A little under a year ago I treated myself to a book purchase (something I do only rarely because of my perpetual and monumental reading backlog): Alan Light’s “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the unlikely ascent of “Hallelujah”.  But even having just read Light’s interesting book my attention piqued especially when my 12-year-old son was skimming my copy and asked of the foreword’s account of the 2012 inaugural PEN “Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence” awards, who was this ‘Berry’ guy who was being honoured along with Cohen?

I have sung, listened to, accompanied at various keyboards, considered, parodied (in the medieval sense implying more respect than humour or critique) this piece for only two of its four decades of life, whatever ‘life’ means to a song or for that matter, a poem. I even once re-wrote the lyrics for a wedding whose bride loved the song, but maintained a fierce disinterest in the song’s original content to the point that even my pragmatic theatre/church musicianship required of me lots of denial. But I must admit that I had until Light’s book no idea of the true ubiquity of the Canadian song and songwriter my 12-year-old knew while never having heard of Chuck Berry – just its musical perfection and the remarkable power of its intimate and vivid sentiments.

Two signposts in my own relationship with “Hallelujah” were accompanying a young Patricia O’Callaghan in a performance at St. James’ Cathedral, Toronto in the late 1990s, and then playing a minor role in the August 27 2011 state funeral of my distant acquaintance and political idol Jack Layton, when Steve Page’s version was deeply memorable to many, but confirmed that, in the words of Toronto critic Kevin Courrier, “[it] has lost its meaning and much of its sting. Sung now with a solemn reverence, as Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” often is, “Hallelujah” is about as misunderstood as Randy Newman’s “Sail Away.” (to be fair to Page, in a conversation I had with him backstage he like the rest of us had not much notice before taking part in the Layton funeral, and agreed with many others that it was a challenging and bordering chlicheed request.)

Some versions, like the John Cale’s from 1991, famously used in the 2001 movie Shrek!, and the late Jeff Buckley’s backing video of the World Trade Centre attacks later that year became holy writ in the “Hallelujah” canon while others, like Bono’s and Sandra Boyle’s, fell more into a continuum ranging from missed opportunity to outright embarrassment. But in the end words and music make this obscure (and at the time rejected outright by Columbia Records in perhaps one of music industry’s most legendary missteps) 1984 masterpiece into something timeless, transfixing, and endlessly vital.  When in 2004 k.d. Lang contributed a beautiful symphonic-scale arrangement into the repertoire, its most poignant attribute IMHO was its album title, “Hymns of the 49th Parallel” – reclaiming the work not just for the country she, Cohen and I share, but also for Cohen’s deeply nuanced and often tortured faith journey.

Perhaps Salman Rushdie, an author of mythic power in his own right and presenter of Cohen’s award in 2012, said it best: “(it’s) joyous and despondent, a celebration and a lament, a juxtaposition of dark Old Testament imagery with an irresistibly uplifting chorus, ‘Hallelujah’ is an open-ended meditation on love and faith.”

“There is a religious hallelujah, but there are many other ones,” Cohen once said. “When one looks at the world, there’s only one thing to say, and it’s hallelujah. That’s the way it is.”

CD & Scooter

Like many musicians middle age has not financially empowered me to buy a sports car, even if I wanted to.  My new vehicle is human powered and has two wheels – but it is not a bike, I’m NOT wearing a stitch (if that’s the right micro-unit) of Lycra, and I was recently surprised to learn a remarkable lesson about music from my new wheels.

There are few reliable assumptions in the musician’s life.  Many in the mainstream workforce struggle in the ‘new economy’ to survive temporary contracts, lack of benefits, highly variable work conditions and constantly-changing colleagues and circumstances; musicians, who are mostly in effect hired and fired every day by individual project, who have never had access to anything resembling conventional job security or meaningful health benefits (even publicly mandated ones like maternity leave), and who must often adapt to new instruments, new mission-critical colleagues including soloists and conductors, new hall acoustics, new genres of music and other wide-ranging demands untranslatable to those outside of the field… well, we tend to yawn and politely support while whistling in our minds, or inaudibly through our teeth, “You can cry me a river.”

(As some of you will know, ‘cry me a river’ originated in the 1953 Arthur Hamilton song – NOT in the 2002 break-up between Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, a fact that neither Timberlake nor the proprietary Wikipedia entry on the song he included in that year’s “Justified” solo debut studio album seem very interested to share).

Middle age is traditionally a time for reflecting on one’s work and life, and my scooter has taught me that I have a three-part response to the challenges of a musician’s life, even as I continue to reap the rewards and savour the joys thirty-or-so- years in.

My account of Kickscooting: One leg (in my case, the right) takes on a role of support – it flexes, it locks, it releases as needed – but it provides no power.  The other leg (in my case, the left) provides the power, and the real response to the road (/sidewalk) surface and the pedestrians and their vehicles including strollers, grocery carts, and so on.  And beyond safely navigating what lies immediately ahead my hands are what keep me headed where I’m needing to go (and apply the brakes, if needed!)

So HERE’S THE IDEA:  Musical life requires all three – a supporting level of knowledge and discipline, like my RIGHT leg on the scooter; a degree of power able to push ourselves towards our limits and others around us to new understandings as needed – like my LEFT leg on the scooter, and critically also A PAIR OF HANDS to work on, and direct where all of this is going.  Nor is this such a bad model for creating and interpreting music.

-CD