I was 15. It was a rainy afternoon in Rhode Island, where my family and I were on vacation. It had been raining for most of the two weeks we had been there, so instead of frolicking on the beach, we had spent much of our time sealed indoors, playing board games and listening to music.
That afternoon, my cousin put an album on the boom box that I had never heard, by an artist of whom I was completely unaware. She said, “When I first heard this album, I thought his voice was too whiny. It’s grown on me, though.” We listened as we talked and joked, and gazed longingly out of the window, wishing that the sun would make even a brief appearance. At the time, I didn’t think much of the album. I enjoyed it, but only heard fragments through our distracted conversation. This first listening was by no means thoughtful or deliberate.
About a week later, when I was back at home and the sun had come out again, my mind, as if a CD scratched beyond recognition, began to remember one plaintive, crying phrase: “Oh, if only you’d come back to me…” I knew it was from the album my cousin had played that day in Rhode Island, but the rest of the song hadn’t permeated the membranes of my subconscious, and I couldn’t recall it. The lyric was oddly appropriate, as I wished for days that I could hear that song, just that one song, once more.
Eventually, I got smart and consulted Napster. After all, these were the days during which downloadable music was still an embryonic, developing paradigm. With the help of my sloth-like 56K modem, I downloaded the first three songs that I could find by this “Jeff Buckley” guy. These songs, as I would later discover, were the the first three tracks found on his only completed album, Grace. The first of these songs was “Mojo Pin,” which contained the phrase that had been haunting my thoughts. My longing had been quenched.
I listened to those three songs over and over again, and I eventually began to crave something more. Because downloading music was painfully slow in the days of dial-up, I knew I’d have to purchase the CD. I didn’t have a job or any money at the time, so I waited almost a year before I was able to buy it.
Listening to the album in its entirety was, well, life-changing. Perhaps this makes me weird, but I have a small list of very formative albums that I can say, without equivocation, changed my life. This is one of them. Every track seemed perfectly written, recorded, chosen, and placed in order. What struck me most, of course, is what strikes everyone else who has heard the album: Jeff Buckley’s soaring falsetto. Sometimes it is soft, smooth, a whisper. Sometimes it shudders with tremolo, crying out in raw beauty. As a singer myself, I couldn’t help but appreciate this aspect of his talent above all else.
I can’t name a track that I consider to be a definitive favorite; each one is distinctly beautiful. If I had to choose two songs that stand out as being particularly superb (because I couldn’t possibly choose one), though, I’d pick his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and his rendition of Benjamin Britten’s setting of “Corpus Christi Carol.”
His version of “Hallelujah,” a song that has been recorded countless times and by a diverse array of artists, is one of the best known, and the most beloved. Those who haven’t heard the Buckley version have probably heard versions by either John Cale or Rufus Wainwright, as both of these renditions were associated with the movie Shrek. Cale’s version, which mixes and matches various verses from two different sets of lyrics written by Cohen, serves as the basis for both the Buckley version and the Wainwright version. I bet you’ve never seen the word “version” used so many times in so few sentences. The lineage of the song, its lyrics, and the people who have recorded it, is anything but linear.
Jeff Buckley, more than any artist I’ve heard do this song, captures the purity and underlying melancholy present within it. Cohen’s versions are sort of plodding and funky (and great, don’t get me wrong), but Buckley makes fully transparent any clandestine grief that Cohen may or may not have intended. In short, it’s just gorgeous.
There isn’t as much to say about “Corpus Christi Carol.” It is as beautifully sung as by any professional countertenor, albeit probably not as polished. Buckley’s own accompaniment on guitar is almost harp-like. His diction and phrasing are, in a word, lovely. I think Benjamin Britten would have approved of it, to say the very least.
As with all of the albums that have made my life-changing list, I listened to it religiously. It became a soundtrack for the summer prior to my junior year of high school, a time I look on with extreme fondness. Whenever I listen to it, it summons thoughts of good friends, love, and warm weather. But, as is to be expected when one listens to an album as frequently as I did Grace, I got pretty sick of it. Sure, I’ve listened to it and rediscovered it countless times since that summer, but I often have to take a step back and abandon it for long periods.
Last night, I had the urge to listen to Grace. And the more I listened to it, the more I wanted to listen. This morning, I woke up singing its songs. For the first time in a while, I can truly appreciate its greatness, and I can comfortably remember who I was and what I was doing when I first discovered it. I have heard people call it “overrated,” and countless people have asked me, “Isn’t that the guy that all the college chicks fawn over?” College chicks may quiver with delight over Jeff Buckley, and it may be a critic’s darling, but to me, it is immeasurably more than all that. Years ago, I fell deeply in love with it, and that love has matured, evolved, and will likely last forever.
