Hallelujah! Leonard Cohen’s almighty struggle with rejected song that became a classic

Hallelujah is one of the most famous songs ever written, yet a new film reveals it took Leonard Cohen 180 attempts over a decade to perfect – only for it to be rejected by his record company. Nearly 20 years went by before an animated ogre, Shrek, turned the song into a monster hit.

The makers of the documentary, Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, had unprecedented access to Cohen’s many notebooks, showing his scrawled handwriting and deletions. “We got Leonard’s ‘tacit blessing’ not long before he died in 2016,” says co-director Dan Geller.

Cohen had pencilled in his ill-fated meeting with the president of Columbia Records, Walter Yetnikoff, who turned down the album, Various Positions, on which Hallelujah was the main track.

One day in 1984, John Lissauer, his arranger and producer of many years, got a call. “Leonard asked if I wanted to make a record as he had some new songs, including one called Hallelujah. I never asked about the lyrics or for him to explain them as that would have been insulting. I simply wanted to be the audience. I really thought Columbia would like it. Boy, was I wrong. Yetnikoff hated it.”