Album of the Day — October 16. Jeff Buckley — Grace
By: Keith R. Higgons
Tags: Music, Rock, Art, Culture, Album

Album of the Day — October 16

Jeff Buckley — Grace

Jeff Buckley — Grace (Columbia Records)

16.October.2020

Jeff Buckley

Grace

1994

Jeff Buckley recorded only one proper album, Grace. And it’s one of the best albums of the 1990s …arguably, one of the best albums in rock history.

No, really, it’s that good.

Grace is that rare album that continues to grow in stature as more people are hipped to Buckley’s unique brilliance.

Buckley’s biological father was folk and jazz artist Tim Buckley, a moderately popular artist in the 60s and 70s who died in 1975 of a drug overdose. The younger Buckley was raised in southern California as Scott Moorhead by his mother and stepfather.

Jeff Buckley only met his biological father once. After his death, he decided to go by his biological name, Jeff Buckley.

After graduating high school, he moved to Los Angeles and began kicking around the scene as a guitar player — picking up sessions here and there and playing in different bands. Six years later, in 1990, he moved to New York City but found the same degree of indifference he encountered in LA.

When his father’s former manager, Herb Cohen, offered to pay for a demo and help the younger Buckley get a recording contract, he left New York City.

Jeff Buckley was again met with little if any, interest by record labels.

In April of 1991, a tribute to Tim Buckley — Greetings from Tim Buckley — was staged at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, New York. The younger Buckley was invited to perform, and with experimental rock guitarist Gary Lucas, Buckley performed “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain,” a song Tim Buckley wrote about an infant Jeff Buckley and his mother as well as:

“Sefronia — The King’s Chain”

“Phantasmagoria in Two”

“Once I Was”

The buzz began.

Eventually landing a recurring gig at the Lower East Side Sin-é — (pronounced shin-ay) is Irish for “That’s it.” It was here that Buckley woodshedded and perfected his craft. His set would cover a myriad of artists, including:

Nina Simone

Van Morrison

Judy Garland

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Elton John

Bad Brains

By the summer of 1992, the industry had taken notice. And in October, Buckley signed with Columbia Records in what was rumored to be a million-dollar deal.

A few months later, Buckley recorded a lot of his solo material, singing a cappella, and using acoustic and electric guitars with Steve Addabbo (Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin). While these sessions remain unreleased, much of this material would end up on Grace.

Formal sessions were set for the summer of 1993 with producer Andy Wallace — who was then riding high after having mastered Nirvana’s Nevermind.

On Grace, Wallace would wear three hats — producer, engineer and he would master the album.

After hiring bassist Mick Grøndahl and drummer Matt Johnson, the trio began rehearsing Buckley’s material. In September of 93, they left NYC for Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York. Along with Wallace, they would spend six weeks recording basic tracks for Grace.

After returning to NYC, Buckley would spend time overdubbing at various studios, attempting to capture perfect vocals and adding layers of texture to the songs.

In November of 1993, the EP Live at Sin-é was released on Columbia Records. Despite a Van Morrison cover (“The Way Young Lovers Do”), it was met commercially with indifference here in the United States. Still, it did chart in several European countries, including Ireland, where he remains very popular.

Grace was released on August 23, 1994.

The album contains seven Buckley originals and three covers: “Lilac Wine,” based on the version by Nina Simone; “Corpus Christi Carol,” from Benjamin Britten’s A Boy was Born; and “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. Buckley’s version is largely regarded as his “best” song.

[Fun Fact: In April of 2014, Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry.]

Among the seven original tracks, any one of them could be someone’s favorite song. What comes together on Grace are Buckley’s influences, paired with his unique singing and sounds like an almost effortless approach to the songs (but very far from effortless).

The record captures a certain “I don’t give a fuck” attitude that Gen X’ers were known for. If you took the time to listen to Grace like if you took the time to talk to a Gen X’er at the time, you’d see that there were layers of complexity and sensitivity that go much deeper than “I don’t give a fuck.”

While I love “Lover You Should’ve Come Over” and “So Real,” the best songs are right upfront.

For me, it’s the one-two-three wallop of the opening tracks: “Mojo Pin,” “Grace,” and “The Last Goodbye” that define not only the album, but Buckley as an artist.

Perhaps that’s because I’m a sucker for a good old-fashioned heartbreaking rock song. And these are three of the best of that era, if not ever.

The album's opener, “Mojo Pin,” is about, according to Buckley: “Sometimes if somebody you feel you need… the whole universe tells you that you have to have her, you start watching her favorite TV shows all night, you start buying her the things she needs, you start drinking her drinks… this is called Mojo Pin.”

Mojo Pin

I’m lying in my bed

The blanket is warm

This body will never be safe from harm

Still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal

Touch my skin to keep me whole

If only you’d come back to me

If you laid at my side

Wouldn’t need no mojo pin

To keep me satisfied

On the second track, Buckley lays it on the line — “Grace” is:

“It’s about not feeling so bad about your own mortality when you have true love.”

