The term is used 24 times in the Hebrew Bible, twice in. But it’s like they said about Sinatra: Jeff could have sung the phone book and made it sound great. Hallelujah is an interjection from the Hebrew language, used as an expression of gratitude to God. “There’s a spiritual quality in Hallelujah that touches people,” Buckley’s one-time collaborator Gary Lucas once told this writer. By the time the 30-year-old’s body was dredged from the choppy waters of Tennessee’s Wolf River in May 1997, the song had taken on an almost unbearable poignancy. Released between grunge and Britrock, Buckley’s Hallelujah seemed a fragile anomaly, too good for this world. “I hope Leonard doesn’t hear it,” he once said – but that could only have been to spare the older songwriter the ignominy of hearing his own song perfected and wrestled away from him. There was a little of the Cale version (from 1991’s I’m Your Fan) here, but whereas the Velvet Underground man had led with the piano, Buckley elevated the song with a showcase of solo electric guitar, starting out rich, sad and slow, then blossoming into a shimmering instrumental passage that stopped all the clocks. Hallelujah is a Hebrew word meaning praise ye YAH (Yahweh). “Whoever listens closely to Hallelujah will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth,” Buckley once said. Hallelujah is not only a loanword it is also a compound word, as it is made up of two Hebrew words: Hallelu and Yah. It’s exultant but it’s also a song about the dark side of humanity and of our. The English word Hallelujah is a Hebrew loanword, which means that it came to us from Biblical Hebrew and has been absorbed in the exact same form in modern speech. And in late 1993, when Grace was recorded, he hammered home that sensual treatment (the track even begins with an audible sigh). The song, which includes several obvious Biblical references, utilizes the single word, Hallelujah, as its chorus. In early days, the singer-songwriter had made New York’s Sin-e club shiver with a reading that he said nodded to “the hallelujah of the orgasm”.
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