Encore: Hallelujah

23:36Many of Cézanne's paintings are unsigned because he doesn't want to admit to himself that he's done. He does portraits of his art dealer, Ambrose Vallard, and he makes him come for a hundred sittings. A hundred? A hundred. Normally there would be how many in that yard? Well, I mean, normally for portraits, it would just be a relatively short number. I mean, five or something. Why does he need a hundred? Exactly. I mean, so what's he doing all the time? Cézanne was never finished. This is what David Galenson means by experimental genius. And Galenson points out that you can see this creative type in virtually every field.

24:17Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick when he's 32, writes it in a heartbeat. He's Picasso. Mark Twain publishes Huck Finn when he's in his late 40s, and it takes him forever because he ends up obsessively rewriting and rewriting the ending. He's Cezanne. Orson Welles does Citizen Kane when he's 24, Picasso. Alfred Hitchcock doesn't reach his prime until his mid-50s, after he spent his entire career making one thriller after another, playing with the genre over and over again, Cezanne. But there's one field where I think Galenson's theory plays out the most powerfully, and that's music. It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, The minor fall, the major lift, the baffled king composing.

25:09And hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. That's the song Hallelujah. It was composed by the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen. But basically everybody has done a cover of Hallelujah. Rufus Wainwright, U2, Jeff Buckley, Bon Jovi, John Cale, Bob Dylan. I could go on. It's featured in countless TV and movie soundtracks. If you ride the New York City subway on a regular basis, you'll probably hear a busker singing it virtually every day. Like a good Canadian, I go to a Canada Day celebration every year at Joe's Pub in Manhattan where local artists sing cover versions of Canadian songs. Every year, someone does a version of Hallelujah.

25:58every year it brings down the house. And here's what's interesting about that song. It is so not Picasso. It is Cezanne. Textbook Cezanne.

26:16This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now, imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving.

26:57And you stay in control. You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT. You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode. available on Plus and Pro plans. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. This episode is sponsored by Navy Federal Credit Union. Buying a car can be like a long road trip. There's negotiating prices, lots of fees, and a difficult process.

27:36But with an auto loan from Navy Federal, you're on the highway to higher savings. They want the members to save more on their next auto purchase. That's why they offer great rates, military discounts, and pre-approvals that are good for 90 days. Plus, Navy Federal offers most decisions in seconds. So if you want to save more on your next auto purchase, learn more and apply for an auto loan at navyfederal.org slash autoloans. Navy Federal Credit Union. Navy Federal is insured by NCUA, credit and collateral subject to approval. Terms and conditions apply for military discounts. Visit navyfederal.org slash autoloans for details.

28:20These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. And we've all gone down an internet rabbit hole exploring the latest health trends. Your social media feed is packed with wellness advice telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction.

29:04Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A few years ago, the music writer Alan Light wrote an absolutely wonderful book, an entire book, on the song Hallelujah. It's called The Holy or the Broken, and one of the big themes is how peculiar Leonard Cohen is. He's a poet, a tortured poet. He is a writer in that way, that he labors over what these lyrics are, line by line, word by word, throws a lot away, spends a great deal of time. And Hallelujah, famously out of all of these, is probably the song that he says bedeviled him the most.

29:51That's Alan Light. He came by my house one day to talk about Hallelujah. He sort of was chasing some idea with this song and couldn't find it and just kept writing and writing. And depending when he tells the story, he wrote 50 or 60 or 70 verses for this song. You've been writing about music for many, many years. Have you ever heard of a musician who wrote 80 different verses? I don't think so. And I don't know if that means variations on verses. I don't know if that means entirely. How much of this is exaggeration? But it doesn't matter. It's a whole other level. Well, there's the famous story that, you know, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan have this kind of mutual admiration thing.

30:33And apparently they met up in the 80s. At some point they were both in Paris and they went to meet at a cafe. And Dylan said, oh, I like that song Hallelujah, which is a fascinating piece of this story that really the first person who paid attention to Hallelujah as an important song was Bob Dylan. But he said to Leonard, you know, I like that song. How long do you work on that? And Leonard said, I told him that I'd worked on it for two years. Which was a lie. Cohen later confessed it took him much longer. Then Cohen asks Dylan how long it took him to write the song Eye and Eye. And Bob said, yeah, 15 minutes.

31:10Dylan is Picasso. With Leonard, it's not the first thought, best thought school at all. And he talks about, you know, being in a hotel room in his underwear, banging his head on the floor because he couldn't solve this song Hallelujah. Leonard Cohen spends five years writing Hallelujah. He finally records it in 1984. It's for an album called Various Positions. When Cohen finishes recording the songs, he takes them to his record label, which is CBS, to the head of CBS, who's this legendary figure named Walter Yetnikoff, who's the guy who releases Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce Springsteen's Born in USA.

31:48say. Not a dumb guy. Yetnikov listens to Cohen's songs and says, what is this? We're not releasing it. It's a disaster. The album ends up being released by the independent label Passport Records. It barely makes a ripple. And if you go back and listen to that first Hallelujah and try to forget how beautiful future versions would be, the song's failure makes sense. It's not there yet. There's an essay written by Michael Parthel about the trajectory of Hallelujah, and he calls Cohen's original version so hyper-serious that it's almost satire.

