- From Kurt to Jeff.
Then came hallelujah sounding like mad Ophelia
for me in my room living
So kiss me, my darling stay with me till morning
Turn back and you will stay
Under the Memphis Skyline
Rufus Wainwright - “Memphis Skyline”
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There are numerous points during the transcendental journey that is Grace, Jeff Buckley’s only completed studio album, which never fail to move me. But none will ever top that which occurs exactly 17 seconds into the recording, on the opening cut, “Mojo Pin.” For that is the very first entrance of his voice.
That voice.
It hangs for a long moment, suspended over one’s head, sounding so unlike any voice I have heard sing a note before or since that you’d be easily forgiven for not realizing that it is indeed a man singing, and not some angelic apparition. One of my other favorite singers, Bono, describes Jeff as “a pure drop in an ocean of noise,” and yet, there are still times on the record where voice, guitar and strings become so rapturously entwined together that such distinctions begin to lose all meaning.
I have listened to my well-worn copy of Grace at least one hundred times, such use interspersed with carefully administered loans to many friends. At present, it is in the hands of a colleague who I overheard listening to Rufus Wainwright at her workstation. Before delivering the album to her, I issued a warning that for most artists would be offered with a grain of salt. For Jeff, however, I could not have been more serious.
“This will change your life,” I said.
For how it has mine. It came into my possession almost accidentally. Soon after returning from a summer trip back to Australia—where Jeff gained far more mainstream recognition during his life than he did in the States—I purchased it on eBay, on a whim. It immediately became my primary source of all inspiration. Good music changes the way you feel; great music changes the way you feel. Grace not only best captures and relates to its listener in his most personal daily circumstance; it re-phrases and re-conceptualizes his life experience so that it begins to carry more meaning than one had previously conceived possible, making sentiments like jubilation, wonder, anger, sorrow and love far more real. Anything that I might remember feeling before Grace is now subconsciously understood through Grace. Like a lost sheep upon sighting his shepherd, I found Jeff’s trail soon after Kurt Cobain’s stopped carrying me past pubescence.
Though he may have been only a mysterious white boy, Jeff played soul music, first and foremost. His musical furnishing may have had more immediate genealogical ties to Led Zeppelin and Edith Piaf, but the force behind his art came through pious devotion at the altar of Black privation: Rhythm and Blues. He soaked in the darkest waters of its progenitors, learning his trade through Billie, Nina and Al Green, thus becoming as worthy a vessel of its timeless power as any “outsider” vocalist could hope to become. That he would ultimately combine this with the Sufi timbre of his self-proclaimed “Elvis,” Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, inspired me to explore deeper within the music that I so dearly loved in an effort to discover the soul behind its sound.
Embarrassing as it is, I dared to name my short-lived high school rock band after one of his songs. We were, but of course, The Mojo Pins. Thankfully, our first and final gig at a local church did not include any covers of his songs. That most ill-advised of efforts was spared for a solo performance at a high school’s coffeehouse, where, with sweaty fingers and faltering falsetto, I tip-toed my way through an earnest version of “Last Goodbye.” It was in fact only a small piece of my multiple appearances that night, where I mixed angsty anti-Bush poems with several emo covers in a bid to strike at least a glimmer of sensitive-songwriter-Asian-white-boy gold with the eligible women in the audience. I didn’t, but have since justified this failure upon the stage crew’s inability to cart in the piano from the art room for my scheduled performance of Mozart’s “Six Variations in G on a Theme of Salieri,” a lady killer if ever there was one. Playing “Last Goodbye” did, however, introduce me to two of my best high school friends; fellow Jeff devotees with whom a devotion to his music and mourning of his passing would form the core of our friendship.
I recall dragging another close friend around the East Village on one of my first visits to the Big Apple, in search of Jeff’s early regular gig venue, a hole-in-the-wall café named Sin-e (“Shin-ay,” Gaelic for “That’s It”). After an extended period of fruitless searching, we finally came upon it, only to find that at 21 and over, our entry was not permitted. Forgoing disappointment, I lingered at Sin-e’s doorstep, peering in through the window and then closing my eyes, invoking the musical muse that had so profoundly shaken his traveling devotee. At the beginning of his first live E.P. (recorded inside the café), Jeff whispers: “this is a song about a dream” before launching into his signature croon. Well, reaching Sin-e had become my hajj, and I’d come here before: if not in prayer than certainly in dream. Standing on the sidewalk of that grimy, dark alley of a street, Jeff’s lingering presence for a moment brought into clarity more of the pain and frustration, the longing and bohemian wonder, the celebration and artistic hunger of the East Village and New York City than I would otherwise have ever known.
Grace crossed the Atlantic with me during a semester spent in London. On one of those most triumphant of Spring occurrences, which come so rarely as to elicit genuine joy throughout the entire city (and seemingly, British Kingdom), that is: when the sun momentarily breaks the shackles of its cloud captors, splashing her glorious light across Mother England’s pale brow, I celebrated with a stroll through Hyde Park. “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” was washing its gospel yearning across my ears. At the very point where Jeff exalts: “Sometimes a man must awake to find that really…he has no one,” I noticed a small Indian girl playing innocently in the grass with her parents. It was such a slight, ordinary event, played out across millions of lives each day. But under the spell of this music, of this wrenching line, I became a bearer of an epiphany so much larger and more awesome than any Mass I ever sat through during childhood Catholic school. I felt closer to God than the existentialist-absurdist seminars I would attend years later could endeavour to re-distance me from, and basked in an impossibly fiercer love than the relationship-based narrative of “Lover” originally evokes.
The critic James Wood writes that reading Saul Bellow “is a special way of being alive.” In this case, listening to Jeff is an approximate experience, but one that not only intensifies one’s aliveness, but actually raises it beyond the realm of the subjective or symbolic and into an eternal place. One which, unlike heaven, remains grounded in all of the joyous treachery and miserable mortality of its human condition. In the penultimate chapter of Grace, Jeff screams: “There’s no time for hatred, only questions/Where is love, where is happiness, what is life, where is peace?”
The right reply, I have gradually but increasingly come to find, can be found in the living body of the original source itself. Qawwals, employing the extended, throaty ululations and modal melodies which Jeff would eventually stylize into a voice uniquely his own, bring their audience into a state of religious ecstasy and greater devotion through the power of their singing. An evening/car ride/drink with Grace then, is by leaps and bounds the most profound secular service an album has thus far proven to be for me. It feels slightly ironic, if unsurprising, that an artist like Jeff, who remains best known for his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” who named his only completed album after a phrase commonly associated with Christianity, and whose early passing and father’s inescapable shadow bring to mind another highly deified son, should detest organized religion.
In my own short, unfolding journey, it is the accompaniment of Jeff’s dreams and struggle for meaning that have breathed constant vitality into my own search for understanding of faith, meaning and above all else, love. As Daphne Brooks--who inspired me to write this love note--explains: more than anything else, Grace is an act of love. If this musician’s tragically short career is to be celebrated in some way, I would put forth that lives renewed be most appropriate. In which case, I am born anew with each listen. Again, and again, and again.
