohen said when Various Positions was released. “I like very much the last verse—‘And even though it all went wrong, / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song / with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!”
― Alan Light, The Holy or the Broken