The reason everyone covers Cale's version of "Hallelujah" is not licensing, it's that his arrangement is so compelling that he made it impossible to hear the song any other way. If he hadn't, few would know it existed. Cale reinvented that song. In the annals of aesthetic justice he gets a cowriting credit beside Cohen.
John Cale is a classic under-the-radar genius. Drastically reworking songs has been one of his specialties for decades; he did it to "Heartbreak Hotel" twice. But "Hallelujah" was a freakish success. It used to bug me that no one ever mentioned Cale when that song came up (only Jeff Buckley, who copied him) but that has finally changed.
What screwed Cale is that his version was replaced on the Shrek soundtrack by Rufus Wainwright's carbon copy, because the record label wanted to promote Wainright at the time. Your point applies to that maneuver.
Curious factoid: of the few covers of "Hallelujah" that existed before Cale reworked it, one was by Bob Dylan. It's easy to see why Dylan would have singled that one out, but still, kind of amazing.
Comments
Thank you for spelling this out.
This explains why there are so many god damn awful covers of John Cale's cover of Hallelujah.
The reason everyone covers Cale's version of "Hallelujah" is not licensing, it's that his arrangement is so compelling that he made it impossible to hear the song any other way. If he hadn't, few would know it existed. Cale reinvented that song. In the annals of aesthetic justice he gets a cowriting credit beside Cohen.
John Cale is a classic under-the-radar genius. Drastically reworking songs has been one of his specialties for decades; he did it to "Heartbreak Hotel" twice. But "Hallelujah" was a freakish success. It used to bug me that no one ever mentioned Cale when that song came up (only Jeff Buckley, who copied him) but that has finally changed.
What screwed Cale is that his version was replaced on the Shrek soundtrack by Rufus Wainwright's carbon copy, because the record label wanted to promote Wainright at the time. Your point applies to that maneuver.
Curious factoid: of the few covers of "Hallelujah" that existed before Cale reworked it, one was by Bob Dylan. It's easy to see why Dylan would have singled that one out, but still, kind of amazing.
Leonard Cohen wiki page has a link to a whole book about this song's history.