Grace

There’s the moon asking to stay

Long enough for the clouds to fly me away

Oh, it’s my time coming, I’m not afraid, afraid to die

My fading voice sings of love

But she cries to the clicking of time, oh

Wait in the fire

Wait in the fire

Fire

And she weeps on my arm

Walking to the bright lights in sorrow

Oh, drink a bit of wine we both might go tomorrow

Oh, my love

The gutting reality of “The Last Goodbye” rings true if you’ve ever been in love and watched that love die. Try as you might, it just …dies. Its slide guitar and bass intro before the drums kick in to set the song on a course leading up to the bridge's crescendo. It’s almost five minutes of pure perfection. And like the best love affairs, it goes by both too quickly and for just the right amount of time.

The Last Goodbye

This is our last goodbye

I hate to feel the love between us die

But it’s over

Just hear this and then I’ll go

You gave me more to live for

More than you’ll ever know

This is our last embrace

Must I dream and always see your face?

Why can’t we overcome this wall?

Baby, maybe it's just because I didn’t know you at all

Kiss me, please kiss me

But kiss me out of desire, babe, not consolation

Oh, you know it makes me so angry

’Cause I know that in time, I’ll only make you cry

This is our last goodbye

Did you say, “No, this can’t happen to me”

Did you rush to the phone to call

Was there a voice unkind in the back of your mind

Saying maybe you didn’t know him at all

You didn’t know him at all, oh oh, ya didn’t know

Ooo didn’t know

Well, the bells out in the church tower chime

Burning clues into this heart of mine

Thinking so hard on her soft eyes

And the memories offer signs that it’s over

Over

Initially, the accolades for Grace weren’t seen in record sales or even with critics, but by his legendary (now) contemporaries:

Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page considered Grace close to being his “favorite album of the decade.”

Bob Dylan, named Buckley “one of the great songwriters of this decade.”

David Bowie named Grace as one of 10 albums he’d bring with him to a desert island.

Record sales for Grace remained sluggish, but by the end of 1994, Grace was in or on top of some of the “Best of” lists of that year, among them:

Mojo Magazine Top 25 albums — #1

Teknicart Top Five albums of 1994 — #2

Melody Maker Best 50 albums of the year — #9

Rocksound Best albums of 1994 — #2

Entertainment Weekly Top 10 albums of 1994 — #6

CRITICS:

In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau excoriated the young Buckley and displayed a particularly unfair degree of assholery: “Young Jeff is a syncretic asshole, beholden to Zeppelin and Nina Simone and Chris Whitley and the Cocteau Twins and his mama — your mama too if you don’t watch out. “Sensitivity isn’t being wimpy,” he avers. “It’s about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom.” So let us pray the force of hype blows him all the way to Uranus.”

In the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot wrote: “Jeff Buckley’s voice not only has range, it has a soulful intensity that sends chills. The music has a rolling-and-tumbling dynamic that suits the swooning vocals, the crash-and-burn of “Eternal Life” of a piece with the jazzy atmospherics of “Lilac Wine” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” a masterpiece that Buckley wholly inhabits.”

After touring the world more than once in support of Grace, Buckley took some time off before de-camping to Memphis to record his second album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk.

On May 29, 1997, along with roadie Keith Foti, Buckley went swimming fully dressed in Wolf River Harbor, one of the Mississippi River's slack water channels. Foti remained on shore and moved a couple of things out of the wake of a passing boat, and by the time he turned around, Buckley had disappeared.

Despite a rescue effort, Jeff Buckley would not be found until June 4.

The autopsy showed no signs of drugs or alcohol in his system and his death was ruled an accidental drowning. The music industry ruled it one more tragic loss.

By coincidence, the musical tributes began immediately. Former girlfriend, Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, recorded the Massive Attack song “Teardrop” on the day he died and later stated: “That was so weird … I’d got letters out, and I was thinking about him. That song’s kind of about him — that’s how it feels to me anyway.”

The tributes have carried on over the years. Artists of varying genres have written songs to pay tribute to the creativity of Jeff Buckley. These are just a few:

Aimee Mann — “Just Like Anyone”

Glen Hansard — “Neath the Beeches”

Juliana Hatfield — “Trying Not To Think About It”

Pete Yorn — “Bandstand in the Sky”

Duncan Sheik — “A Body Goes Down”

Chris Cornell — “Wave Goodbye”

Lana Del Rey — “Gods and Monsters” (the name of Buckley’s band in NYC)

Even as recently as January of 2020, Mark Kozelek’s song “LaGuardia” contains lyrics reflecting on his memories of Jeff Buckley.

The mark of an artist that recorded only one proper studio album 26 years ago and how they can still influence and impact musicians to this day is the identifier of the magnitude of Jeff Buckley’s talent and the loss with his untimely death.

I shudder to think of what may have been.

It’s Friday, and here in the Northeast where I am, the weather is a little cloudy, and we’re due for some rain. It’s a perfect Indian Summer day to pop in Jeff Buckley’s Grace and just let it flow into you.

Letting the album’s simple elegance roll through you, you’ll discover the album is aptly named.