Photo: Alex Wong
Singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was generally pretty laid back about the fact that one of the most famous songs he ever wrote only really got that way in the hands of others. While he occasionally nodded to the argument that his 1984 ode to religion and horniness, “Hallelujah,” had reached some kind of saturation point around its 300th or so cover version, Cohen also never seemed to be more than distantly amused by its unexpected ubiquity. (If he had any specific thoughts on Shrek, the movie that, bizarrely, injected the song directly into the mainstream consciousness—courtesy of a cover by John Cale—he kept them to himself.)