If you were Leonard Cohen, and you kept hearing how no one considers your version of “Hallelujah” to be the best one—and, trust me, most people do not—you might be tempted, on your new tour, to change the song’s arrangement a bit. Make it a little more like that dead pretty boy, with chiming guitar, or more like the viola guy from that Warhol band, a little peppier and piano-driven. But did he?
Sexy siren and star of Rob Reiner’s 1994 classic North Scarlett Johansson has covered a Jeff Buckley song. And it sucks. And you can hear it inside! And if that’s not what gets people to click inside blog threads then we’ve been going at this Internet thing all wrong! What if we told you we had nude photos of her too?
In news that only the hardest-hearted among us (ahem, Superineficaz) will be grumpy about, Canadian songwriter and former Buddhist monk Leonard Cohen will play his first United States show in 15 years at New York’s Beacon Theater on Feb. 19. That place has a capacity of 2,800, and I’m making the ballsiest prediction of my life here: it’s gonna be a sellout. Tickets go on sale this Friday. But there’s a dark side to all of this.
Ed. note: Chris “dennisobell” Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on this week’s Billboard charts:
When the producers of American Idol announced at the start of this season that, for the first time, they would be selling contestants’ performances on iTunes, but that iTunes had agreed not to report those sales publicly or to Billboard, we chart geeks grumbled. How would we know how big an impact the show had on consumers’ instant whims?
We needn’t have worried–we’ve still got plenty of old songs, the ones the contestants sing, to keep an eye on. Long story short–the show is still huge, and it affects music sales like nothing since Ed Sullivan. Idol contestant Jason Castro: the estates of Cohen and Buckley thank you.
As of this moment, Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”–which Jason Castro performed last night to much fanfare and Googling–is No. 5 on the iTunes Music Store’s Top Songs chart and Nos. 2 and 7 on the Amazon MP3 store’s singles chart; Cohen’s version is also at No. 98 on Amazon. More »
American Idol hopeful Jason Castro performed his take on the Jeff Buckley interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” that won huzzahs from the judges tonight, thus continuing the long, strange journey of Cohen’s song from hyperserious-to-an-almost-satirical-point track to something that… More »
