Jeff Buckley: Grace (1994)

 

I got this CD years ago as a birthday gift from my younger brother.  While I’d of course heard his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” it had been my only previous exposure to Jeff Buckley.  I still remember the first time I listened to the album – driving to the Cities for an evening workshop after a long day, I started with a distracted ear to the music, but by the time “Mojo Pin” really got underway, I was speechless.  So beautiful.

 

Grace, Buckley’s only studio release before his sudden death in 1997, offers sublime rock tunes infused with a mixture of folk, soul, and blues.  I already mentioned the first track; “Mojo Pin” starts quiet and dreamlike, light guitar and soft vocals.  It’s a fantastic building song, however, and you’re soon introduced to wall-of-sound riffs and Buckley’s evocative vocals, which nimbly leap up and down an impressively-wide range.  It moves like a story, and its lyrics are filled with moody imagery (my personal favorite line in this one is, “Born again from the rhythm screaming down from heaven…”)

 

The title track follows, a wonderfully listenable number that ponders love and mortality.  These are themes that reverberate throughout the entire album.  “Last Goodbye” deals with the “death” of a relationship, a requiem for lost love.  As Buckley makes his final farewell to his lover, he weaves in funereal emblems, such as “the bells out in the church tower […] burning clues” into his heart.  Meanwhile, the rocking “Eternal Life” examines regrets and doubts in the face of the end.  As a point of interest, the guitar is amazing here.

 

“Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” also employs the love ‘n’ mortality couplet, opening on a funeral observed from afar by a man who can’t “keep good love from going wrong.”  This rueful, melancholy track doesn’t ultimately wallow in its sorrow, though.  It’s one of my favorites on the album, in part because of the way it clings fast to hope.  With its twin mantras of “It’s not too late” and “It’s never over,” it invites reconciliation.  The lyrics in this song are absolutely gorgeous – I love the description of Buckley’s lover as “the tear that hangs inside [his] soul forever,” and there aren’t many lines more beautifully wistful than “My kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder…”

 

I’d be remiss, of course, if I didn’t mention “Hallelujah.”  It’s one of three covers on the album, and it’s easily the best.  With its lovely lyrics, biblical allusions, and gently rising verses, it’s a winner through and through.  The other two covers, “Lilac Wine” and “Corpus Christi Carol,” are more staid – pretty, but not as interesting as the rest of the album. 

 

Really, though, having listened to the entire CD numerous times, “Hallelujah” ranks below most if not all of the original songs I described above.  There’s something so interesting about the way Buckley’s songs develop and shift.  Rather than follow the typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus format (or the verse-verse-verse-verse-verse-verse layout of the more folkish “Hallelujah,”) his songs are sweeping, dynamic landscapes, more like dramas with rising and falling action.  It makes this album stand out from most of the CDs I own.