Encore: Hallelujah

How does genius emerge? Kicking off our summer series, Malcolm digs into the Revisionist History archive to revisit Elvis Costello’s song “Deportee” and explore the power of innovation. Get ad-free episodes to Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin http://apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkin See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 0:28Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 1:05Speaker 02

  Purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply. See paypal.com/risk-management for details.

• 1:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  Pushkin.

• 1:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Years ago, and this is going to date me, my best friend Bruce and I used to make mixtapes for each other. Actually, mixed CDs. We used to spend enormous amounts of time picking the songs, and then an even more enormous amount of time on the art for the CD box. My mixes were always named after popes for reasons I cannot remember, like Pope Pius XII with a big photocopied picture of him in some ermine robe. Anyway, the point of the mixes, and I think this is true of everyone who grew up in the mix era, was to find songs that you knew about and liked, and that you believed that your best friend didn't know about and would like. Which, if you're talking about someone with whom you've been sharing music your whole life, is a pretty narrow window.

• 2:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Anyway, Bruce put the acoustic re-release of Elvis Costello's Deporti on a special mix. I think it was for one of my birthdays in my roaring twenties. I just remember thinking two things as I listened to that song over and over again. First, I knew the first version and hated it. And this was the same song sung by the same artist. And now in this form, it was magical. How did that work? The second thing I remember thinking is, this is why God invented best friends. I still think that, by the way. Here we go, the first in our musical encore, Hallelujah.

• 2:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  In 1984, Elvis Costello released his ninth album, Goodbye Cruel World. I bought it the week it came out because I bought every Elvis Costello album back then the week it came out. There's a theory in psychology, the music you listen to at ages 19 and 20 is the music that imprints itself most deeply on your consciousness. If you make a list of your favorite songs, you'll see what I mean. Anyway, I was 20 in 1984, so I remember Goodbye Cruel World. I listened to it right away. And this episode is about one song on that album. It's called "The Deportes Club." I still have it on vinyl. It goes like this.

• 3:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh God, it's awful.

• 3:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things forgotten or misunderstood.

• 4:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  This week, I want to go back to Elvis Costello in 1984. I should say, you don't have to know anything about Elvis Costello, or even like his music, to be interested in this story. I'm not talking about Deportes Club as a song, but as a symbol. I'm interested in understanding how creativity works. And I've chosen Deportes Club as my case study for the purely arbitrary reason that I'm obsessed with it. And maybe, hopefully, you will be too, once we're finished.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 5:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. And we've all gone down an internet rabbit hole, exploring the latest health trends. Your social media feed is packed with wellness advice, telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype, from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio, is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real people, and, most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction.

• 6:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We spend hours researching products online and deciding what to buy, but there's a split-second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit the buy now button? The way we discover and compare things is evolving, happening faster and influenced by new forms of intelligent advice. But the underlying trust question doesn't go away. If anything, it's more important than ever. That's where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, they've been a trusted way to pay.

• 6:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  And now PayPal can make the agentic era of commerce work for merchants, letting them maintain control of their brand, their customer relationships. So even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most still feels familiar and deeply dependable. PayPal is built for all business. Get started at paypal.com/business. Purchase and sell our protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply. See paypal.com/risk-management for details.

• 7:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  "Deep Oates Club" is the second-to-last song on the B-side of "Goodbye, Cruel World." The album cover is a picture of a little mountaintop with two trees on it, with Costello and his band members in various strange poses. It's all very 80s. The record was produced by two legends of the British music scene at the time, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. You've probably heard some of their work. They did records with Madness, Lloyd Cole, David Bowie, virtually all of the great English new wave hit songs of the 1980s and early 1990s. Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley were the guys behind the curtain. I don't know if you've ever heard "Come on, Eileen" by Dexys Midnight Runners. "Come on, Eileen, oh, I swear what he means.

• 8:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  At this moment, you mean everything." Now, I'm a terrible singer, but maybe you can make that out. That song, Langer and Winstanley.

