Rufus Wainwright recorded Hallelujah for the 2001 movie Shrek. Wainwright did not sing on the version used in the film, John Cale did, but Wainwright’s version is on the soundtrack.
Wainwright recorded for Dreamworks, which also distributed the movie, and he had an album coming out a few weeks after Shrek was released.
John Cale has brought an avant-garde ear to rock & roll ever since he founded the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed in 1966. His work shows a fascination with opposites: lyricism and noise, subtlety and bluntness, hypnotic repetition and sudden change.
Even as a student of classical music, he was an extremist: During a recital at the Guildhall School of Music, London, where he was studying theory and composition, he demolished a piano. Cale studied in Britain with composer Humphrey Searle, came to America in 1963 to work with Iannis Xenakis and Aaron Copland under the auspices of a Leonard Bernstein Fellowship, then settled in New York with such radical composers as John Cage and La Monte Young.
That year Cale was one of a group of pianists to perform Erik Satie's nearly 19-hour-long Vexations. Through his association with the Lower Manhattan art community, Cale met Reed, who directed him toward electric instruments and rock & roll and helped conceive the Velvet Underground, for whom Cale played keyboards, bass, and electric viola.
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