I was angry this morning.

Most mornings, I am too busy not sleeping to entertain real emotions; I try to save those for later in the day. But this morning presented a significant exception.

As usual, the radio was playing in the background as I was eating and preparing for work; this morning, it was tuned to WMUZ, and they were playing their usual assortment of songs. And then I heard a new one.

Well, at first I thought I was actually hearing an old one, but I knew that couldn’t be the case. I thought I was hearing Jeff Buckley‘s Hallelujah, a song written by Leonard Cohen, but I knew there was no chance WMUZ would ever play Hallelujah. Upon a closer listen, I discovered I was hearing Hallelujah … but I wasn’t. I was hearing Lincoln Brewster‘s rewrite of the song, called Another Hallelujah.

As I listened to the song and discovered that he had almost completely rewritten the song — retaining only one or two lines and the chorus of a repeated “hallelujah” — I became angry. I was angry because he had blatantly taken a beautiful, haunting, compelling song and turned it into a sanitized church-ready song.

If there were to be anything positive in Brewster’s song, it would be his efforts to make the song sound like Buckley’s performance; for most of the song, he continued those efforts. But my anger increased toward the end of the song, when he abandoned the quiet, haunting sound of Buckley’s Hallelujah in favor of a full rock band conclusion. It was not just that he failed to stay faithful to the song he hijacked; it was also that the high-energy conclusion failed to fit the mood of the rest of the song. Following the song, the WMUZ morning hosts confirmed that I was not the only one to feel that way, saying a caller complimented the song but expressed dismay at the mismatched ending.

For the most part, my anger has subsided, but I continue to consider Brewster’s rewrite to be utterly outrageous and ill-conceived. Religious music already has its critics, and Brewster carelessly handed a substantial grenade to those critics. Cover the existing song as it is written or write an entirely new song, but please, don’t rewrite an existing song to make the lyrics work for religious radio. To do so is a sad display of some of the biggest faults of — and restrictions on — the creative culture within the Christian community.

Lincoln Brewster, and others: instead of redecorating other songwriters’ houses, please, build your own musical houses.