Do It Anyway

 People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;

Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may just never be enough;
Give the world the best you have anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it’s all between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway. 

From Do It Anyway: The Handbook for Finding Personal Meaning and Deep Happiness in a Crazy World.

The Holy or the Broken : Hallelujah

CHAPTER ONE

Allen Ginsberg once said, “Dylan blew everybody’s mind, except Leonard’s.”

Comparisons are often drawn between Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. There are books devoted to comparing and contrasting the two towering singer-songwriters; in early 2012, someone even released a “Cohen and Dylan” app, documenting their recordings and set lists for comparative purposes, complete with “quiz mode.” (One especially free-thinking soul—who revealed only that his last name is also Cohen—even devoted a website, WhoWroteHallelujah.com, to a detailed “musical conspiracy” theory alleging that Dylan was the primary author of Cohen’s best-known song; even in the Wild West of the Internet, the site didn’t stay up for long.)

The two artists have in fact crossed paths many times. They were both signed to Columbia Records by the legendary A&R executive John Hammond; both lived in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, and later wrote about it in song; both recorded in Nashville. Dylan sang backup on “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On,” from Cohen’s 1977 Death of a Ladies’ Man album. In December 1975, when Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour played in Montreal, he dedicated the night’s performance of “Isis” to hometown hero Cohen, who was in the audience—and then delivered the definitive rendition of the song, as documented in the 1978 film Renaldo and Clara.

So it isn’t too surprising that when Cohen and Dylan were both on tour in the mid-1980s and found themselves in Paris at the same time, they decided to meet at a café. At this impromptu summit, Dylan expressed his admiration for one of Cohen’s new songs, the largely unknown “Hallelujah.” The discussion that followed has passed into myth among fans of both singers, and the details frequently change in the retellings over the years, but here’s the way Cohen recounted it in an interview with Paul Zollo in 1992:

“Dylan and I were having coffee the day after his concert in Paris a few years ago . . . and he asked me how long it took to write [‘Hallelujah’]. And I told him a couple of years. I lied, actually. It was more than a couple of years.

“Then I praised a song of his, ‘I and I,’ and asked him how long it had taken and he said, ‘Fifteen minutes.’ ”

Although clearly a story told for laughs, playing on the contrast between Cohen’s meticulous, obsessive lyric writing and Dylan’s notorious impatience, there seems to be a good bit of truth to it: Over the years, Cohen has repeatedly described the agony that this one composition gave him. “I filled two notebooks,” he once said, “and I remember being in the Royalton Hotel [in New York], on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor and saying, ‘I can’t finish this song.’ ”

When Old Ideas came out in 2012, Cohen chose not to do interviews to promote the album. Instead, he appeared at a few listening events in major cities before the release date, allowing journalists to hear the album in full and then taking questions for a brief session. In London, the playback was held in the basement of a Mayfair hotel, and Jarvis Cocker, debonair front man of the band Pulp, served as the moderator. These many years later, Cohen was still talking about the torment that “Hallelujah” caused him.

“I wrote ‘Hallelujah’ over the space of at least four years,” he said (elsewhere, he has also said that it was “at least five years”). “I wrote many, many verses. I don’t know if it was eighty, maybe more or a little less.

“The trouble—it’s not the world’s trouble, and it’s a tiny trouble, I don’t want you to think that this is a significant trouble—my tiny trouble is that before I can discard a verse, I have to write it. I have to work on it, and I have to polish it and bring it to as close to finished as I can. It’s only then that I can discard it.”

This doesn’t seem to be an uncommon situation for Cohen. In the one extensive interview he consented to prior to the release of Old Ideas, for the British music magazine Mojo, he told Sylvie Simmons, who was also in the process of writing her Cohen biography, I’m Your Man, of an unfinished song that he had been working on for years. “I’ve got the melody, and it’s a guitar tune, a really good tune, and I have tried year after year to find the right words,” he said. “The song bothers me so much that I’ve actually started a journal chronicling my failures to address this obsessive concern with this melody. I would really like to have it on the next record, but I felt that for the past two or three records, maybe four.”

Cohen played another melody for Simmons on the synthesizer, saying it was something he had been struggling with for “five or ten years.” He told her that the new song “The Treaty” has been around “easily for fifteen years,” while he had been working on another, “Born in Chains,” since 1988.

