Music Also Helps - a rare Subway Series post

There is so much art and music and oddities on the NYC subway that I post about it just enough that at some point I gave it its own tag. 

My job is very calendar-driven, with a heavy concentration of deadlines in September and March. I will end up working strings of late nights just to get the big reports done, and it can be very stressful.

I think it was March of this year that the late nights coincided with subway track work, with the Q train running on two sections, one that ended at Atlantic Avenue and another from there on out to Coney Island.

Trains running strangely late at night can be aggravating, but when Ishmael Levi was there and singing for us late-night commuters, it wasn't as bad. Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" was the first song I heard him sing, I think it's a favorite of his because he was singing it more than once when I got to the platform to change to the train to continue into Brooklyn. I love music, but I'm not really a connoisseur and I don't know much about Leonard Cohen's work (although a lot of my friends were crushed at his passing so I know he must be great) - but this song is so beautiful, and when Ishmael sang it late at night as the tired night shift folks waited for the next train, I could just feel my nerves un-frazzling.