Grace - Jeff Buckley
Album #59: Grace – Jeff Buckley
I lost myself on a cool damp night / I gave myself in that misty night.
We all have those albums that creep down our back, rub the lining of our spinal column, and fill us with the static of god.
With the exception of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the entire Beatles’ catalogue, I have listened to Jeff Buckley’s seminal album Grace, released in 1994, more times than any other. Every time is a revelation. It is the subtle blurring of reality and dream, balancing precariously between them.
Jeff Buckley
“Mojo Pin,” a sensual meditation that veers into Led Zeppelin power chords, feels like my bed at night, drifting into that liminal state of unconsciousness, while the title track howls into the night with impassioned screaming and loneliness over Buckley’s chiming telecaster loneliness as Buckley.
“Last Goodbye” resurrects every shitty relationship I’ve watched fall apart and crumble to dust; “Lilac Wine” is sensuality personified, with Buckley’s voice dripping like wine down the back of a lover along with the slow drawl of thick bass and granular drums.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve joined Buckley in “Hallelujah,” Leonard Cohan’s lament to love, and the 25-second sustained note at the end is as near I’ve ever come to a miracle.
The harmonium drenched “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and the crystalline lullaby of “Corpus Christi Carol” brings me to dappled forest paths, sunlight through the canopies of my youth. The violent reprisal of “Eternal Life,” is an ode to the beauty of savagery and all wrapped up in the Angel of Death’s unfurled black wings, flying over the eastern influenced “Dream Brother.”
Never has an album so synchronized with my life.
And so it’s my favorite.
Until I drink more than I ought to drink, to bring you back.
