You don't know what the world is, when you're still young. You haven't experienced its many miracles, not enough to know where to look for them. You haven't witnessed its unfathomable cruelties, either.

I wasn't ready for Shrek.

Specifically, I wasn't ready for John Cale. But I wasn't ready to experience such profound betrayal, either.

Leonard Cohen recorded his iconic song "Hallelujah" in 1984. It has since become one of the most-covered songs of all time. The most famous cover of all is likely Jeff Buckley's 1994 rendition, but singers return to it again and again. It's simple, it's clever, and it's heartrending.

Thing is, those "Hallelujah" covers aren't covers of Leonard Cohen. They're covers of John Cale covering Leonard Cohen.

Here's Cohen singing Hallelujah. It's heavily gospel-inspired—the perfect way to capture Cohen's desolation, that sense of a sacredness departing. It's also not at all the song that's been covered to death and back. In fact, it doesn't even have the same lyrics. Cohen allegedly wrote somewhere between 80 and 180 verses for the song, when he was first putting it together; when John Cale covered it in 1991, for the Cohen tribute album I'm Your Fan, he asked Cohen for the original batch of lyrics, plucked a new set of verses out, and created the lyric procession that has now become iconic.

Cale did more that rework the lyrics. He paired Cohen's melody to an elegant, sparse arpeggio, stripping the original instrumentation down to something that brings his deep, Welsh voice front-and-center. The result, which may sound familiar to you, was this masterpiece. Even if you've never heard this version before—even if you've never seen Shrek—you may recognize this song. It's the one that Jeff Buckley covered three years later, the one that k.d. lang covered in 2004, the one that's become an unofficial standard.

John Cale, if you're unfamiliar, is one of the most brilliant men to ever touch popular music. He was a founding member of The Velvet Underground, which in a handful of albums profoundly changed our understanding of what rock, and what pop, could be. Before that, he studied under La Monte Young, arguably the most profound composer to write music in the 20th century. (It's not one of his "major" works, but Young's Just Stompin' is as important to me as an adult as Cale's "Hallelujah" was to me at 10.) Leonard Cohen is an astonishing songwriter in his own right, so it's a thrill and a pleasure to see what Cale draws out of his music: a rare chimera of a collaboration, one artist finding his voice through another artist's inspiration.

Cale's "Hallelujah" is featured in the Dreamworks movie Shrek, released in 2001. It underscores a pivotal sequence: Shrek, after misinterpreting a conversation that he overheard between the princess Fiona and the donkey Donkey, coldly hands Fiona off to the wretched man who intends to purchase her as his bride. Fiona, who is secretly in love with Shrek, mistakes the ogre's heartbreak for a rejection. And Donkey, who is the only man animal to know the truth, is cast out by Shrek, who has mistaken his friendship for betrayal. What follows is a cold, sad, lonely scene, as three lonely people and one blithering lord cast about in total solitude.

Dreamworks, no stranger to blatant emotional manipulation, sets this sequence to John Cale. And emotional manipulation aside, discovering "Hallelujah" was pivotal for me, as I'm sure it was for millions of young children. I hadn't been on this Earth long enough to experience music at its most heightened. Cale ripped my mind and my heart wide open.

I knew in the theater, right then and there, that this song would be an important part of my life. And I did the only thing that it was possible to do back then, in pre-9/11 America: I bought a copy of Shrek: Music from the Original Motion Picture, or rather, I begged my parents to buy a copy for me.

You have to understand: this was an era before Wikipedia, an era before iTunes, an era before YouTube. The only way you could listen to music from a movie was by buying a CD, putting that CD in some kind of portable spinning-music machine, and pushing the "next" button again and again until the song that you wanted to hear came on.

I skipped to track 10. But something was wrong.

This version of "Hallelujah" hit all the right notes... but it left me feeling empty. I listened to it again and again, trying to force myself to feel the same emotional catharsis that I'd felt in theaters. Absolutely nothing.

I'd never fallen out of love before. I'd never before felt what it was like to wake up one morning, look into a pair of eyes that once made me feel Complete, and admit to myself that today, here and now, I felt Apart. I hadn't experienced those miserable, wretched months of trying to make myself feel love again, hating myself for no longer loving her, hoping against hope to find some way of being the man whose love she deserved. My first crush was still a face I'd pass sometimes in the halls; Shrek came out a month before the fifth grade yearbook came out for me to scour, searching in vain for her face and for a name I could connect it with. I didn't have words for this feeling. "Maybe it's not as good as I remember," I thought, not daring to admit my disappointment to myself. I medicated myself with Smash Mouth, and I went on with my life.

Months passed. My parents bought the Shrek DVD, which was kind of like a CD if a CD came with a silly menu full of easter eggs.

I rewatched Shrek. And I fell in love all over again.

Excitedly, I returned to the soundtrack.

Still nothing.

