When Haim launched “Hallelujah” in November 2019, the title alone invited confusion. This wasn’t a Leonard Cohen cowl. It wasn’t a hymn.
It was one thing quieter and extra private: a track in regards to the individuals who catch you when the whole lot else falls away.
The monitor arrived because the third single from what would turn out to be Ladies in Music Pt. III, following “Summer season Woman” and “Now I’m in It”.
The place these songs orbited round Danielle Haim’s experiences with nervousness and romantic turbulence, “Hallelujah” widened the lens.
This wasn’t about one individual’s breaking level. It was about three sisters acknowledging the load every carries, and the reduction of not carrying it alone.
Alana Haim wrote her verse after waking up on an October morning when she was 20 to study that her finest pal, Sammi Kane Kraft, had died in a automotive accident.
The loss rewired her understanding of permanence. She began serious about all of the milestones Sammi wouldn’t see: turning 21 collectively in Vegas, travelling to festivals world wide, standing beside her at a marriage.
The verse doesn’t dwell on the grief itself. It focuses on what stays after somebody is gone, and who you flip to when language fails.
Este’s verse got here from a unique type of rupture. Recognized with Kind 1 diabetes at 14, she had spent years managing the situation with the type of self-discipline that makes it invisible to everybody else.
However across the time she wrote her a part of the track, she obtained troublesome information from her endocrinologist.
She’d been ignoring warning indicators, letting the fixed vigilance slip. She described the sensation as “diabetic burnout”, when the 24-hour accountability of managing a continual sickness turns into too exhausting to maintain.
Her verse doesn’t identify the sickness. It speaks as an alternative to the fragility of making an attempt to carry the whole lot collectively, and the necessity for individuals who perceive while not having to be advised.
Danielle opens the track with a line about assembly “two angels in disguise”. The reference factors towards her sisters, but it surely additionally units the tone for what the track is actually about.
This isn’t a love track within the conventional sense. It’s about recognising the individuals who keep shut when the whole lot else turns into unstable.
The refrain repeats the identical query: “Why me? How’d I get this hallelujah?” The phrase doesn’t carry non secular weight right here. It’s nearer to disbelief, or quiet astonishment at surviving one thing you weren’t certain you’d.
The manufacturing displays that restraint. There aren’t any drums. Simply acoustic guitar, voices layered in concord, and house round each line.
Co-written with Tobias Jesso Jr. and produced by Ariel Rechtshaid, Rostam, and Danielle herself, the association refuses to dramatise the emotion. It lets the phrases sit plainly, with out embellishment.
Every sister takes a verse, and the construction makes the which means collective fairly than confessional.
When Danielle sings about outdated fears easing and new tears drying in time, she’s not providing reassurance to the listener.
She’s describing what it feels prefer to lean on somebody who already is aware of the form of your worst days.
When Este sings about leaning her again in opposition to another person’s, or travelling like her ft don’t contact the ground, the imagery is bodily however not literal.
It’s in regards to the sensation of being held up when standing alone feels not possible.
Alana’s verse shifts the tense. “I had a finest pal however she has come to cross,” she sings, earlier than addressing Sammi straight. “You at all times remind me that reminiscences will final.”
The verse doesn’t try closure. It holds the previous and current in the identical breath, acknowledging that grief doesn’t resolve however integrates.
The ultimate traces return to childhood imagery: lengthy hair, operating by way of fields, the sensation of being protected. The simplicity makes it extra affecting, not much less.
The Paul Thomas Anderson-directed video mirrors that method. Shot on a single darkish stage, every sister takes her flip alone below a highlight earlier than they arrive collectively for the refrain.
There’s no narrative arc, no symbolic imagery. Simply three individuals passing one thing fragile between them.
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Listeners linked to “Hallelujah” in ways in which shocked even the band. The track turned a reference level for individuals coping with continual sickness, grief, or the slower, much less seen sorts of survival that don’t match neatly into public dialog.
It provided permission to really feel reduction while not having a cause, to be glad about small continuities fairly than grand resolutions.
What makes the track work is what it refuses to do. It doesn’t clarify. It doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t provide consolation within the type of solutions.
As a substitute, it acknowledges that a few of the most necessary relationships in our lives are those that ask the least of us, those that exist while not having to be named or defended.
The phrase “hallelujah” turns into a approach of marking that presence, not celebrating it.
Within the context of Haim’s catalogue, “Hallelujah” stands aside. It doesn’t attain for the propulsion of “The Wire” or the grit of “My Tune 5”.
It doesn’t play with the textural density of their earlier work. It sits nonetheless, and in sitting nonetheless, it reveals one thing the louder songs couldn’t.
5 years after its launch, the track stays one of many band’s most quietly vital. Not as a result of it gives catharsis, however as a result of it doesn’t faux to. It merely holds house for the sensation of being held.