• 8:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  Clive Langer knows Elvis Costello, of course. They would bump into each other in the way that people in a small world always bump into each other, and new wave music in the 1980s was a small world. At one point, Langer has his own band, and he was doing a show in a riverboat on the River Mersey. Costello calls him up.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  And he said, "Oh, I'll come up and play a few songs before you go on."

• 8:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's Langer. We met at a pub on Lauriston Road in Hackney in North London. He's slightly spidery, with close-cropped white hair and oversized glasses, and the kind of graciousness that only the English seem to possess. An absolutely delightful person. My father is English, and all older charming Englishmen remind me of my father. We had some tea. It was all very civilized. Okay, back to Elvis Costello.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  He came up and played all his best songs, I mean, his hits, you know, "Allison" and everything.

• 9:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  "Allison," Costello's first big hit.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  And then I had to go on and do my first-ever show with the same lineup, and we weren't as good, you know? So I don't know, I didn't know quite how to take that.

• 9:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  If you detect a little bit of friction in that, you're not wrong. Elvis Costello is a genius, and like a lot of geniuses, he has a really strong personality.

• 9:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  A few years pass, and Costello's record label decides they want to broaden his commercial appeal. He has a fanatical following among those who know new wave music, but the label wants a big commercial hit. So they turn to the hitmakers, Langer and Winstanley. And the two of them produce a record for Costello called Punch the Clock, which has a number of absolutely exquisite songs, including "Shipbuilding," which Langer co-wrote with Elvis Costello.

• 10:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  You collaborate on Punch the Clock.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  And you like that album?

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Yes, he doesn't.

• 10:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  And he doesn't?

• 10:37Speaker 03

  No.

• 10:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  Why is he unhappy with it?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  I think it was just too commercial at that time. And he wanted to write something simpler, more live, more, you know, he's more of a purist than I am. So I was brought up with psychedelic pop in the mid 60s. So I was kind of like, oh, we can do this, we can do that, you know. And he's like, I want it to sound real and like Bob Dylan or something, you know. But, and when you get that right, that's amazing.

• 11:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  I want to hear a little bit more about Punch the Clock, about whether those differences in perspective had an impact on the way the record turned out.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Not so much on Punch the Clock, we didn't have tension. We had tension later, which I'll talk to you about.

• 11:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  What we did have, when we did the playback of Punch the Clock, we got quite drunk and played it back really loud.

• 11:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  Of course they did. And how much would you kill to have been in the room with them?

• 11:33Speaker 03

  And he kind of freaked out, said, it's all rubbish. It's terrible, it's terrible. And I was like, I had to, you know, calm him down a bit and we all carried on.

• 11:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  When the time comes to make the next album, Castello turns to Langer and Winstanley again, only this time.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  The first thing he said is, I want to call it Goodbye, Coral World. I think it's going to be my last album, which he didn't even tell the band. So he was confiding in me.

• 12:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  They do a first run-through, recording all the songs live. Langer is the producer, the one who's supposed to be running the show, but immediately there's an issue. Elvis basically takes over.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Because he's quite a forceful, powerful guy, very eloquent and, you know, lovely. But he can sort of barge in and start changing things, you know. So I remember saying to him, thanks for letting me be here to listen to you make your record, you know, but I don't think it should go like that, it shouldn't be like this, you know.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  So it was a bit, we were a bit of a standoff. I think he went out and bought a half bottle of gin and...

• 12:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  I asked Langer why Costello said this was going to be his last album. It's not like he was an old man, ready to retire.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  He wasn't even 30. It was just he'd had a lot on his back, you know, he'd been through a lot. I don't know if he wanted to carry on playing the game at that point.

• 13:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  The result is disastrous. I hated "Goodbye Cruel World" when I first heard it. And remember, I'm a massive Elvis Costello fan. A couple of years ago, Costello did a television variety show called "Spectacle." Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome to the stage, the one and only Mr. Nick Lowe! And in the episode where he interviews Nick Lowe and Richard Thompson, the camera pans the audience, and twice, you see me, grinning madly. As I said, I'm a massive Elvis Costello fan, and believe me when I say, "Goodbye Cruel World" was unlistenable, especially "Deportees Club." It was angry and loud and upsetting.

