Alan Light Quotes & Sayings

You don't need a major label and they sure don't need you. — Alan Light

Though most cultural observers hadn't noticed it yet, everything was now in place for "Hallelujah" to sweep through the pop landscape. It was a song that had multiple strong, emotional connections with millions of listeners. Its mood was both fixed and malleable, universal and specific. It was familiar enough to resonate, obscure enough to remain cool. Though its most celebrated performer was gone forever, its mysterious creator had come back to the spotlight just in time.
After 2001, whether it signified an individual's solitude (human or monster or otherwise) or a population in mourning, "Hallelujah" - now far removed from Leonard Cohen's initial," rather joyous" intent - was established as the definitive representation of sadness for a new generation. — Alan Light

After the Beatles and Dylan, there's this assumption that you are a singer-songwriter, or that if someone else is writing your rhymes, you're a fake rapper. — Alan Light

Needless to say, the song ["Hallelujah"] was now a climax in every show [of the 2009 Leonard Cohen tour], received like holy scripture. It belonged in a category with seeing Bob Dylan sing "Like a Rolling Stone" or watching Bruce Springsteen perform "Born to Run" - it was an event that people simply wanted to witness, to say they had seen. It took on a power that had to do with the song's history first, its feeling second, and its details hardly at all. Every performance carried with it a sense of where this song had been, who had sung it,where and how every listener had first encountered it; it had reached a place where it was something to be experienced, rather than listened to. — Alan Light

It's easy to say that reducing a song to 90 seconds on "American Idol" strips off so many things, and how it's the 21st century and music doesn't mean the same things to people and that it's so disposable. — Alan Light

A rock band is a mysterious thing. Somehow, every once in a while, a few individuals bump into one another, and they look exactly right together and share a focus and an aspiration and the right balance of musical similarities and differences. — Alan Light

In country and R&B, there's much more of that division between writers and performers, and that's where you see more of those [crossover] songs, but you don't get a lot of that coming out of the more pop and rock side of things. — Alan Light

It's a rather joyous song," Cohen said when Various Positions was released. "I like very much the last verse - 'And even though it all went wrong, / I'll stand before the Lord of Song / with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah! — Alan Light