Kate McKinnon Performs Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ In ‘Somber’ SNL Opener [Video]
From the archive: published Nov 13, 2016, 9 years ago. Details may have changed since.
Saturday Night Live broke from its tradition of starting the show with a comedic cold-open this weekend as cast member Kate McKinnon kicked off Saturday’s episode with “an unexpected and somber tone,” Colin Campbell writes in an article for Yahoo! News.
McKinnon, playing her reoccurring role as former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, simply performed the late Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as the cold-open for the show. It’s not a funny song, and her performance of it was not intended to be humorous in any way.
McKinnon undoubtedly chose the melancholy song in honor of both Hillary Clinton’s electoral defeat last Tuesday and Leonard Cohen’s passing on Monday.
SNL ‘s audience tends to lean to the liberal side of the political spectrum. That said, a few of the lines in “Hallelujah,” such as “I did my best, it wasn’t much,” could be interpreted as subtle jabs at Clinton for failing to defeat Donald Trump, a candidate many pundits and politicos assumed more or less anyone should be able to beat.
After finishing the song, McKinnon turned to the camera to directly address viewers at home.
“I’m not giving up, and neither should you,” she said before adding, “And live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”
Watch Kate McKinnon sing ‘Hallelujah’ in a powerful ‘SNL’ cold open https://t.co/MIqNFXnTDa
— TIME (@TIME) November 13, 2016
McKinnon portrayed Clinton on Saturday Night Live numerous times throughout the primary and general election campaign season, “often depicting her as tough and confident of her upcoming victory — especially against Trump, now the president-elect,” Campbell notes.
Throwing Cohen into the mix was an unexpected but inspired touch.
In his New York Times obituary of Cohen, Larry Rohter describes Cohen as “the Canadian poet and novelist who abandoned a promising literary career to become one of the foremost songwriters of the contemporary era.”
Cohen’s literary career began with the publication of her first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956. Over the next decade, he penned several novels and poetry collections, including the poetry collection The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) and the novel Beautiful Losers (1963).
Despite his promise and positive reviews of some of his books, Cohen’s literary work in those early years met with a generally mixed response and poor sales. He decided to turn to music and began adapting his poetry into lyrics.
Watch: Kate McKinnon’s Clinton delivers tearjerker ‘Hallelujah’ on ‘SNL’ https://t.co/ku4EitJnKy
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 13, 2016
He quickly gained a cult following in the folk and underground rock music scenes. Eventually, he would sell millions of albums and his songs would be covered by dozens upon dozens of musicians.
“More than 2,000 recordings of his songs have been made, initially by the folk-pop singers who were his first champions, like Judy Collins and Tim Hardin, and later by performers from across the spectrum of popular music, among them U2, Aretha Franklin, R.E.M., Jeff Buckley, Trisha Yearwood and Elton John,” according to Rohter’s New York Times piece.
And “Hallelujah” was among the most popular and widely-covered of all of Cohen’s songs.
“Mr. Cohen’s best-known song may well be ‘Hallelujah,’ a majestic, meditative ballad infused with both religiosity and earthiness,” Rohter explains.
“It was written for a 1984 album that his record company rejected as insufficiently commercial; it was popularized a decade later by Jeff Buckley.”
Cohen’s songs appeared on the soundtracks of nearly 250 films and TV shows, according to his IMDB profile. Music by Cohen has been used in a surprisingly diverse range of productions. His songs “Anthem” and “The Future” were prominently featured in Oliver Stone’s gritty 1994 cult classic Natural Born Killers, while “Hallelujah” appeared on the soundtrack for DreamWorks Picture’s animated romance Shrek (2001).
For a week that was particularly heartbreaking for a wide swath of the American public, due to the death of Cohen and the election of Trump, it seems particularly fitting that Kate McKinnon wrapped up the week with “Hallelujah,” a song that is pensive and mournful, yet beautiful and hopeful.