It was a strange dissonance, to have what I loved so readily at hand, and to feel out-of-love at the same time. It was an optical illusion of sorts: a sleight-of-hand that produced, not wonder, but elusive disappointment.

It would be a lie to say I thought nothing of it. But my thoughts were impossible to commit to words. I didn't know how to explain what I'd experienced.

Years went by.

I turned 18. I left for college, and had the worst and loneliest year of my life. I became well-acquainted with the laptop in a dark room, the sense of staring desperately at the screen looking for a life, for a world, for a connection, that felt more meaningful than the emptiness and alienation that crept even into my dorm room, my cheap bunk bed, as I slept.

I turned to political activism, in vain. I turned to the nascent world of tech start-ups, and found I was too lonely and resentful to healthily participate in it. Lastly, I turned to the arts: the timeless, eternal dialogue of people trying to discover what it means to be human, what it means to live in this world, and trying to share their own humanity through their work.

I discovered La Monte Young, and I discovered The Velvet Underground. I discovered John Cale. And I discovered John Cale's "Hallelujah"—and, with it, felt an absolute shock. I am not being hyperbolic in the slightest: it was one of the most intense and sudden emotions I've experienced to this day.

If I'd looked up Shrek: Music from the Original Motion Picture on Wikipedia, I'd have learned the truth years ago. But I'd never done that. When would I have ever had a reason to?

Look the soundtrack up on Spotify, or Apple Music, or wherever else you go to find track listings of decades-old albums. Look at "Hallelujah." Look at the credited artist. Whose name do you see?

Rufus Wainwright. Rufus goddamn Wainwright.

Funny, that. But I don't see anyone laughing.

Without mentioning it, Dreamworks swapped the Cale "Hallelujah" for the Wainwright one. The covers have identical arrangements—because Wainwright, like so many other artists, took Cale's interpretation as canon. But the songs are two entirely different beasts. Rufus Wainwright, I am told, is a marvelous singer-songwriter in his own right; I am incapable of assessing him honestly, because I still hold rage in my heart. His sister Martha was one of my favorite musicians when I was 18. His father, Loudon, is a borderline miracle of a man. I'm sure Rufus brought something to that song—something that, had I encountered to it without the deceit, I might have come to love. But Rufus is no John Cale.

There is no mention of the switcheroo on the CD case. The digital album doesn't own up to this. Certainly the movie never mentions it. Dreamworks, without a word, switched one song for another. And they did this in 2001, when I was trusting enough to be gullible, when the world was young enough that certain horrible secrets simply never came to light.

Now, it is deeply pithy to equate what Dreamworks did to gaslighting. I have been gaslit and emotionally abused; I have dealt with the slow, horrifying realization that I knew something was off from the start. That the pit of dread and misery deep in my chest was, in fact, a seed I'd willingly planted within me, as I let someone whose poisons I was too-familiar with into my heart. I do not mean to lessen or dismiss the horrors that people experience at other people's hands: the nightmarish versions of reality which, as we commit ourselves to what we think is love, we slowly come to think reflect reality itself.

The soundtrack switcheroo was more like disinformation. (You know, that thing that both of America's political parties agree is ripping the country apart.) It wasn't a byproduct of malice; the most you can accuse Dreamworks of is emotional neglect.

But I am not kidding—well, I am not entirely kidding—when I say that that switcheroo infuriates me to this day. I feel hurt. I feel rage. More than anything, I feel betrayal: a vast sense of unfairness, a feeling that somebody hurt me for little other reason than that they didn't care enough not to.

Maybe music doesn't matter enough to you that you can imagine getting this het up about being denied a song for half your lifetime, then being lied to about being denied. Maybe you've been through such hell that I strike you as grossly privileged, to be able to feel so hurt by so little a thing. If so, then I regret that I can promise you this: I have been hurt worse, far worse, and I know how unserious a thing this is.

When I tell this story I mostly laugh at myself, and at the fact that I can feel such genuine anger at this.

Mostly.

But it's a funny story because the feeling is real. It's funny because, beneath the absurdity for it, beneath the hilarious fact that the song was changed out to begin with, I still can't tell this story without feeling a genuine spark of emotion, a tiny little stabbing feeling of betrayal and injustice. It's funny because the feeling is real. It's funny because, on some level, I am incapable of finding this story funny. I am incapable of reenacting my feelings without the sincere belief, as I reenact them, that Dreamworks lied to me, that they hurt me. That what they did was as blasphemous, as much a tarnishing of something sacred, as Farquad's coveting Fiona. (A comparison that's also funny to make, and for the same reason: that, on some level, I genuinely mean it.)

I meant it when I said that I still can't listen to Rufus Wainwright's voice. I hear that his music is witty, tender, aching; I hear that the way he explores his feelings is at once heartrending and deeply, deeply engaging. In that way, he's a worthy successor to Cohen, to Cale, to his own father Loudon. But I may never be able to hear it for myself. The wound has yet to heal.