• 13:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  And I'm not the only one who feels that way.

• 13:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  In 1995, the album is re-released by Ryko Disc Records, and Elvis Costello writes in the liner notes, "Congratulations, you've just purchased our worst album." You have to kind of admire his honesty.

• 14:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  Except, on that same re-release, Costello includes a new version of "Deportees Club", one of the songs on the original album he hates so much. He gives it a new melody and plays it by himself, an acoustic version, shortens the title to "Deportee," fiddles with some of the lyrics. And it never appears anywhere else, just on this random re-release by Ryko Disc Records, whatever that is. And I would never have heard it, except that my friend Bruce ran across it and played it for me. Bruce, by the way, was also in the audience of that Elvis Costello TV show, grinning madly. Anyway, Bruce and I used to make mixtapes for each other.

• 14:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  And he puts this new version, "Deportee," on a mixtape for my birthday. And I become obsessed with it. I'll bet I sing parts of it to myself almost every day. I don't really know why, but it might be one of my favorite songs ever. There's a line in it that jumps into my head whenever I'm sad. It's so perfect. A little couplet about the dissolution of romantic love. "And you don't know where to start or where to stop. All this pillow talk is finely talking shop."

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Can we play it?

• 15:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. I'm in the pub with Clive Langer, the producer of the original awful version, "Deportee's Club." Strangely, he'd never heard the new obscure and amazing version of the song he produced so long ago. Want to hear the...

• 15:49Speaker 03

  His new version?

• 15:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  So I found it on my iPhone. And Langer leaned his head over the table so that his ear would be right next to the tiny phone speaker. Let's see, is this the one?

• 16:48Speaker 03

  You know,

• 16:50Speaker 03

  it sounds like he's found the song.

• 16:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  But he didn't know at the time either that that's what the song... I mean, that's what's sort of fascinating, that...

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  Neither of you, in the moment...

• 17:00Speaker 03

  No, well, sometimes, you know, if it's not sounding right, maybe, I don't know. Maybe we were not focused enough. You know, maybe we were making a record, but we were miles away, you know.

• 17:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  In the end, they, Elvis Costello and his producers, all thought they had put out something mediocre. What they didn't understand until much later was that that mediocrity contained a bit of genius. It's just that it hadn't become genius yet.

• 17:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's what I want to talk about. Time and iteration. What happens when genius takes its sweet time to emerge? I know that this is just one three-minute song. Maybe you don't even like it. But every time I hear it, I think the same thing, which is, this is something that gives a lot of people in the world pleasure, including me, and it almost didn't happen. If Elvis Costello doesn't go back and revisit Deporti's Club, turn it into Deporti, we miss all that beauty. And the thought of that breaks my heart.

• 18:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  There's a theory about creativity that I've always loved. It's an idea that an economist named David Galenson came up with. Galenson is an art lover, and it strikes him when looking at modern art that there are two very different trajectories that great artists seem to take. On the one hand, there are those who do their best work very early in their life. They tend to work quickly. They have very specific ideas that they want to communicate, and they can articulate those ideas clearly. They plan precisely and meticulously, then they execute, boom. Galenson calls them conceptual innovators. Picasso is a great example. He bursts on the scene in his early twenties and electrifies the art world at the turn of the last century.

• 18:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  I think that someone like Picasso is who we have in mind when we think of that word genius.

• 19:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  But Galenson says, wait a minute. There's another kind of creativity. He calls it experimental innovation. Experimental innovators are people who never have a clear, easily articulated idea. They don't work quickly. When they start off, they don't really know where they're going. They work by trial and error. They do endless drafts. They're perpetually unsatisfied. It can take them a lifetime to figure out what they want to say. Who's a good example? Cezanne. Every bit as famous and important a painter as Picasso may be the greatest of the impressionists who reinvent modern art in Paris in the late 1800s. But Cezanne's genius and Picasso's genius, they could not be more different.

• 19:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  Why don't we start with your favorite? Do you have a favorite in this room?

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Well, maybe my favorite at the moment is that one, the back.

