2016 has been a tough year — among many other famous people, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen recently passed. He wrote “Hallelujah,” one of my favorite songs to sing and play on the guitar.

The version I play only has four verses, and other versions I’ve heard also have four verses, but they are a different set of four verses. That said, I’ve read somewhere that Cohen actually drafted around 80 total verses. I don’t know if anyone has ever sung all of them in one performance, live or recorded. I imagine losing my voice in the attempt, or going hungry and falling asleep.

It’s hard for me to picture even writing that many verses. Each verse is six lines with a rhyming scheme of A-A-B-C-C-B, and while I love reading and writing that pattern in poetry, I think I would get sick of it after the 10th verse.

Heck, I got sick of “Poetry” after three verses, and the fourth was a stretch for me; I wouldn’t even have written it if I didn’t feel the song needed an ending somehow. When I asked a veteran music producer for any suggestions on “Poetry,” he said that the only thing it might need was a bridge … but that on second thought it didn’t really need one. That’s about when I realized that my song “Poetry” was a lot like “Hallelujah” in that it’s just a bunch of verses with the chorus in between each verse — and it lacks something to give the song more of an arc, that something being a bridge.

But if “Hallelujah” works without a bridge…

I think “Hallelujah” works because it’s almost like a hymn, and hymnals are full of songs without a bridge. A bridge adds something unexpected to a song, breaking up its normal pattern, and it’s great for an element of surprise and complexity in a contemporary popular song, adding epiphanies and climaxes to the narrative, but throw a bridge in a hymn, and the congregation might get tripped up in their formulaic singing.

Leave the fancy singing to the choir!

Without a bridge to make the song a single story with a single plot, complete with conflict, climax, and resolution, the song can be an episodic series of stories, and it can go on as long as the congregation feels moved enough to sing.

And I think that’s why Leonard Cohen was so readily able to write 80 verses. Each verse was like a mini-song by itself, an episode. They can be inserted or left out at will, put in whatever order desired, because there is no over-arching plot to shape the entire song.

With that in mind, I may want to play around with adding some verses to “Poetry,” perhaps as many as 80 — if only to see if I can.

On second thought … maybe not.

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