In the first interview, when quizzed about her regular covering of Hallelujah, she said she never gets tired of singing it, experiencing it in a different way each time, also reverentially referring to Leonard as a poet.
In her second interview, when asked about her feelings regarding singing it at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver last year, she said she thought it was an odd choice for such an occasion, but even though she queried this, the committee wanted to go ahead with her singing it (in particular).
The discussion then moved on to the sexual allusions in the lyrics (including her curiosity about how 80 year old women would regard them) and she maintained that she “reframed” (my word) the experience of singing these lyrics by looking at the thrust of them in a way that interprets them as referring to the general experience of “desire” that we all have as humans. I thought this was a neat way of dealing with the song’s lyrics, which I have always thought of as being quite sexually charged and oriented. She was also highly amused when the interviewer said that the song was performed for the Pope on his recent Australian visit.
Cheers,
Andrew