• 20:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'm talking to a man named John Elderfield. He's a Cezanne expert, and he took me to that gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York where they have all of their Cezannes. Easily a few billion dollars' worth of paintings in one room. And it took only about five minutes, wandering from picture to picture with Elderfield, to see experimental genius in action.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  So this is one of the many portraits of his wife that Cezanne made. And it's one of four pictures done in a short period of time when they were living together in Paris.

• 20:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  The Cezanne we're looking at is a picture of a middle-aged woman, seated. Her head is tilted slightly to the side. As with a lot of Cezanne's portraits, we can see only one of her ears. He didn't like doing the second ear. She's sitting quietly, almost floating in the chair.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  And I think it's arguably, you know, one of the greatest portraits that he did.

• 20:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's one of a series of four similar portraits. Elderfield says that the first two are a little smaller, looser, maybe one traced from another. And then a third, much like the one we're looking at, but without any background painted in, just a figure. Is this very typical of the way he worked? So he does, essentially comes back to her four times and you think it's it right?

• 21:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  Notice my assumption here, because what I was thinking when I said that bit about, "he gets it right the fourth time," was that if Cezanne did four versions, he must have been marching towards some kind of preordained conclusion. He has an idea and he's perfecting it. But that's not Cezanne. Standard practice is you do a sketch, work out the problems, do a finished version. Cezanne kind of starts in the middle. The fourth version of Cezanne's portrait of his wife, the one we're looking at, is less finished than his second and third versions.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Well, for example, here you can see there's unfinished parts, or putatively unfinished parts. I mean, like the area of the dress there, where there's like, you can really see the ground of the canvas and all the way through the lower part, and you can see he's been putting these brushstrokes down and not actually filling them all together.

• 22:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Cezanne didn't work according to some clear, linear plan. He basically just did versions, over and again, iteration after iteration, trying to stumble on something that seized his imagination. Many of Cezanne's paintings are unsigned because he doesn't want to admit to himself that he's done. He does portraits of his art dealer, Ambrose Villard, and he makes him come for 100 sittings. A hundred?

• 22:37Speaker 04

  A hundred.

• 22:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Normally, there would be how many in that year?

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, normally for portraits, it would just be a relatively short number. I mean, five or something.

• 22:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Why does he need 100?

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Exactly. I mean, so what's he doing all the time?

• 22:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Cezanne was never finished. This is what David Gellensson means by experimental genius. And Gellensson points out that you can see this creative type in virtually every field.

• 23:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick when he's 32, writes it in a heartbeat. He's Picasso.

• 23:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  Mark Twain publishes Huck Finn when he's in his late 40s, and it takes him forever because he ends up obsessively rewriting and rewriting the ending. He's Cezanne.

• 23:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  Orson Welles does Citizen Kane when he's 24, Picasso. Alfred Hitchcock doesn't reach his prime until his mid 50s, after he spent his entire career making one thriller after another, playing with the genre over and over again. Cezanne.

• 23:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  But there's one field where I think Galenson's theory plays out the most powerfully, and that's music.

• 24:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's the song "Hallelujah." It was composed by the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, but basically, everybody has done a cover of "Hallelujah." Rufus Wainwright, U2, Jeff Buckley, Bon Jovi, John Cale, Bob Dylan. I could go on. It's featured in countless TV and movie soundtracks. If you ride the New York City subway on a regular basis, you'll probably hear a busker singing it virtually every day. Like a good Canadian, I go to a Canada Day celebration every year at Joe's Pub in Manhattan, where local artists sing cover versions of Canadian songs. Every year, someone does a version of "Hallelujah." Every year, it brings down the house. And here's what's interesting about that song. It is so not Picasso.

• 24:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  It is Cezanne. Textbook Cezanne.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 25:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. And we've all gone down an internet rabbit hole, exploring the latest health trends. Your social media feed is packed with wellness advice, telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez has racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction.