“It’s not the siege of Stalingrad,” he said, “but these are hard nuts to crack.”

• • •

By the time he was torturing himself with “Hallelujah,” Leonard Cohen already had a long, storied, and somewhat baffling career. Cohen was born in 1934 and raised in the prosperous Westmount section of Montreal, the son of a successful clothing retailer who died when Leonard was nine years old.

“I wasn’t terribly interested in music,” he told Simmons. “I liked the music in the synagogue. And my mother sang beautifully. . . . I first started to get interested in song when I came across the Socialist folk singers around Montreal.” In 1951, he began attending McGill University; during his college years, he formed a country-western trio called the Buckskin Boys, in addition to serving as president of the debating union and of the Jewish fraternity Zeta Beta Tau.

My father was a classmate of Cohen’s at McGill. Though his own premed studies didn’t lead him to cross paths with Cohen in a poetry class, he makes it sound like everyone—certainly everyone among the small Jewish community, limited at the time by strict admissions quotas—knew the burgeoning campus celebrity. It was hard to miss one of their own who was straddling two worlds, receiving honors at school and performing at the local coffeehouses.

At McGill, Cohen won the Chester MacNaughton Prize for Creative Writing, for a series of four poems titled “Thoughts of a Landsman.” He graduated in 1955, and his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was published the following year.

Over the next decade, he moved to New York (where he hung around the edges of Andy Warhol’s “Factory” scene), then back to Montreal. In 1960 he bought a house—with no electricity, plumbing, or telephone—on the Greek island of Hydra, living off of his inheritance while writing poetry and fiction. Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers was perhaps his best-known work, partly because of the book’s explicit sex scenes. “James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen,” wrote the Boston Globe, while the Toronto Star’s Robert Fulford called Losers “the most revolting book ever written in Canada . . . an important failure. At the same time it is probably the most interesting Canadian book of the year.”

Still, the book only sold a few thousand copies. Frustrated by his lack of success as a writer, in 1967 Cohen decided to take his shot at a profession in music. He planned to move to Nashville, but stopped in New York City along the way to meet with a potential manager named Mary Martin, a fellow Canadian who had been working with Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. Martin introduced Cohen to a singer named Judy Collins, and he sang her a song he had written called “Suzanne.” She quickly recorded it, in what would turn out to be the first of many versions of this composition.

“He told Mary that he had written some songs, and now he wanted to come down to New York and ask me if I thought that they were songs,” Collins said in 2010, prior to singing “Suzanne” as part of the ceremony inducting Cohen into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. “So he sat down and he said, ‘I can’t sing and I can’t play the guitar and I don’t know if this is a song.’ So he played it for me, and I said, ‘Well, Leonard, it is a song, and I’m recording it tomorrow.’ ”

Bolstered by this vote of confidence, Cohen recorded a demo tape in Martin’s bathroom, which she took to John Hammond at Columbia Records. Hammond had worked with everyone from Count Basie to Billie Holiday to, later, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan; when Dylan’s first album flopped, he was known around the Columbia offices as “Hammond’s Folly.” In 1967, Hammond signed Cohen, who was already on the far side of thirty years old, to the label and brought him into the studio.

Cohen clashed with producer John Simon about the arrangements, and it ultimately took multiple producers, three studios, and six months to get the first album completed. He recorded twenty-five songs, ten of which made the album, nine of which still remain unreleased. Songs of Leonard Cohen came out in the final week of 1967. It contained several of the songs with which Cohen’s reputation was made, including “Sisters of Mercy” and “So Long, Marianne,” and illustrated that from the beginning, the meeting points between the sacred and the physical were central to his songwriting. (Nor was the sexuality in Cohen’s songs purely literary: Over the years, he has been linked to numerous women, including such eminences as Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, and the actress Rebecca De Mornay.)

The album grazed the Top 100 in the U.S., and eventually became his only gold-certified non-compilation album, but it more solidly established Cohen in Europe, reaching the Top 20 in the UK. Many years later, music critic Tom Moon would include Songs of Leonard Cohen in the best-selling book 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. “He transforms a common songwriter conceit—romance as a path to enlightenment, if not redemption—into an urgent, revelatory, all-consuming epic quest,” Moon wrote.

