Grace (1994)
11 tracks, 57 minutes
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Grace, Jeff Buckley’s only studio album released before his death, is a different prospect than the album we’ve already covered, his café sessions record Live at Sin-é, which was recorded just a few months earlier. There, he was on his own, just his guitar and his voice; here, the arrangements are full of atmospheric production and huge instrumentation, from many guitar overdubs with all manner of different effects to string arrangements and interesting timbres from harmoniums to dulcimers. However, what is the same is his own immense talent: his intelligent guitarwork, his agonised but strong compositions and above all, his soaring and swooping voice, a remarkable instrument full of fragility and emotion.
There’s so much variety on this album, it shows just how much he had to offer, musically. The three covers he includes illustrate this well – there’s ‘Lilac Wine’, a gently jazzy musical theatre song made famous by Nina Simone; then possibly the album’s most famous track ‘Hallelujah’, a tragic but passionate rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ballad; and then again ‘Corpus Christi Carol’, a hymn from the Middle Ages that fully utilises Jeff’s tenor range. Even these disparate covers contrast with the original material on the album too: ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ is immediately followed by ‘Eternal Life’, probably the heaviest song on the album that even owes parts of its sound to grunge and punk.
On Live at Sin-é, Jeff makes his famous statement about the legendary Pakistani qawwal Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, calling him “my Elvis,” and going on to sing a version of the qawwali ‘Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai’. There are no Nusrat covers on Grace which, considering the target audience, is probably not too surprising, although hearing a full in-studio arrangement of the piece would have been really cool. But if you listen closely, Nusrat, qawwali and South Asian music in general are all over this album. They’re there in obvious places such as the introduction of ‘Dream Brother’, which is all drones, sliding guitars and tabla, but it’s also there in small elements such as the patterns he traces as he drifts away at the end of a phrase, or even in the way he sometimes constructs his guitar parts and chord progressions. All of it comes together on the title track, where his guitar and voice together sound so much influenced by the South Asian sound that I’m sure there would be room for an interesting cover highlighting those aspects.
Jeff’s death at just 30 years old is an unspeakable tragedy not only for his age and the circumstances surrounding it, but at the sheer amount of creative potential the man held. Everything he made was so beautiful, and his planned work was, by all accounts, just as captivating as that which he left us. It’s a story that seems to be repeated so often in music, and it gets no less saddening. But he did leave us with beautiful music, at least, and that shall ever be attached to the memory of this singular musician.
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