Hallelujah (Shrek)

Jeff Buckley recorded "Hallelujah" in 1994, and in the decades since it has been covered hundreds of times, but his version remains the one everything else is measured against, because he didn't just perform it — he transformed it. Leonard Cohen's original was sardonic and exhausted; Buckley's is ecstatic and shattered simultaneously, which is a harder thing to do and a more dangerous one. He plays a guitar that sounds rich and resonant without being ornate, and his voice — one of the most technically extraordinary in rock history — wraps around the melody in a way that suggests someone who has found a container just barely large enough to hold what he's feeling. The falsetto passages are famous for a reason: they don't feel like technique but like necessity, a register reached because the chest voice can't get there. The emotional experience of listening to it is almost overwhelming if you let it be — it climbs slowly, spends a long time in the middle registers of longing and loss, and arrives somewhere that feels like grief wearing the mask of gratitude. The Shrek placement is now legendary precisely because of the incongruity: a film built for children contains what might be the most emotionally serious piece of music in commercial animation history. You reach for this song when something has broken open — when you need language for a feeling that doesn't have easier words, when beauty and sadness feel like the same thing.