Though his vocal range is limited—a deep murmur suited to dirges and lamentations—Cohen’s songs were strikingly evocative and literary, with hints of cabaret, the dramatic French chansonnier style, and religious melodies. His brooding image and dark humor added to his allure, both personal and public. In addition to Collins, who would record numerous Cohen songs over the years, artists including Roberta Flack and Fairport Convention soon cut some of his material, which introduced Cohen’s work to a much wider audience.

The next few years were the most prolific time in Cohen’s career. In addition to touring for the first time—among these early shows was a hard-fought set in the middle of the night at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, during which he struggled to calm and focus a crowd on the verge of rioting (documented on a remarkable DVD released in 2009)—he released two albums that secured his standing as one of the leading songwriters of his generation. Both 1969’s Songs from a Room and 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate were produced by Bob Johnston, who had worked with Dylan and Johnny Cash, and he stripped Cohen’s sound down to a spare and riveting intimacy.

Such classic songs as “Bird on the Wire” and “Famous Blue Raincoat,” melodically simple but direct, with finely etched lyrics capturing precise yet profound emotions, defined him as a true songwriter’s songwriter; the themes could be bleak—somewhere in here his songs were given the tag “music to slit your wrists by,” which he has never been fully able to shake. Writing in the New Yorker in 1993, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic and a National Book Award finalist, memorably labeled Cohen “the Prince of Bummers.” But the accessible eloquence of the language, with a detail that’s resonant but never showy, was stunning, timeless, and without peer.

Not surprisingly, Cohen has always dismissed the perception of his work as being dour. “I never thought of myself as a particularly solemn person, and I don’t think my friends think of me that way,” he said. “I understand over the years I acquired this reputation for being a somber chap, and of course we all go through periods where, you know, it’s not that funny. But I think there’s always been a perspective of letting a little light in somewhere.”

As for the low, near-monotone rumble of Cohen’s singing, it was certainly an acquired taste—in her best-selling chronicle of female singer-songwriters, Girls Like Us, Sheila Weller called it a “brazenly unmusical drone of a voice”—but he found his following. In one of his final columns for Vanity Fair, controversial essayist Christopher Hitchens wrote about the power of the human voice, even as he was losing his own to the cancer that would soon take his life: “Leonard Cohen is unimaginable without, and indissoluble from, his voice.” British columnist/novelist Howard Jacobson wrote, specifically of “Hallelujah,” that only Cohen “has a voice bruised enough to express its bittersweet lacerations.”

It is a poet’s voice, a sound of experience and reflection. What Cohen lacks in range is more than compensated for by his inflections and nuances. He gives little ground to pop arrangements, but his lyrics can bear the weight. Listening to his own performances is certainly more demanding than listening to others sing his words, but it is generally more rewarding as well. Producer Hal Willner, who organized an acclaimed series of Cohen tribute concerts around the world between 2003 and 2005, said, “I compare hearing Leonard to the first time you drink whiskey or beer. It’s a little weird at first.”

Cohen himself has been known to poke fun at his own vocal limitations. In the letter-perfect “Tower of Song,” from 1988’s I’m Your Man, he sings, “I was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” A few years later, he accepted a Canadian music award with the quip, “Only in Canada could someone with a voice like mine win Vocalist of the Year.”

So while Cohen’s early albums were hardly easy listening, the second and third became Top Five hits in the UK, and Songs of Love and Hate charted throughout Europe. (“I think my rise in the marketplace will be considered an interesting curiosity, that’s all,” he said at the time.) His star seemed to keep rising when director Robert Altman scored the 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Miller entirely with Cohen songs. But as the 1970s progressed, Cohen’s direction became less clear.

In the aftermath of the lunacy that closed out the ’60s, singer-songwriters had become purveyors of a more personal, intimate, and reassuring expression in pop music. James Taylor and Carole King were selling records by the truckload; even such challenging writers as Paul Simon and Neil Young had become arena-filling acts. Cohen’s fellow Canadian and former girlfriend Joni Mitchell created one of the masterworks of the genre in 1971 with Blue; several of the songs made oblique reference to Cohen, and his influence on her writing was evident.

