1994 was an excellent year for music, albeit one tinged with tragedy. New York’s hip-hop heavyweights, the Notorious B.I.G. and Nas, announced themselves, while America’s alternative rock scene was blossoming with the likes of Weezer, Soundgarden, and Hole releasing career-defining albums. Britpop was starting to bloom across the pond, but rock music in America tended to tread in murkier waters, exploring the darker corridors of human emotion. Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo charmed everybody with his self-deprecating humour (a stereotypically British trait), Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell poetically and viscerally painted gloom and despair, and Beck turned being a loser (tongue-in-cheek) into a massive hit. But nobody could match Jeff Buckley’s enigmatic sensitivity.
Grace is sadly an album that became ensconced in tragedy, Buckley’s death in 1997, aged just thirty, looming over it. It’s an album that has forever been subjected to retrospective analysis, grossly underappreciated at its time of release, Buckley’s beguiling, beautiful music too much to comprehend. Buckley has few parallels in terms of weaving emotions into his songs, his deft imagery aided by his captivating voice, effortlessly able to drift from an angelic falsetto to a rock star growl. Grace is an album that stops you in your tracks, forcing you to stop whatever you’re doing and surrender yourself to Buckley’s mesmeric tones.
Despite his natural talent, Buckley’s rise to cult stardom was long and winding. His father was revered folk musician Tim Buckley, though the two had virtually no relationship, Buckley reportedly meeting him just once before his death in 1975, while his mother, Mary, was a classically trained pianist and cellist. Initially growing up around Orange County, Buckley moved to Hollywood after graduating high school and spent several years working in a hotel and playing in various struggling bands.
Struggling to achieve lift-off, Buckley moved to New York in February 1990, seeking more opportunities, but returned to Los Angeles six months later when his father’s former manager Herb Cohen offered to help him record a demo. A four-song cassette entitled the Babylon Dungeon Sessions featured early versions of ‘Last Goodbye’ ( called ‘Unforgiven’) and ‘Eternal Life’, which would appear on Grace. Buckley would return to New York the following year to perform in a tribute concert for his father, marking his public singing debut. Buckley was accompanied by experimental rock guitarist Gary Lucas, formerly of King Crimson’s band.
Buckley began co-writing with Lucas later that year, resulting in early versions of ‘Grace’ and ‘Mojo Pin’, and he even had a brief spell in Lucas’s band, Gods and Monsters. Back living in Manhattan, Buckley became a regular performer at clubs in the Lower East Side, practically taking up a residence at the Sin-é, an emerging creative hub. Buckley performed an eclectic range of covers encompassing the likes of Billie Holiday and Bad Brains, as well as performing original material that would appear on his 1993 EP, Live at Sin-é. Buckley’s performances garnered great attention, and he eventually signed for Columbia records in October 1992.
Work began on Grace in mid ’93 with producer Andy Wallace, who had mixed Nirvana’s Nevermind and Rage Against The Machine’s eponymous debut. Buckley assembled a band composed of bassist Mick Grøndahl and drummer Matt Johnson, with Gary Lucas playing the guitar on ‘Grace’ and ‘Mojo Pin’, and jazz musician Karl Berger helping conduct string arrangements. Describing the album’s title, Buckley said: “Grace is what matters in anything. It keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly”. Buckley explored the highs and lows of love in excruciating detail, stripping away any sense of ego.
‘Mojo Pin’ provides an eerie opening, with Buckley’s ghostly tones crooning over gentle guitar strums. ‘Mojo Pin’ sees Buckley explore the darker, torturous side of love, his intimate vocals matching his visceral, sensory imagery: “I’m lying in my bed, the blanket is warm/Still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal”. Despite some drug allegories (“Oh, precious, precious silver and gold”), the song is about the addictive nature of love, and the sudden burst of explosive riffs towards the end feels like a culmination of his pain.
Buckley’s dexterity on the guitar is impressive throughout, able to encompass a variety of styles, from Nick Drake-style fingerpicking to the jazzy chords on ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’, and even the thrashing Led Zeppelin homage that is ‘Eternal Life’, Grace’s angriest moment. Buckley can extract just as much emotion from his guitar as his voice, and his wide-ranging influences and years of playing eclectic covers are evident in the diversity of his styles. The Michael Tighe featuring ‘So Real’ features a wonderfully grungy guitar solo that sounds like two saws scratching against each other, while on ‘Grace’, the twinkling notes eventually give way to a squalling crescendo.
‘Grace’ is up there with one of the greatest vocal performances of all time, Buckley’s anguish slicing through the noise. On the ultimate break-up anthem, ‘Last Goodbye’, Buckley’s falsetto dripping with emotion as he pleads to an unknown lover: “Kiss me out of desire, baby, not consolation”. Buckley’s vocals are similarly powerful on ‘So Real’, turning a simple choral refrain into something incredibly intense. Throughout, Grace Buckley seems to come second best in love, lamenting on ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’: “Maybe I’m too young/To keep good love from going away”. ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’ is searingly honest, Buckley expressing past regrets, but ultimately expressing a commitment to love: “Oh, love, well I’ll wait for you”.
Of course, you can’t talk about Grace without mentioning the three cover versions, a bold move that perhaps didn’t wash with the critics at the time. His Nina Simone-inspired cover of James Shelton’s ‘Lilac Wine’ is the record’s most haunting moment while again demonstrating his supreme vocal talents as he stretches words and lets them go at the perfect moment. ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ is similarly striking, the Benjamin Britten cover serving as a dedication to an old school friend.
And what can you say about ‘Hallelujah’? Taking on Leonard Cohen, one of history’s great singer-songwriters, is no mean feat. But Buckley surpasses his effort with an unbelievable performance that makes it feel like Cohen wrote the song for him, from the intense fragility of his voice to his nimble guitar work, with riffs that ripple and float away. Buckley became synonymous with ‘Hallelujah’, perhaps detrimentally so, as people ignored the rest of his catalogue, but as cover versions go, it’s up there with the best.
Some initial criticisms of Grace revolved around its instrumentation’s lack of textures. But producer Andy Wallace does a fine job of ensuring Buckley’s voice holds the candle and shines through while Grøndahl and Johnson provide impressive support. Grace is beguilingly beautiful, accessible but complex, with the melodies of rock music and the moodiness of jazz, and you always feel more is lurking beneath the surface. It’s a record that creeps under your skin, Buckley’s tones lingering long after you’ve stopped listening. Buckley’s tragic death robbed us of one of music’s great talents; rather than being the beginning, Grace became a legacy.