The writing of “Hallelujah” is one of the most documented creative processes in modern music. Cohen has talked about it across decades of interviews with the specific combination of wonder and frustration of someone describing an experience that exceeded the ordinary boundaries of what writing feels like. He spent five years on it. The number of verses he wrote in that time has been cited as anywhere between fifty and eighty — a body of draft material from which the published versions of the song represent only a fraction.
He worked on it in hotel rooms across whatever tour was current. He worked on it in the apartment in Montreal where he maintained a base across the years of his adult life. He worked on it at the Zen monastery on Mount Baldy in California where he spent years as a student and eventual ordained monk. The song followed him. Or he followed the song. The distinction was not always clear to him and he has said as much — that there were periods when he was not sure whether he was writing a song or being written by one.
The specific challenge of the song — the thing that made it take five years and fifty verses and the specific quality of sustained creative suffering that Cohen described — was not technical. He was a sophisticated craftsman. He could write a finished lyric. The challenge was finding the true version. The version that said what the song was trying to say in the specific way that the song needed to say it. There were many finished versions. Finished in the technical sense. He kept working because finished and true were not the same thing and he could feel the difference.
Then one night — the specific date is not recorded in any account but the season was autumn, which Cohen always described as his most productive time — he finished it. Not finished in the sense of stopping work because the work had become too much. Finished in the other sense. The sense of completion that arrives rarely and cannot be manufactured. The sense of looking at what exists and understanding that the thing you were trying to make is now actually there.
He made a recording. Not a studio recording — a home recording, on equipment that was modest by any professional standard. Just himself and a guitar and the song. He recorded it the night he finished writing it and he did not tell anyone he had made the recording and he did not play it for anyone.
It was found in his apartment after his death in November 2016. Among the papers and notebooks and the accumulated artifacts of a creative life that his family was sorting through in the weeks after the death. The recording was labeled in his handwriting — the date and the words “first true version.”
The people who heard it first were his son Adam and the small group of people managing his estate. The accounts of that listening come in fragments — from Adam, briefly, in an interview that was not primarily about the recording. He said that his father sounded different on it. That the quality of the voice was unlike the recordings made for public consumption. That he sounded like someone alone with something he had been trying to reach for five years and had finally touched.
He sounded, Adam Cohen said, relieved.
Five years. Fifty verses. One night alone with the finished thing.
He recorded it and told nobody. He kept it as a private document of the moment of completion — a record for himself of what it felt like when the work was finally done.
“Hallelujah” has since been recorded by hundreds of artists. It has been played at funerals and weddings and Olympic ceremonies and presidential inaugurations. It has become one of the most widely performed songs in the English language.
The first true version exists on a home recording in Montreal. A man alone with a guitar on an autumn night, singing the song that had taken five years to find.