• 26:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We spend hours researching products online and deciding what to buy. But there's a split-second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit the buy now button? The way we discover and compare things is evolving, happening faster and influenced by new forms of intelligent advice. But the underlying trust question doesn't go away. If anything, it's more important than ever. That's where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, they've been a trusted way to pay. And now PayPal can make the agentic era of commerce

• 27:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  work for merchants, letting them maintain control of their brand, their customer relationships. So even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most still feels familiar and deeply dependable. PayPal is built for all business. Get started at paypal.com/business. Purchase and sell our protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply. See paypal.com/risk-management for details.

• 27:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  A few years ago, the music writer Alan Light wrote an absolutely wonderful book, an entire book, on the song "Hallelujah." It's called "The Holy or the Broken," and one of the big themes is how peculiar Leonard Cohen is. He's a poet, a tortured poet.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  He is a writer in that way, that he labors over what these lyrics are, line by line, word by word, throws a lot away, spends a great deal of time, and "Hallelujah," famously out of all of these, is probably the song that he says bedeviled him the most.

• 28:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's Alan Light. He came by my house one day to talk about "Hallelujah."

• 28:19Speaker 05

  He sort of was chasing some idea with this song and couldn't find it and just kept writing and writing, and depending when he tells the story, wrote 50 or 60 or 70 verses for this song.

• 28:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Which is...

• 28:33Speaker 05

  Which is...

• 28:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  I mean, you've been writing about music for many, many years. Have you ever heard of a musician who wrote 80 different verses?

• 28:40Speaker 05

  I don't think so. I mean, and I don't know what that... I don't know if that means variations on verses. I don't know if that means entirely, like, how much of this is exaggeration.

• 28:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  It doesn't matter.

• 28:49Speaker 05

  But it doesn't matter. It's at a whole other...

• 28:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's a whole nother...

• 28:52Speaker 05

  Level. Well, there's the famous story that, you know, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan have this kind of mutual admiration thing, and apparently they met up in the 80s. At some point, they were both in Paris, and they went to meet at a café, and Dylan said, "Oh, I like that song, 'Hallelujah,'" which is a fascinating piece of this story, that really the first person who paid attention to "Hallelujah" as an important song was Bob Dylan. But he said to Leonard, "You know, I like that song. How long did you work on that?" And Leonard said, "I told him that I'd worked on it for two years."

• 29:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  Which was a lie. Cohen later confessed it took him much longer. Then Cohen asks Dylan how long it took him to write the song "I and I."

• 29:32Speaker 05

  And Bob said, "Yeah, 15 minutes."

• 29:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Dylan is Picasso.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  With Leonard, it's not the first thought, best thought school at all, and he talks about, you know, being in a hotel room in his underwear, banging his head on the floor because he couldn't solve this song, "Hallelujah."

• 29:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Leonard Cohen spends five years writing "Hallelujah." He finally records it in 1984. It's for an album called "Various Positions." When Cohen finishes recording the songs, he takes them to his record label, which is CBS, to the head of CBS, who's this legendary figure named Walter Yetnikoff, who's the guy who releases Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA. Not a dumb guy. Yetnikoff listens to Cohen's songs and says, "What is this? We're not releasing it. It's a disaster." The album ends up being released by the independent label Passport Records. It barely makes a ripple. And if you go back and listen to that first "Hallelujah" and try to forget how beautiful future versions would be,

• 30:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  the song's failure makes sense. It's not there yet. There's an essay written by Michael Barthel about the trajectory of "Hallelujah", and he calls Cohen's original version "so hyperserious that it's almost satire."

• 30:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kind of turgid, isn't it? But Cohen's not done. He keeps tinkering with it. He plays it in concerts and he slows it down. It becomes twice as long. He changes the first three verses, leaving only the final verses the same. The song becomes even darker this time around.

• 31:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've seen your flag on the marble arch. But listen, love, love is not some kind of victory march. No, it's a cold, and it's ever outbroken. Hallelujah.

• 31:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  One night, Cohen is playing this version at the Beacon Ballroom in New York, and the musician John Cale happens to be in the audience. Cale is a legend. He used to be in the Velvet Underground, a really pivotal figure in the rock and roll avant-garde. He hears this song come out of Cohen's mouth, and he's blown away. So he asks Cohen to send him the lyrics. He wants to do a version of it. So Cohen faxes him 15 pages. Who knows what the lyrics actually are at this point? Kale says that for his version, he took the cheeky parts. He ends up using the first two verses of the original, combined with three verses from the live performance. And Kale changes some words.