Though his work may not be as accessible as that of any of these other singer-songwriters, this might have been Cohen’s best moment to strike. But his next album wouldn’t come until 1974, and it took a different musical direction. He met John Lissauer when the producer was working with a Cohen protégé named Lewis Furey in Montreal; Lissauer described the album he made with Furey as “the first punk record ever recorded, like tango-punk.” Furey was playing at the Nelson Hotel. Cohen attended one night, introduced himself to Lissauer, and invited him to come to New York. After an audition for John Hammond, they set to work on a new record.

The resulting eleven songs on New Skin for the Old Ceremony were more orchestrated than Cohen’s earlier music, with strings, horns, and a banjo, and more prominent use of (mostly female) backup vocalists. Despite such remarkable songs as “Chelsea Hotel #2” and “Who by Fire,” with lyrics based on a prayer from the Yom Kippur service, New Skin seemed to confuse some of Cohen’s limited but devoted fan base. Reviews were a bit less glowing than he was used to. It was his first album that failed to reach the U.S. charts at all, and sales slipped in other countries.

He toured throughout 1974 and 1975, first in Europe and then in the U.S. and Canada, with a band led by Lissauer. “We did this big tour, which was really successful,” said Lissauer. “Then Leonard said, ‘Let’s write a record together,’ so we wrote a bunch of songs, went on the road again doing those songs plus the other stuff, and went in the studio and got half an album done. And then Leonard disappeared.”

Without so much as a word to Lissauer, Cohen put out a Best of collection in 1975, and returned to the road with a new band. He continued trying out new material, then went back into the studio in the unlikeliest of settings. Heading to Los Angeles, he began work on a new project with brilliant, demented producer Phil Spector; Lissauer maintains that the pairing was part of a larger deal with Columbia made by Cohen’s manager at the time, Marty Machat.

Things got off to a rousing start when Cohen and Spector wrote a dozen songs together over the course of three alcohol-fueled weeks. But once the recording sessions started, it all fell apart—culminating with Spector allegedly threatening his collaborator with a firearm. (He reportedly brandished guns in the studio with John Lennon and the Ramones, as well, and was sentenced to prison in 2009 following his conviction in the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson at his home.)

“I was flipped out at the time,” Cohen said later, “and he certainly was flipped out. For me, the expression was withdrawal and melancholy, and for him, megalomania and insanity and a devotion to armaments that was really intolerable. In the state that he found himself, which was post-Wagnerian, I would say Hitlerian, the atmosphere was one of guns—the music was a subsidiary enterprise. . . .

“At a certain point Phil approached me with a bottle of kosher red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder and shoved the revolver into my neck and said, ‘Leonard, I love you.’ I said, ‘I hope you do, Phil.’ ”

They argued about songs and arrangements, and Spector eventually barred Cohen from the studio and mixed the album by himself. He buried Cohen’s voice under his signature “Wall of Sound” production, resulting in an incongruous, if sometimes fascinating, mess. When Death of a Ladies’ Man was released in 1977, Cohen called the album “grotesque” and a “catastrophe.” Rolling Stone’s review was titled “Leonard Cohen’s Doo-Wop Nightmare”; critic Paul Nelson, long a missionary when it came to Cohen’s work, struggled to defend the album, describing it as “the world’s most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world’s most fatalistic introvert.”

Cohen retrenched coming off this debacle. With 1979’s Recent Songs, he received coproduction credit for the first time. This set of songs added more international sounds, such as an oud, a Gypsy violin, and a mariachi band. Cohen’s current touring band, the jazz-fusion group Passenger, played on four of the tracks. The album included one song, “Came So Far for Beauty,” that was a finished recording from the abandoned second album with John Lissauer, and two others (“The Traitor” and “The Smokey Life”) that had been started during those sessions.

It was an interesting midpoint for Cohen to attempt, poised between the overblown Spector arrangements and the starkness of his earlier work. The lyrics were more ironic and bemused than those of the past few albums, which had been so full of bitterness. But while the Gypsy-style instrumentation added some interest, the melodies on Recent Songs were not his strongest, and the album seemed to lack the confidence and momentum of his best work.

