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The Lord of Song: “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song”

Before Cohen and Lissauer went into the studio to record, the song had already had an early life of its own – a kind of painful adolescence. Light recounts the story of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen meeting in Paris. “Dylan asked me how long it took me to write,” Cohen reported. “I told him…

‘I only am escaped alone to tell thee’: Bob Dylan’s Tempest

With Bob Dylan turning 80 last month, when I thought of a song to revisit, my mind went almost immediately to the title track on his penultimate album of original music, Tempest (2012). The song charts the sinking of the Titanic a century earlier in April 1912, and is based on a ballad by The…

Main image: Lewis Chessmen © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Blog content: © Benedict Gilbert 2021