• 32:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Most importantly, he changes the theme and brings back the biblical references that Cohen had in the album version.

• 33:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kale is really the one who cracks the code of hallelujah, according to Alan Light. This cover version appears on a Leonard Cohen tribute album, put together by a French music magazine. It was called "I'm Your Fan," came out in 1991. Almost nobody bought "I'm Your Fan," except, weirdly, me. I think I found it in a remainder bin in a little record store on Columbia Road in Washington, DC. Another person who bought "I'm Your Fan" was a woman named Janine, who lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn. She was good friends with a young, aspiring singer named Jeff Buckley. He used to house-sit at her apartment. And one time, when Buckley's there, he happens to see the CD of "I'm Your Fan." He plays it.

• 33:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  He hears John Kale's version of "Hallelujah" and decides to do his own version of that version. He performs it at a tiny little bar in the East Village called Shinnay, where he happens to be heard by an executive from Columbia Records. So Columbia Records ends up signing Buckley, and he records his version of "Hallelujah" for the album Grace, which ends up being Buckley's first and only studio album. It came out in 1994.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  Now, I'm guessing that Buckley's version is the one you're most familiar with. It's the famous one, the definitive one. It's not really a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." It's a cover of John Cale's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," only with Cale's piano swapped out for a guitar. And of course Buckley swaps out Cale's voice for his own extraordinary voice.

• 34:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

• 34:49Speaker 05

  Every subsequent cover, and there have been hundreds, are really covers of Buckley covering Cale covering Cohen. So the evolution finally stops. But wait, not really.

• 35:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  Buckley records the song in 1994. Still, nobody particularly pays attention to it. I mean, again, in retrospect, we think of Jeff Buckley as this very important figure and this big influence on Radiohead and Coldplay. But nobody bought Grace. Nobody bought Jeff's record when it came out. It peaked at number 160 on the charts or something. It was a huge disappointment after all the hype around him. So that didn't make it a hit.

• 35:26Speaker 05

  Buckley is this incredibly handsome man, looks almost ethereal, like Jesus, with that incredible voice. But none of that is enough until 1997, when something tragic happens. Buckley's in Memphis, and he goes swimming in one of the channels of the Mississippi. He's wearing boots in all his clothing and singing the chorus of "Whole Lot of Love" by Led Zeppelin, and he vanishes, never seen again.

• 36:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  And that tragedy suddenly propels his work, and Hallelujah, into the spotlight.

• 36:26Speaker 05

  And it's really kind of, you know, as you hit the new century, that's when the snowball kind of starts. The first few covers, the first few soundtrack placements. It's 15 years since Leonard recorded this song.

• 36:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  15 years. And think about how many incredible twists and turns that song takes before it gets recognized as a work of genius.

• 37:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  It just happens that the independent label Passport Records releases the first version after the album it's on is rejected by CBS Records.

• 37:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  Then Leonard Cohen doesn't give up, keeps tinkering and performing new versions of Hallelujah. John Cale, one of the most influential musicians of his era, happens to hear Cohen doing that. He revises the song some more. Cale's version goes out on the obscure French CD, I'm a Fan, which goes nowhere except Janine's living room in Park Slope. And Janine happens to have a house sitter who happens to play it, happens to like it, and happens to have an ethereal, amazing voice. Buckley's version goes nowhere until he happens to die under the most dramatic and heartbreaking of circumstances. And then, finally, we recognize the genius of this song. But think about how fragile and elusive that bit of genius is.

• 37:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  If any of those incredibly random things don't happen, you probably would never have heard Hallelujah.