The album won back some of the sympathetic press, but Cohen still felt out of step with the times. “People forget that it was against the law to listen to Leonard in the days of punk,” said Bono, who recalled wanting to attend a Cohen concert as a teenager but being unable to afford a ticket. “Some of the most brutal, eye-gouging music criticism was directed at him in those years.”

He soldiered on with more touring, and then a few side projects—Night Magic, a musical cowritten with Lewis Furey, and an album of poetry recitation that was never finished. Five years passed after Recent Songs; time was stretching longer and longer between new Leonard Cohen releases, a pattern that would continue for the remainder of his career. And then in 1984, after he hadn’t heard from Cohen in eight years or so, John Lissauer’s phone rang. “Hey, man,” purred the voice on the other end of the line. “Wanna work?”

Paperback book 288 pages. 

60 Versions of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah,' Ranked

Thirty six years ago this weekend, Leonard Cohen first performed a song called "Hallelujah". 

Cohen's January 31, 1985 show marks the first known performance of the song.

AND the rest is history here 

https://www.newsweek.com/60-versions-leonard-cohens-hallelujah-ranked-303580

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CULTURELEONARD COHENCHRISTMASMUSICSONGS

Leonard Cohen didn't then know the song would wind its way into the deepest reaches of popular culture, spirituality and, uh, Shrek. He didn't know the song would make much of an impact at all.

The album on which it appeared, the murky, mid-career Various Positions, had been rejected wholesale by Columbia Records in the U.S., and when it finally was released, "the song was still generally ignored," as Alan Light notes in his 2012 book The Holy or The Broken.  

Frankly, it's no wonder: "Hallelujah," as it sounds on that record, is a barely recognizable blur of '80s keyboards and overwrought backing vocals that Cohen further confused by changing up the lyrics when he began singing it in concert. (He has said he wrote as many as 80 verses, then whittled it down to four for the album version.) 

It was a spate of cover interpretations—first by John Cale and Jeff Buckley, then by dozens and hundreds of others—that lifted the song out of obscurity, though it was something more mysterious that cemented its status as a modern standard, appearing on American Idol and in synagogue services in equal measure. It has become ubiquitous. Tallying versions by Cohen and plenty of others, Light estimates "Hallelujah" has been listened to hundreds of millions of times on YouTube alone. It is "something of a musical Rorschach test," Light writes, invented anew by all who attempt the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall.. 

Many of those renditions are great. Some are quite terrible. Here, we celebrate the 30th birthday of "Hallelujah" by listening to 60 notable recordings of it that are readily available online and ranking them from worst to best. This list is of course open for debate and is necessarily far from exhaustive, and we are primarily sticking to renditions that are commercially available, as well as a few notable live performances.

60. Jeff Gutt (A Detroit Christmas, 2014): Dreadful, straining delivery, disastrous AOR arrangement that somehow gets worse and worse (hear those chugging, sub-Creed guitar licks?). Naturally, it was a grand slam on The X Factor. Click to listen on YouTube.

59. The Canadian Tenors (The Canadian Tenors, 2008): "This song is pretty much indestructible," singer Regina Spektor once said of "Hallelujah." This vomitously overstuffed murdering of the track proves her wrong. 

When I'm feeling down I sit in the dark, close my eyes, and crank this song up in my headphones. I'm not a religious person but this song is a purely spiritual experience and not because of the lyrics. Their voices are just so perfect, and combined with this song, with the notes just climbing and climbing, it unlocks emotion and sets it free. Listening to this song always makes me feel better because it reminds me that even though life can seriously suck, there can also be such raw beauty in it.  

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wllPTTIi1GY 

[Verse 1]

Now I've heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

But you don't really care for music, do ya?

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing "Hallelujah"

[Chorus]

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

[Verse 2]

Your faith was strong but you needed proof

You saw her bathing on the roof

Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya

She tied you to a kitchen chair

She broke your throne, and she cut your hair

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

[Chorus]

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

[Verse 3]

Baby, I've been here before

I know this room, I've walked this floor

I used to live alone before I knew you

And I've seen your flag on the marble arch

Love is not a victory march

It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

[Chorus]

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

[Verse 4]

I did my best, it wasn't much

I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch

I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya

And even though it all went wrong

I'll stand before the lord of song

With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah

[Chorus]

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah 

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah 

58. Michael Bolton (Gems - The Duets Collection, 2011): From its opening string swells to its steel guitar flourishes and choir crescendo, Bolton's "Hallelujah" is a miserable grab bag of elevator-core tackiness, with a key change that would make even Jon Bon Jovi grimace. Avoid at all costs. Watch YouTube.

