A Broken Hallelujah Audiobook By Liel Leibovitz cover art

A Broken Hallelujah

Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen

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A Broken Hallelujah

By: Liel Leibovitz
Narrated by: Liel Leibovitz
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About this listen

Brings to life a passionate poet-turned-musician and what compels him and his work.

Why is it that Leonard Cohen receives the sort of reverence we reserve for a precious few living artists? Why are his songs, three or four decades after their original release, suddenly gracing the charts, blockbuster movie sound tracks, and television singing competitions? And why is it that while most of his contemporaries are either long dead or engaged in uninspired nostalgia tours, Cohen is at the peak of his powers and popularity?

These are the questions at the heart of A Broken Hallelujah, a meditation on the singer, his music, and the ideas and beliefs at its core. Granted extraordinary access to Cohen’s personal papers, Liel Leibovitz examines the intricacies of the man whose performing career began with a crippling bout of stage fright, yet who, only a few years later, tamed a rowdy crowd on the Isle of Wight, preventing further violence; the artist who had gone from a successful world tour and a movie star girlfriend to a long residency in a remote Zen retreat; and the rare spiritual seeker for whom the principles of traditional Judaism, the tenets of Zen Buddhism, and the iconography of Christianity all align. The portrait that emerges is that of an artist attuned to notions of justice, lust, longing, loneliness, and redemption, and possessing the sort of voice and vision commonly reserved only for the prophets.

More than just an account of Cohen’s life, A Broken Hallelujah is an intimate look at the artist that is as emotionally astute as it is philosophically observant. Delving into the sources and meaning of Cohen’s work, Leibovitz beautifully illuminates what Cohen is telling us and why we listen so intensely.

©2014 Liel Leibovitz (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
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What listeners say about A Broken Hallelujah

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Authors should NOT read their own books

I couldn't get past the poor narration. It might have been a good book, I tried, skipped forward listened for an hour, repeated sequence... I just couldn't get past the narrator.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

B-Sides and Demos

Any additional comments?

Sometimes when you’re a hardcore fan of a band or a singer, a completist, you come across the old “B-Sides and Demos” style release and just have to have it. There are usually some familiar songs in their original unproduced incarnations, a promising song that never made it onto any of the official releases, and a lot of things you tell yourself – for as long as it takes to justify the price of the album – are OK.

This book reads a lot like a B-Sides and Demos release.

On the one hand, Leibovitz has an intriguing fundamental take on Cohen. He sees him as a kind of wannabe prophet, someone pushing popular music to more authentically spiritual dimensions than anyone else. He has a number of striking readings of Cohen songs, and he adds some real depth to a few. I’ve been listening to a lot Cohen’s music in the last several weeks – more than at any other time in my life – and Leibovitz gives me a few new ways to listen to something like “Famous Blue Raincoat” as a song vacillating between an abstract philosophical inquiry and a personal, signed letter.

But…much of the rest of this feels like filler, like the demo tracks that might have sounded good at the time and now don’t feel fleshed out.

To take a representative example, we get an extended description of the Isle of Wight Music Festival. We hear about its promoter, about the anarchists resolved to overturn it, about the performers’ reactions to hostile crowds. For 20+ pages, it feels as if the book is going to talk just about the festival. And then, near the end of the section, Cohen emerges and calms the audience by talking to them. It’s a great scene, and it led me to what my favorite music books do: to track down the track described on Youtube and enjoy it in a new way.

I expect that exegesis to be emblematic of how Leibovitz sees Cohen on stage, but it turns out to be mostly anomalous. Cohen was not generally able to connect with crowds in those days. It’s a great story, but the first two-thirds feel like digression and the final third doesn’t seem to connect to the rest of the portrait Leibovitz is painting.

We get similar digressions all the time. We hear about Jewish religious practices, about the rise of punk or prog rock, about the zeitgeist of 1975 or 1984. There are places for that kind of work. Greil Marcus – widely quoted here and a clear inspiration – has a knack for doing what we might call rock criticism’s version of literary theory’s new historicism, of taking a small cultural moment and demonstrating how it reflects larger political and aesthetic tensions of its age. But Leibovbitz – as well and as insightfully as he writes in small sections – doesn’t quite have that same breadth of vision for his subject. (At least not here. I get the impression I’d enjoy spending time with this guy.)

The largest problem here, however, is that the book can’t quite decide what it wants to be. It isn’t quite a biography though we do get substantial pieces of Cohen’s life. It isn’t quite a literary analysis because it jumps from one era to another too markedly, never quite developing its core argument but applying it in repeated (if interesting) ways. And it isn’t quite a music history since we hear anecdotes of performance but no sustained description of Cohen as performer.

In the end, this works to take me back to Cohen’s music, but it seems more an invitation to return to the greatest hits – to the songs I already know – than to explore more rarities from the, sadly, now deceased master. Leibovitz has some tunes that I think could be polished and produced into hits, but they feel too much like unfinished demos for me to recommend this as highly as its best parts make me want to.


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5 people found this helpful

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Leonard cohen book

good story. the narrators voice pronunciation of words and cadence is hard to get past.

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4 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing .....Hallelujaah

I am fascinated by passion. Those amazing people are focused on their vision. This is the story of a Jewish intellectual Canadian who never fit into the time or place he lived.....but has profoundly shaped poetry and music. If you are a fan of dense and upper level vocabularies this is a rich find. It rather reminded me of wine lovers reviewing various wines. The taste, the smell etc all have a special vocabulary. I don't know it but if you listen to the wine lover you feel his passion and share the experience. This was an amazing experience...

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    4 out of 5 stars
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There is a crack

Good and interesting "story". At times, however, it goes into lengthy discussions that could be made concise leaving more space for the real story.

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4 people found this helpful

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FACTUAL, WELL-RESEARCHED AND BORING

if nothing else, Liel Leibovitz has a catchy title for his work. He went into great detail with Leonard Cohen's poetry reminding the reader that Leonard Cohen was not just a singer or song writer, he was a gifted poet. However, the book reads like a senior thesis. I suspect it was , and after being highly praised by academics, it was turned into a book. It should come with a warning notice that iit is acceptable for reference purposes but not entertaining.

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A beautiful story about a beautiful man

What disappointed you about A Broken Hallelujah?

The reader! Why, oh why, didn't the author hire a professional reader? Even though I listened to the end, it was painful. I had to work so hard to understand his immature phrasing, and his attempts at foreign names was unintelligible.

What did you like best about this story?

The subject. I'll read anything written about Leonard Cohen.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Liel Leibovitz?

Joshua Pollock who read I'm Your Man is good.

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8 people found this helpful