Izzy sings Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah

After all, I do have a blog post to share before I go and return from the Lake District and Scottish borders: my daughter, Isobel Moody, singing her heart out on her rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah:

There are many versions of this song: Cohen spent years writing and rewriting it; so to help memory along just these are quoted here:

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the Name in vain
I don’t even know the Name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah …

These are the additional lyrics as per Cohen Live (and Jeff Buckley et al); there are rumoured to be many more verses but these are the ones also that appear in Stranger Music so if there are any more available I don’t know where they are

baby I’ve been here before
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
love is not a victory march
it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

There was a time you let me know
What’s really going on below
but now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Maybe there’s a God above
but all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s no complaint you hear tonight
It’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the light
it’s a cold and it’s a lonely(/broken )Hallelujah
…that David played and it pleased the Lord…

Ellen

Yvette sings Taylor Swift, with Ian from on high looking on

Evenings Ian will leap up high to the hutch (bookshelf) on top of Yvette’s extended desk-like furniture set. You see him looking startled when he realized Yvette was photographing him:

Singing Taylor Swift

Do click to see and hear her.

Are we out of the woods? is anyone ever out of the woods? Remember Sondheim’s lunge Into the Woods.

I like how clearly the words of Swift’s song come across in Yvette’s rendition. In Swift’s rendition I cannot hear them so cannot get the situation. (I am more than a little deaf I sometimes surmize.) I also like the high notes Yvette hits towards the end. Have a look at her hutch: it contains her favorite books: all Patrick O’Brien, all and much Austen (and Persuasions periodicals); her music and Latin and Roman culture and history books: she majored in music, with her voice as her primary instrument, her trumpet her secondary; she minored in Latin and by extension the classical ancient world under Rome. Librarianship came later.

Emily Blunt as the baker’s wife in the Disneyfied Into the Woods — nonetheless going it alone …

Miss Drake