You can read a bit about its creation on Neil Gaiman's blog here and a different take on it at PEN America's site here. You can watch it there, also, or you can check it out below.
When you're done, consider making a donation back on the PEN America page.
I know Neil Gaiman doesn't need my help in promoting anything, but I believe that these are dark days indeed, and this video shines as a bit of hopeful light in it.
Well done, Gaiman, Palmer, Cohen, and all who helped.
Well, this week delivered another fine blow: Leonard Cohen is dead. He was 82, so he had a reasonably long life, but I have to tell you that from where I stand right now, that's just not enough years--not for him, not for me, not for anyone.
At the risk of repeating everyone else, I'm putting here a relatively recent performance of his brilliant song, "Hallelujah."
Damn, another legend passes. 2016 has been brutal for musicians.
a song playing, just part of the background noise, and had it hit your heart, burrow into it, and take up residence there for a few days? That's what happened to me Wednesday night, at dinner at Castagna, and the song is still inside me, not there all the time, but peeking its head up now and then, soothing me and reminding me that it's not ready to leave yet.
Fortunately, it's a good song, one that evokes lovely moments.
I'm working on the end of draft two of Overthrowing Heaven. I'm closing in on it, and now that I'm so close to finishing this pass I know what I must play over and over: Jeff Buckley's cover of "Hallelujah."
Leonard Cohen wrote it, and I love his version, but for my money this Jeff Buckley rendition, the one from the album, not any of the live sessions, is the definitive one, the one you must hear. I chose this YouTube post, which isn't a video at all, just an excuse to post the song, precisely so you get Buckley from the ablum.
From the opening breath to the final notes, this song is pure and powerful and gut-wrenching.
What I love about this song is that you can listen to the words and spend as much time as you're willing to devote to it trying to decide exactly what Cohen meant--or you can simply let the sound of it, the mood of it, carry you away and feel it so strongly it overcomes you. No wonder the song appears so often on TV shows and is the subject of so many online postings.
Some songs hit me, reach inside me, and yank out a burbling sun of feelings, an ongoing natural reactor that is constantly on the edge of exploding. I can crank up this song, stand in the middle of a room, close my eyes, and work myself up to the point of almost unbearable emotion, body shaking, eyes squeezed shut, tears leaking.
Why would I do that?
Because life should be that intense sometimes, because art should hit us that hard, because I dream of writing sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books that smack someone else's heart around, that for a second let the two of us stand together in the searing, soaring fire of shared emotion.
It's true: I'm such a teenager still, all these years later.
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