• 38:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  I don't think this crazy chain of happenstance matters so much with conceptual innovations. Paul Simon once says of "Bridge Over Troubled Water", one of the most beautiful pop songs ever written, "It came so fast, and when it was done, I said, 'Where did that come from? It doesn't seem like me.'" The song came out perfectly. You can evaluate it right away. It doesn't require 15 years' worth of twists and turns and random events. The world is really good at capturing conceptual creations. Or at least, we don't miss as many conceptual works because they don't require that the stars be perfectly aligned. But if you're Cezanne and the first version you produce is just a starting

• 38:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  point, and you never know exactly what you're doing, or why, or whether your work is finished or not, the stars really do have to be aligned. Cezanne was his own worst enemy in a way. He threw up barrier after barrier. He wasn't thinking of us when he painted his paintings. That was really John Elderfield's point. The art of the experimental innovator is elusive.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  There are some of them which now are in museums, which we know he had tried to destroy. I mean, and you can see in some of them, the cases of where he slashed their canvases.

• 39:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Why would he destroy his own canvases?

• 39:30Speaker 04

  You know, he had certain ideas about what he wanted to do and felt he actually never was actually getting to that point. There are other paintings done much later where he simply abandons them. And Picasso said that, you know, what actually engages us is Cezanne's doubt, his uncertainty.

• 39:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  He's obsessive.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's absolutely, just totally obsessive.

• 40:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  Elvis Costello, "Deporté" in its original flawed form. It comes out in 1984, the same year, by the way, that "Hallelujah" first came out. And I'm not sure that's a coincidence, because 1984 is a very particular moment in pop music. The biggest album of that year was Michael Jackson's Thriller. Pop music glossed to perfection. There's not a single stray note or emotion on that record. It's the antithesis of songs like "Hallelujah" or "Deporté."

• 40:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Along comes Costello. He wants to make an album in the midst of that cultural moment, and he's not interested in glossy perfection. His marriage is breaking up. He's having financial difficulties. He says later that Langer and Winstanley were "ill-equipped for dealing with someone of my temperament at that time. A nurse with a large, sedative syringe might have been more appropriate." Costello writes a series of dark, emotional, bitter songs, gritty and spare, to match his mood, something not 1984. Meanwhile, Langer and Winstanley have been brought on board to produce hits, polished, exquisite.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Every little bit was pondered over and, you know, thought about and put together very carefully. I mean, you had bands like Skriti Politi at that time, you know, spending nine months on a song and Trevor Horn spending four weeks on the snare sound for Two Tribes.

• 41:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Two Tribes was an album by a hugely popular band called Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and they spent a month just getting a particular drum sound right.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  So we weren't that peneccaty, but we were dealing with a world that was, you know, perfection. It was, we were trying to make pop perfection.

• 41:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  You can imagine what happened when that world collides with Elvis Costello.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Some of it just sounded like, I mean, even the band were kind of not very excited by some of the material. So it wasn't a great experience, but we did it very quickly.

• 42:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  What does quickly mean?

• 42:06Speaker 03

  In the time it took Trevor Horn to get a snare sound for Two Tribes. So it was about three or four weeks.

• 42:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  The whole album.

• 42:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  It was a mess, perfectionism in a hurry. That's how you get to the bitter words, "Congratulations, you've just bought my worst album." "Goodbye, Cruel World" is not good, it's unlistenable. But it's what happens next that matters. You know how people always say, "Put your failures behind you, get on with your life, never look back"? Elvis Costello does none of those things. Because he's Cezanne, he's not Picasso. He carries around a little black book where he writes draft after draft after draft of the songs he's thinking about. He changes lines in the middle of songs he's already recorded. He rearranges songs at different tempos or in different time signatures.

• 42:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  He cannibalizes his own work, quitting new songs out of old songs. And I don't know where to start or where to stop. He doesn't want to sign his name to the painting. And thank God there are people like him and Cezanne in this world. Because without the obsessives and the perpetually dissatisfied and the artists who go back over and over again, repainting what others see as finished, we would never have seen the beauty of Deporti.

• 43:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. You can get more information about this and other episodes at revisionisthistory.com or on your favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia Lobel, Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flan Williams is our engineer, and our fact checker is Michelle Soraka. The Panoply management team is Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

• 44:42Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 45:19Speaker 02

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• 45:29Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 46:13Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 46:58Malcolm Gladwell?

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