[Outro]

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

57. RMaster (feat. Ingo Lass) (New Anime Nation, Vol 3, 2014): Information about this is quite sparse, but it appears to be several anime stars with throaty, horribly reaching voices performing "Hallelujah" on top of piano, synthesized strings and even some xylophone twinkles. Truly hellish. Watch here.

Hallelujah song cover in reality shows.

Number 5 - Jeffrey Adam Gutt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBKuW... Number 4 - Anna Clendening - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO-ab... Number 3 - Matthew Schuler - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0umZ... Number 2 - Kyle Tomlinson - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN5mk... Number 1 - Carly Rose - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwKNi...

56. Susan Boyle (The Gift, 2010): It is difficult to encompass every trite, melodramatic "Hallelujah" cliché in a single, four-minute rendition, but Britain's Got Talent star Boyle succeeds. Cloying beyond mercy. Click here to watch YouTube. 

Live performance video recording, watch here.  

55. Peter Hollens feat. Jackie Evancho (Peter Hollens, 2014): If you traveled to 1985 and told Leonard Cohen that a terrifyingly saccharine a cappella version of "Hallelujah" would one day have 1.7 million YouTube streams, he'd have said, "What the hell is YouTube?" 

54. Bird of Pray (More Sad Songs, 2011): Throaty, exasperating verses meet saccharine, choral-style refrains. At least it's short.  

Click here  

53. Kelley Mooney (Tomorrow, 2011): Apparently, it's not unheard of for Christian performers to swap out Leonard Cohen's lyrics for their own. Mooney goes all out, axing every familiar verse in favor of worshipful musings like, "The soldier who had used his sword / To pierce the body of our lord / Said 'Truly, this was Jesus Christ our savior'"— in the process obliterating both the rhyme schemes and the spiritual ambiguity that make the song work. 

Watch YouTube here. 

From her living room, watch here. 

52. Alejandro Fuentes and Askil Holm and Espen Lind and Kurt Nilsen (Hallelujah - Live, 2006): Splitting the verses between co-vocalists is usually a mistake, and this gratingly oversung version by four Norwegian talents isn't an exception. It's a respite when the crowd takes over for the last chorus. Watch here. Open field rendition watch here.

Laugh More Every Day

 Laughter. Though it may be harder to come by these days, laughing it up does wonders for your health, so I urge you to indulge every day. Just like getting good sleep, eating your veggies and daily exercise, laughter is an essential, particularly now, when it’s so easy for our chaotic world to drag spirits down. Set the Intent to Laugh More. Make a resolution, or set the intent, of laughing heartily as often as you can. Setting a goal to laugh more is as important as setting the goals to get more exercise, eat healthier, and drink more water. Tell yourself: "I resolve to laugh more". A simple way to have a happier, healthier life is to laugh more.

Laughter is a physiological response that involves rhythmic and involuntary action, and denotes merriment, happiness, or joy. Over the past several years countless studies have been conducted that show the positive effects that laughing has on one’s physical and mental health. 

Here are some of the many benefits of laughing more:

Laughter causes you to gulp in large portions of air, thereby oxygenating your blood.

Laughter decreases stress hormones in the body such as cortisol and adrenaline, thus helping to stave off illness.

Laughter strengthens the immune system.

When we laugh our bodies release hormones and chemicals that have positive effects on our system. One of these chemicals is endorphins, the feel-good hormone.

One minute of laughing burns the same number of calories as 6 to 10 minutes on a treadmill.

Laughing raises your mood; joyfulness through laughter is the fastest way to create a positive state of mind.

Laughing is good for the heart and improves blood circulation.

Laughter can reduce pain and aid the healing process.

Laughter creates and strengthens human connections.

It feels good to laugh.

Are you ready to laugh more? Below you’ll find 22 ways to bring more laughter into your life.