32:28Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

32:32Hallelujah! Kind of turgid, isn't it? But Cohen's not done. He keeps tinkering with it. He plays it in concerts and he slows it down. It becomes twice as long. He changes the first three verses, leaving only the final verses the same. The song becomes even darker this time around. Yeah, and I'll sing your flag on the marble arch. But listen, love, love is not some kind of victory march. No, it's a cold and it's ever outbroken. Hallelujah.

33:16Hallelujah One night, Cohen is playing this version at the Beacon Ballroom in New York, and the musician John Cale happens to be in the audience. Cale is a legend, used to be in the Velvet Underground, a really pivotal figure in the rock and roll avant-garde. He hears this song come out of Cohen's mouth, and he's blown away. So he asks Cohen to send him the lyrics. He wants to do a version of it, so Cohen faxes him 15 pages. Who knows what the lyrics actually are at this point? Cale says that for his version, he took the cheeky parts. He ends up using the first two verses of the original combined with three verses from the live performance.

33:58And Cale changes some words. Most importantly, he changes the theme and brings back the biblical references that Cohen had in the album version. Maybe there's a God above All I ever learned from love Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you And it's not a cry you can hear at night It's not somebody you've seen the light It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah Hallelujah Kayla's really the one who cracks the code of Hallelujah, according to Alan Light. This cover version appears on a Leonard Cohen tribute album put together by a French music magazine. It was called I'm Your Fan. It came out in 1991.

34:51Almost nobody bought I'm Your Fan, except, weirdly, me. I think I found it in a remainder bin in a little record store on Columbia Road in Washington, D.C. Another person who bought I'm Your Fan was a woman named Janine, who lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn. She was good friends with a young, aspiring singer named Jeff Buckley. He used to house-sit at her apartment. And one time, when Buckley's there, he happens to see the CD of I'm Your Fan. He plays it. He hears John Cale's version of Hallelujah and decides to do his own version of that version. He performs it at a tiny little bar in the East Village called Cheney, where he happens to be heard by an executive from Columbia Records.

35:33So Columbia Records ends up signing Buckley, and he records his version of Hallelujah for the album Grace, which ends up being Buckley's first and only studio album. It came out in 1994. Remember when I moved in you And the holy dove was moving too And every breath we drew

36:01Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Now I'm guessing that Buckley's version is the one you're most familiar with. It's the famous one, the definitive one. It's not really a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, it's a cover of John Kale's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, only with Kale's piano swapped out for a guitar. And of course, Buckley swaps out Cale's voice for his own extraordinary voice. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

36:54Every subsequent cover, and there have been hundreds, are really covers of Buckley covering Kale covering Cohen. So the evolution finally stops. But wait, not really. Buckley records a song in 1994. Still nobody particularly pays attention to it. I mean, again, in retrospect, we think of Jeff Buckley as this very important figure and this big influence on Radiohead and Coldplay. But nobody bought Grace. Nobody bought Jeff's record when it came out. It peaked at number 160 on the charts or something. It was a huge disappointment after all the hype around him. So that didn't make it a hit. Buckley is this incredibly handsome man.

37:34Looks almost ethereal, like Jesus, with that incredible voice. But none of that is enough until 1997 when something tragic happens. Buckley's in Memphis, and he goes swimming in one of the channels of the Mississippi. He's wearing boots and all his clothing and singing the chorus of Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin. And he vanishes, never seen again. And that tragedy suddenly propels his work, and hallelujah, into the spotlight. And it's really kind of, you know, as you hit the new century, that's when the snowball kind of starts. The first few covers, the first few soundtrack placements. It's 15 years since Leonard recorded this song.

38:2115 years. And think about how many incredible twists and turns that song takes before it gets recognized as a work of genius.

38:35It just happens that the independent label Passport Records releases the first version, after the album it's on is rejected by CBS Records. Then Leonard Cohen doesn't give up, keeps tinkering and performing new versions of Hallelujah. John Cale, one of the most influential musicians of his era, happens to hear Cohen doing that. He revises the song some more. Cale's version goes out on the obscure French CD I'm a Fan, which goes nowhere except Janine's living room in Park Slope. And Janine happens to have a house sitter who happens to play it, happens to like it, and happens to have an ethereal, amazing voice.

39:14Buckley's version goes nowhere until he happens to die under the most dramatic and heartbreaking of circumstances. And then, finally, we recognize the genius of this song. But think about how fragile and elusive that bit of genius is. If any of those incredibly random things don't happen, you probably would never have heard Hallelujah.

39:43I don't think this crazy chain of happenstance matters so much with conceptual innovations. Paul Simon once says, A Bridge Over Troubled Water, one of the most beautiful pop songs ever written, It came so fast, and when it was done, I said, Where did that come from? It doesn't seem like me. The song came out perfectly. You can evaluate it right away. It doesn't require 15 years' worth of twists and turns and random events. The world is really good at capturing conceptual creations. Or at least, we don't miss as many conceptual works, because they don't require that the stars be perfectly aligned.

