The Hallelujah Effect -- Crossing Blogs

DrHGuy – Another Other Leonard Cohen Site On Life, Love, Lust, & Leonard Cohen

Cross-posting a blog post from a Leonard Cohen site by Allan Showalter that fans of Leonard Cohen should know about. Comments on the overpricing of The Hallelujah Effect are, alas, spot on: the book is woefully overpriced, should be ordered for libraries and should be read there.  

I can say this as the author because I don't make anything from the book (I can't afford it myself: cost me a fortune to send a copy to Cohen himself -- and, remarkably, the publisher did not do that). 

Of course, that's why this is not only a book about Leonard Cohen, and his Hallelujah, about other Hallelujahs from the Bible to Handel and so on to Al Jolson, and a reading of the history of covers of Hallelujahs --- including the one singer almost everyone else, including Alan White, author of yet "another other" new book on Cohen's Hallelujah, manages to pass over in silence. That is the singer k.d.lang as her extraordinary voice illustrates the song as a song, the very musical power of Leonard Cohen's song. And she does it as musicians say, as even Leonard Cohen has said, like no one else. 

For this reason this book had to include three bonus or extra tracks, as it were, about the music industry, about Adorno's Current of Music, and about the centrality of Beethoven in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy.

But maybe I should take a tip from the music industry and just issue the tracks all on their ownsome...