Sometimes chance wins

I recently posted about how luck is a combination of chance, curiosity, and hard work, and I still believe that. If you work hard and stay curious, there is a decent chance that you’ll find yourself “lucky” more often than not.

There are fun stories out there, though, where chance played a huge part in someone’s success. I have two great stories related to music that fall into that category.

Hallelujah

You’ve heard the song Hallelujah in various places by a variety of artists over the years, but it took some incredibly unlikely events to get it into the world. Malcolm Gladwell covered it in his podcast a few years ago (and I strongly recommend that you listen to it here).

It’s a messy story, but essentially:

• Leonard Cohen spent five years tweaking and re-recording the song, and it went essentially nowhere.
• John Cale covered it, but it still went nowhere.
• A woman named Jeannine had a copy of Cale’s album, and when she had a man named Jeff Buckley house sit for her he happened to listen to the album, so Jeff recorded it himself and released it — and it went nowhere.
• Then Jeff suffered a tragic death, which got his name out there a lot more, and it brought the song to the masses.