40:22But if your Cezanne and the first version you produce is just a starting point, and you never know exactly what you're doing or why or whether your work is finished or not, the stars really do have to be aligned. Cezanne was his own worst enemy in a way. He threw up barrier after barrier. He wasn't thinking of us when he painted his paintings. That was really John Elderfield's point. The art of the experimental innovator is elusive. There are some of them which now are in museums, which we know he had tried to destroy. I mean, and you can see in some of them, the cases of where he slashed the canvases.

41:03Why would he destroy his own canvases? You know, he had certain ideas about what he wanted to do and felt he actually never was actually getting to that point. There are other paintings done much later where he simply abandons them. And Picasso said that, you know, what actually engages us is Cézanne's doubt, his uncertainty. He's obsessive. Yeah, he's absolutely, just totally obsessive.

41:39Elvis Costello, Deportee in its original flawed form. It comes out in 1984, the same year, by the way, that Hallelujah first came out. And I'm not sure that's a coincidence, because 1984 is a very particular moment in pop music. The biggest album of that year was Michael Jackson's Thriller, Pop Music Gloss to Perfection. There's not a single stray note or emotion on that record. It's the antithesis of songs like Hallelujah or Deportee. Along comes Costello. He wants to make an album in the midst of that cultural moment, and he's not interested in glossy perfection. His marriage is breaking up.

42:21He's having financial difficulties. He says later that Langer and Winstanley were ill-equipped for dealing with someone of my temperament at that time, A nurse with a large sedative syringe might have been more appropriate. Costello writes a series of dark, emotional, bitter songs, gritty and spare, to match his mood, something not 1984. Meanwhile, Langer and Winstanley have been brought on board to produce hits, polished, exquisite. Every little bit was pondered over and, you know, thought about and put together very carefully. I mean, you had bands like Scree, Politi at that time, spending nine months on a song and Trevor Horn spending four weeks on the snare sound for Two Tribes.

43:07Two Tribes was an album by a hugely popular band called Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and they spent a month just getting a particular drum sound right. So we weren't that pernickety, but we were dealing with a world that was, you know, perfection. We were trying to make pop perfection. You can imagine what happened when that world collides with Elvis Costello. Some of it just sounded like, I mean, even the band were kind of not very excited by some of the material. So it wasn't a great experience, but we did it very quickly. What does quickly mean? In the time it took Trevor Horn to get a snare sound for Two Tribes.

43:46So it was about three or four weeks, the whole album. It was a mess. Perfectionism in a hurry. That's how you get to the bitter words, congratulations, you've just bought my worst album. Goodbye, cruel world is not good. It's unlistenable. But it's what happens next that matters. You know how people always say, put your failures behind you, get on with your life, never look back? Elvis Costello does none of those things. Because he's Cezanne. He's not Picasso. He carries around a little black book where he writes draft after draft after draft of the songs he's thinking about. He changes lines in the middle of songs he's already recorded.

44:27He rearranges songs at different tempos or in different time signatures. He cannibalizes his own work, creating new songs out of old songs. And I don't know where to start or where to stop. He doesn't want to sign his name to the painting. And thank God there are people like him and Cezanne in this world, because without the obsessives and the perpetually dissatisfied and the artists who go back over and over again repainting what others see as finished, we would never have seen the beauty of Deportee. And you don't know where to start or where to stop All this pillow talk is nothing more than Finally talk and shop

45:22You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. You can get more information about this and other episodes at revisionisthistory.com or on your favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flan Williams is our engineer, and our fact-checker is Michelle Siraca. The Panoply management team is Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

46:16A business gift should do more than check a box. It should reflect your brand and show someone they're appreciated, recognized, and truly seen. That's why teams trust 4imprint. With thousands of high-quality, customizable products like premium apparel, drinkware, tech, and more, it's easy to create a gift that feels meaningful and on-brand. And with 4imprint's expert support and their 360-degree guarantee, you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive exactly as intended. Explore gifting with confidence at 4imprint.com. 4imprint for certain. We spend hours deciding what to buy, but there's a split-second decision that can make or break a sale.

47:07Do you have the trust to hit buy now? Agentic Commerce is testing that moment more than ever. And that's where PayPal comes in. With 25 years of checkouts, 400 million consumer accounts globally, and the benefit of purchase and seller protection, all of which makes sure wherever a purchase starts, it ends with trust. Built for payments, growth, and agentic. PayPal Open, built for all business. Visit paypalopen.com. Purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply. See paypal.com slash risk-management for details. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Medal of Honor Stories of Courage.

47:51This episode is sponsored by Navy Federal Credit Union. They offer great rates and pre-approvals that are good for 90 days. Plus, you could even get$200 when you refinance your auto loans from another lender with Navy Federal Credit Union. Learn more at NavyFederal.org slash autoloans. Navy Federal Credit Union. Navy Federal is insured by NCUA. Credit and collateral subject to approval. Refinance loan must be at least$5 ,000 to be eligible for the$200. Terms and conditions apply. Visit NavyFederal.org slash autoloans for details.