Sentenced: Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen
You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
from Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen
There is a lot of great stuff floating around about Leonard Cohen, but even after hearing it a million times, even before it was a cover by everyone and their mother, Hallelujah is one of the songs of his I can always stop and listen to. I won’t always find something new, but it is just a great song.
The original version is my favorite, nothing wrong with all the different cover and live versions, but this is the version of the song I always think of.
The lines about there being ‘blaze of light in every word’, always gets me thinking about how complex the interaction is between what mean to say, how you say it, even before you get around looking at what you say. Something I think about when I spend an uncomfortable amount of time looking for just the right word for a scene, if the emotion of the scene or the justification of the scene are not right then even the perfect word won’t save it.
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