I like the Wainright cover, but I think there's a direct line from there to Hallelujah becoming a Christmas song. Not that it isn't beautiful, but the song as written is also tinged with irony and without Cohen's winking mixup of the sacred and the profane, it sounds kind of schmaltzy.

Is that pretentious? Hell yeah. Cohen brings out the pretentious side of me because he was such a brilliant writer and it bums me out when his work gets mistaken for platitudes.