22 Ways to Laugh More

1. Set the Intent to Laugh More. Make a resolution, or set the intent, of laughing heartily as often as you can. Setting a goal to laugh more is as important as setting the goals to get more exercise, eat healthier, and drink more water.

Tell yourself: “I resolve to laugh more”.

2. Include Laughter in Your Morning Routine. Many of us have a routine that we follow every morning to help set us up to have a great day. How about adding laughter to your morning routine?

One way you can do this is bygetting a year-in-a-box calendar that will give you a quick laugh when you glance at the joke for the day. Choose a year-in-a-box calendar that tickles your fancy and put it right next to your alarm clock.

I’m partial to the Garfield year in-a-box calendars, but I know a lot of people like Dilbert. Start your day with laughter!

Garfield

Another idea is to get yourself a joke book and read one joke every morning.

3. Smile More. Yes, I know: smiling is not laughing. However, smiling also has a myriad of benefits. When you smile, happy changes begin to take place automatically, both internally and externally. In addition, you can think of smiling as a warm up for laughing.

One way to remember to smile more is to have smiling cues sprinkled throughout your day. There are a number of ways to do this, including getting yourself a coffee mug that makes you smile. That way, every time you get yourself a cup of coffee you’re reminded to smile.

Maxine

Here are three more cues you can use to remember to smile:

Smile as you step into the shower.

Smile every time you’re about to enter your home.

Smile every time you open the refrigerator.

4. Read the Funnies. If you’re one of those people who still reads the newspaper offline—like me—don’t skip the funnies. After reading about everything that’s going wrong in the world, a little levity will do you good.

5. Befriend a Funny Person. Some people are just naturally funny. They may have a way with words, or they may have a wacky way of looking at the world. These people are gems. If you find one, befriend them immediately.

6. Have a Favorite Comedian. There are lots of great comedians out there, but almost everyone knows of at least one comedian who really appeals to their own particular sense of humor. Choose your favorite comedian and look for some of their comedy routines on YouTube.

If you’re wondering who my favorite comedian is, it’s George Carlin (1937 – 2008). I love his dry, sarcastic humor. Here are three of his most memorable lines:

“In most polls there are always about 5 percent of the people who ‘don’t know.’ What isn’t generally understood is that it’s the same people in every poll.”

“Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?”

“I have six locks on my door, all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three of them.”

7. Follow a Funny Sitcom. Although I advocate watching less TV so that you have more time to read—or work on projects that are important to you—I’m not one of those people who argue that you shouldn’t watch any TV. Just make sure that you’re watching shows that you really enjoy.

Specifically, limit your TV viewing to shows that make you think, and shows that make you laugh. Here are two shows that make me laugh:

The Big Bang Theory

Parks and Recreation

8. Have More Fun on Date Night. Keep your relationship strong by laughing more with your partner. On date night, go to a comedy club. If you want to stay in, make some popcorn and watch a funny movie. Here are two funny movies I would definitely recommend:

Burn After Reading, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich.

The Other Woman, starring Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, and Kate Upton.

9. Read a Funny Book. I often recommend that you read the classics, but you should also read books just because they’re funny. A genuinely funny book is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Here are two funny books you can get started with:

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which is a war comedy.

Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a science fiction comedy.

10. Find a Little Kid You Can Hang Out With. Little kids haven’t forgotten how to laugh yet. They’ll laugh at just about anything, and there are few things more infectious than a little kid’s laugh.

11. Get a Pet. More specifically, get a dog. Dogs make us laugh because. . . well, just look:

happy dog

12. Play Fun Games With Friends. Playing competitive party-style games with a group of friends you enjoy hanging out with will have you laughing in no time. There are lots of games you can choose from, including the following:

Rollick! The Hysterical Team Charades Party Game

Apples to Apples

Just set up the game, put out some guacamole and chips, and get ready to laugh ’till it hurts.

13. Learn to Laugh at Yourself. Most of us take ourselves too seriously, which limits our ability to find the humor in difficult situations. In addition, it can make us uptight and overly sensitive to what other people may be thinking of us.

Learning to laugh at yourself takes some of the pressure off, and it will allow you to be more authentic and vulnerable (both of which are desirable character traits). Here are two ways learn how to laugh at yourself:

Give yourself permission to be silly. At the right moment, being silly is a plus.

