My Hallelujah

Getting right in death’s grill tends to wake up the creative, or anybody. I felt it when I was thrown out of the boat in Alaska last year. I felt it in New Orleans on New Year’s Day. I feel it through the horrific news from California as I write this. Many of us North Americans are in a permanent state of PTSD ever since 9/11. Recently, I have had bad news from the doctor and the IRS is after me. Somehow, I retain optimism from just being alive and able to create. God & Goddess knows that when I took the poetic vow of poverty that Jim Harrison wrote about, I then became rich with connection and friends. When it comes to traveling and great life experiences, my life is glorious bordering on ridiculous. I posted on line to borrow a car in Alaska next week and I got six offers. That blows my mind. Perhaps I am doing a lot of things wrong, but I am doing a few things right, and Alaska is proof of one of them. Onward…

I have always been fascinated with the Romanian Revolution, when the people took power & overthrew the corrupt, Communist dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, killing him and his wife on Christmas Day of 1989. I had just graduated from college, and was enthralled by the idea that the people could just take over. Not long after this time, I traveled through all of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, meeting various people who had lived through and participated in actual revolutions.

Fast forward to 1999 when I was living in Los Angeles and would see Leonard Cohen just hanging out in the back of his daughter Lorca’s furniture store on Melrose. I never spoke to him. Some conversations are better left to the imagination.

You cannot copyright a title. I admit it would be ambitious to write another song called “My Way” or “Yesterday,” but I always got a kick out of The Replacements cheekily calling one of their albums “LET IT BE.” The title “Hallelujah” simply cannot belong to one song. In fact it is the Hebrew expression to “praise Jah” which is thousands of years old. It also happens to be a very singable word and has been used in secular music countless times throughout the centuries. A few generations of singer-songwriters revere the Cohen tune, and rightfully so. When you Google the word “Hallelujah,” you don’t get Handel’s Messiah first on the screen, you get Leonard Cohen. There is a whole documentary made about his song. The fascinating part, for me, is that, much like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” there are verses which were censored on the most popular versions.

I began my Hallelujah with an observation of the Romanian Revolution and then just made a connection to the good, evil, sex, death, salvation, and the wonder of existence business much like Cohen did, or any lyric worth its salt.

All I know is that I wanted to write a song with that title. I have recorded demos of this song before. In pouring over the seventy some tunes I have collected together to make this next album, this one keeps coming to the surface, or makes the top fifteen anyway. You have to start somewhere when it comes to picking the songs to record for a new album. Having a lot of songs to choose from is another one of my quality problems today. The songwriter Ron Sexsmith says he often demos a song three times before settling on an arrangement. I more or less do the same, thanks to the ease of home recording gear. I still use modern technology like a 4-track cassette machine. I get the meat and potatoes in the stew and put it on the stove. Perhaps there will be less salt and more structure by the time I get into the studio.

I took a snowy day in Tennessee to just sit and sing it one more time while playing my old Kay guitar, tuned down a full step and run through the tremolo on my old Gretsch amp, which is a favorite sound on my many home recordings that you can find on my Patreon page. I put A LOT of songs on there. Sometimes, like today, it crosses over into my Substack world. Check it out.