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This is one of my favorite albums all-time, like top 10 desert Island keepsakes. And I’m gonna torture your ear with why in this thread...
This is Jeff Buckley’s only finished studio album and it opens with “Mojo Pin,” a bedazzling montage of soulful psychedelia, one part soft plaintive-ness, one part aggressive longing. Dude is a maestro of crescendo
Title track “Grace” was the first Buckley song I ever heard and I was high af in one of those college navel-gazing settings so this segment right here hit like a ton of bricks and I said whoa whoa timeout wtf is this white boy
“...grace is what matters, in anything, especially life, especially growth, tragedy, pain, love, death; about people, that's what matters...It keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly. It keeps you from destroying things too foolishly.” - Jeff Buckley, 1994
Scarlett Johansson is known for non-acting and being pretty but she also does a cover of “Last Goodbye” on the He’s Just Not That Into You soundtrack that’s kinna cloyingly sweet. #JeffBetter tho
“Lilac Wine” is one of three covers on this album but no one does covers like this white boy...from Dylan to Edith Piaf to Zeppelin to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to The Smiths to Nina Simone, that white boy good
“So Real”
Everybody and they mama including all your favs and a dumb amount of music show contestants has covered Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” but ain’t nobody touching this mystery white boys version
“Lover You Should’ve Come Over” I’ve already told y’all is a top 5 sexiest song of all time and I’m gonna let you in on a secret: if a woman isn’t familiar with Jeff Buckley and you want her to associate you with this level of intimacy, play this song and reap the rewards
Ain’t adding “Corpus Cristi Carol”, not because it’s not a expression of Buckley’s vocal talents but you can get away with Hallelujah, you can’t get away with adding this. Yea it’s beautiful. And it could maybe fit thematically, But it doesn’t fit for me
Cutting away from vinyl cuz my fav version of “Eternal Life” is this meandering rough cut Buckley did at the now shuttered Sin-é in NY’s East Village in 1993
Anyway the legacy edition of this set at Sin-é has some rich covers: Yeh Jo Halk Hakka Saroor Hai by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, If You See Her Say Hello by Dylan and Je n'en connais pas la fin by French chanteuse Edith Piaf, a good lullaby if you love singing to your babies
So this last joint “Dream Brother” Buckley wrote for a friend to encourage him not to walk out on his girlfriend who was preggos. Buckley’s own dad, noted musician Tim Buckley, walked out on him from a heroin overdose at age 28
Choice lyrics: “Don't be like the one who made me so old/Don't be like the one who left behind his name/'Cause they're waiting for you like I waited for mine/And nobody ever came” man was going through it
Anyway, Jeff went out young like his dad at 30 while working on his 2nd album My Sweetheart The Drunk. Apparently he was singing Whole Lotta Love while swimming in the Mississippi before a eddie pulled him under and he washed up on Beale Street a few days later
We were robbed
We were robbed
