I just finished a book by Alan Light titled The Holy or the Broken. It is a book solely about the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah. I suppose one has to be somewhat of a music junkie to really like such a book, which makes sense, because I really liked it. In short, Cohen wrote the song over several years and it frustrated the heck out of him. Reportedly he wrote more than fifty verses. The version he originally selected to put on an album had five verses – and his record label refused to release the song, indeed, entire album. When Hallelujah was later ultimately released in 1984 it was essentially unnoticed. Ultimately, Cohen’s original was covered by John Cale. Cale contacted Cohen and asked him for the lyrics and came home to a a floor full of pages spewed from the fax machine. Cale picked a handful of verses, only two of which were on Cohen’s original release. Cale’s version received no great response. However, a then unknown singer named Jeff Buckley, while house sitting for someone, pulled an album from a stack and listened to Cale’s cover of Cohen’s Hallelujah. Buckley’s version, arguably the most famous (though it did not become popular until after Buckley’s tragic death) is then, a cover of Cale’s cover of Cohen’s original. Many versions we hear are then, covers three-times over. Most bear little in common with Cohen’s version other than the title and the fact that they use some of Cohen’s many verses. Prior to his death, Cohen generally played in concert some version of Cale’s or Buckley’s covers.
In reading the book I kept thinking of the quote from Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
There, that’s a long way to get to the punchline. It occurs to me that life is full of failure. The failure is a given, and not the end of the story unless we allow it to be. The trick is to, as Beckett wrote – “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
It occurs to me... 