"Hallelujah" in G Major

Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah" is possibly the greatest thing ever put to record. It's so good it's almost insulting to call it music. It's less a song, let alone a cover of a song, and more this secret little world that you get a glimpse of for a few minutes. It conjures something from nothing with just sound. It's light and darkness at the same time. It's pure passion, but it doesn't sacrifice structure or logic. It is perhaps the closest thing I've ever seen to something truly supernatural.

But it's not the whole story, nor should it be. "Hallelujah" is so widely covered because it's so ambiguous (unlike a lot of widely covered songs like "Yesterday," which are done because they're so universal). It can be sarcastic or achingly sincere, dark or redemptive, subdued or screamed, total crap or the greatest thing ever put to record (it also helps that you can pick and choose which parts to sing, and everyone including me seems to change the words). Even something as great as Buckley's version can't tell the whole story.

[In fact, I've written at least three different covers of this song, and every one of them is completely different. But more on that if I ever finish them.]

With this version I wanted to do something fairly dark, almost minor-key in the way it's sung (especially on the choruses, which are meant to sound pained and defeated, literally "broken"). In all honesty I probably bit off more than I could chew. I picked this version out of the three because I thought it would be relatively painless. Three weeks, fifty takes and one-and-a-half panic attacks later,* I was proven wrong. This was without a doubt the most difficult and time-consuming recording process I've ever had. The end result (for now at least) is what you hear now, which is successful in some ways but certainly isn't nearly as good as it could be.

There were basically three problems I had when recording this. 1.) Learning how to sing it. This version is a little talky, mainly so you can make out the words but also because I kept losing the good parts of my voice, and this was a decent compromise. Goddamn cold season**. 2.) I made a lot of mistakes. It's tricky chord progression, and it's hard to remember the third verse, because the best lines are at the end not the start, so you're always like how does the holy dove verse start oh shit I can't just keep playing people will realize it's cause I forgot the words better start over but now I'm rambling. 3.), and most annoyingly because you can't do anything about it, is volume. My setup has always been lo-fi, which a lot of people think is a good thing because they think it's what the music is supposed to sound like. It's not. Lo-fi in this case means that you can barely hear the quiet parts, and the loud parts hurt your ears and have all kinds of clipping problems***. For a song like this, which has lots of dynamics changes, it's basically a death sentence. In particular, the intro had to be changed from an arpeggiated part (which sounded sort of like Pachobel's canon, actually) to the more lamer thing in this version. I actually tried to dub over it with an electric guitar part, but it just sounded worse, though it did give me the idea to do the solo.

*Sadly neither of those is a joke.
** I'll probably, talk more about this in the "Ray of Light" and "Watchtower" posts, so I'm just giving you the Cliffs Notes here.
***For one take, I set the recording levels to "automatic," which gave me headaches to listen to. It's especially bad since it was otherwise probably the best take I did, much better than the final one, and I spent a week and a half trying to get something even close to it.