Look for the funny side of things. When you’re upset over something, ask yourself: “How is this situation funny”? Humor is a great way to deal with adversity and can even turn a negative into a positive.

14. Take Up Something New. When you try something new–whether it’s to draw, perform a karate kick, or learn to roller blade— your initial attempts will likely be clumsy and even ridiculous. That is, funny.

And, since in the point above you learned how to laugh at yourself, taking up something new is very likely to result in lots of laughs.

15. Have a Favorite Comic Strip. My favorite carton strip of all time is Calvin & Hobbes. I have all of Bill Waterson’s Calvin & Hobbes books. When I need a pick-me up I grab the pile of books, sprawl out on my bed, and look through them.

In a short while I’m laughing, and soon after that I’m out of the funk I was in.

Calvin & Hobbes

16. Start a Pinterest Board of Funny Stuff You Find Online. Before the site Squidoo went belly up, I had a Squidoo lens that I used to collect the funny stuff that I found online. This included YouTube videos, images, jokes, quotes, and so on.

Although Squidoo no longer exists, you can do something similar with Pinterest. Start a Pinterest board and every time you find something funny as you browse the web, pin it to your board.

Here’s one of the jokes that I had added to my Squidoo lens:

A police officer pulls over a driver and informs him that he has just won $5,000 in a safety competition, all because he is wearing his seat belt.

“What are you going to do with the prize money?” the officer asks.

The man responds, “I guess I’ll go to driving school and get my license.”

His wife says, “Officer, don’t listen to him. He’s a smart aleck when he’s drunk.”

The guy in the back seat pops up out from under the blanket and says, “I knew we wouldn’t get far in this stolen car.”

Just then a knock comes from the trunk and a voice calls out, “Are we over the border yet?”

17. Start a Scrapbook of Funny Things Your Family Members Say. Family members are a great source for funny comebacks and sayings. When my nephew, Diego, was about four or five years old, he put on an Indian Jones hat and pìcked up a lightsaber. He then announced that he was, “Indiana Jedi”. 🙂

Start a scrapbook to collect the funny things your family does and the things they say. This will make you more aware of their funny moments, which will make you appreciate them more.

18. Put Laughter Quotes Up On a Bulletin Board. Put up a bulletin board where you’ll be sure to see it often, and fill it with laughter quotes. Here are some to get you started:

“Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” — Mark Twain

“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” – e. e. cummings

“If laughter cannot solve your problems, it will definitely dissolve your problems; so that you can think clearly what to do about them.” – Dr. Madan Kataria

laugh more

19. Do More of What Makes You Laugh. When was the last time you had a really good laugh? What were you Doing? Do more of that.

20. Follow Funny People on Twitter. Follow two or three funny accounts on Twitter so you get a few laughs as you see the tweets go by on your stream. One funny account I follow is @itsWillyFerrell. Here’s a tweet from him I found hilarious:

vfunny tweet

21. Start a Joke Jar. Get your whole family to laugh more by starting a joke jar. Do the following:

Get a nice jar and some scraps of papers.

Find some funny jokes and write them down on the scraps of paper. Ask your family members to do the same.

Put the scraps of paper with the jokes written on them in the jar.

At dinner time have someone reach into the jar, take out a joke, and read it out loud.

Here are some family-friendly jokes to get you started (they’re Easter oriented since it’s almost Easter):

Q: What do you call a rabbit with fleas? A: Bugs Bunny!

Q: Why shouldn’t you tell an Easter egg a joke? A: It might crack up!

Q: What kind of book does a rabbit like at bedtime? A: One with a “hoppy” ending.

22. Try Laughter Meditation. As I wrote in my post on how to meditate, there are many different meditation practices you can try. One of these is laughter meditation. Do the following:

Find a comfortable place to sit.

Bring your attention to your breath and release all tension from your body.

Bring up an image of something you find really funny. Once you have the feeling of laughter, spread it throughout your body, from the top of your head, to the tip of your toes.

Bring up another image that makes you laugh. Continue spreading the feeling of laughter throughout your body.

 

I hope this post made you laugh! After all, laughter is the best medicine. Live your best life by laughing more. Get started with the 22 tips above.