The Road to ‘Grace’: How Jeff Buckley’s Debut Album Remains Timeless 20 Years Later

“Grace is what matters in anything—especially life, especially growth, tragedy, pain, love, death. That’s a quality that I admire very greatly. It keeps you from reaching out for the gun too quickly. It keeps you from destroying things too foolishly. It sort of keeps you alive.”

Those words by the late Jeff Buckley, taken from archival interview footage featured in the 2004 documentary Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley, perhaps sums up the essence Grace, the singer’s only full-length studio album released during his lifetime. Today, the record is regarded as a classic and frequently appears on many ‘best-of’ music critics’ polls—Rolling Stone selected Grace as one its “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” To date, it has sold at least 500,000 copies and its stature continues to grow; earlier this year, Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” from the album was chosen for the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.

“Grace is an example of a record made under conditions that will never exist ever again,” says Matt Johnson, Buckley’s former drummer who performed on the album. “But that simply makes it exactly like every other record ever made. The point here is to consider how someone like Jeff could seize on whatever conditions were applying, and make something exciting that people love.” (Read the full PopMatters interview with Johnson here).

Yet despite the favorable press reviews that came following its release on August 23, 1994, Grace wasn’t a huge commercial success. As Bill Flanagan wrote in the liner notes to the 2004 reissue of the album: “…when it was not [Nirvana’s] Nevermind—there was a slight sense among the self-anointed hip that Grace was a let-down.” But like many other records that weren’t immediate hits—including the Velvet Underground‘s The Velvet Underground and Nico, and the first three Big Star albums—Grace took a while to reach out to the public. Whether Buckley could have made an album to surpass Grace will never be truly known after his death on May 29, 1997 at age 30 in a drowning accident.

“I was struck by the fact that how different the pop world is in a way,” says David Browne, the author of the 2001 book Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley, “to imagine that a major label [Columbia Records] would release an album like that in 2014—this album that spans so many genres… but is very much in some ways a formative record with Jeff showing a lot of his different influences and certainly not willing to hold back vocally.”

An astonishing work of such depth and beauty that is also otherworldly, Grace addresses the complexities of the human condition—from a gifted young artist with a spine-tingling vocal range that harkens such influences as Robert Plant and Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Daphne Brooks, who wrote a 2005 book about Grace, recalls hearing Buckley for the first time through the song “Eternal Life” about 20 years ago. “There was something about the high drama that his voice captured, a kind of open-hearted, very deeply affective reaching that reminded me of something from the past,” she says. “And that was so distinct from that moment.”

How a work like Grace could have been released at a time when the musical landscape was vast yet confining is somewhat remarkable in hindsight. With the arrival of grunge music to the mainstream three year earlier, the term ‘alternative’ was often used to describe almost every musical act in 1994 that was slightly left of the mainstream, from the heavier bands like Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots, and the Offspring; through the more accessible groups such as Counting Crows, Dave Matthews Band, and the Gin Blossoms; to the emerging Britpop sound of Oasis and Blur. Grace, however, truly deserves the ‘alternative’ description simply because of its stylistic range of rock, jazz, pop, blues, soul, choral and world music influences. And rather than featuring covers of well-known contemporary material, this record features unlikely renditions of obscure songs by Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone and Benjamin Britten. “People ask me what kind of music was it,” Buckley’s former bassist Mick Grondahl said on Amazing Grace, “and I just say, ‘Well, it’s somewhere between Billie Holiday and Led Zeppelin.’”

“It always seemed that he knew what he was doing even when he was clearly searching,” says Johnson. “He dove into performance, naked and unafraid, drawing power from the vulnerability of being exposed and seen, no matter what the outcome.”

***

Currently, 122 St. Mark’s Place is home of a bar in New York City’s East Village, a neighborhood populated by tourists, trendy cafes and boutiques. But long before the area’s gentrification, that address was once the home of a small cafe/music venue called Sin-é, founded by Irish expatriates Shane Doyle and Karl Geary in 1989. In its heyday, the place not only attracted an Irish contingent but also famous musicians such as Bono, the Pogues’ Shane McGowan, and Sinead O’Connor. “Sin-é was kind of an informal Irish cultural center,” says Susan McKeown, a New York-based Irish musician and friend of Buckley who had performed there. “A lot of people are drawn to Irish culture and arts. So it drew a lot of people.”

Sin-é also attracted a young man in his mid-20s named Jeff Buckley, who had earlier relocated to New York City from California. In 1991, Jeff had performed at a tribute concert for his estranged father, the late folk troubadour Tim Buckley, at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Church. That appearance led to Jeff’s short-lived collaboration with former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas as part of the band Gods and Monsters. But it was at Sin-é where Jeff really came into his own, when he began a solo residency in 1992 that not only showcased his eclectic tastes in cover songs but also unveiled some of the material that would later appear on Grace. (A document of that period could be found on the 1993 EP and its 2003 reissue Live at Sin-é).

“From the start it had a whole aura about it,” says Browne, who saw Buckley perform Sin-é. “And then when you saw him play, there was something so deeply untrendy and unpolished about it all—to see this guy just with an electric guitar singing anything from the few originals that he had to some obscure Elton John song or Bad Brains song or Edith Piaf song. He seemed both a work in progress and at the same time with that voice and skills completely together.”

Inevitably, Buckley’s mesmerizing performances at Sin-é caught the interest of several record labels. Steve Berkowitz of Columbia Records’ A&R department caught one of Buckley’s performances and in the end his company prevailed in signing him. For the singer, the deal with Columbia was an opportunity to join a legendary record label “When you walk in,” he said, as quoted in Amazing Grace, “the first thing you see is Bob Dylan on the wall, looking beautiful as always. A foot away is Miles [Davis], a foot away is [Thelonious] Monk, a foot away is Johnny Mathis, a foot away is Duke Ellington… there’s no escaping the roots of that company.”

When it came to finding a band to play live with and record on his debut album, Buckley employed newcomers rather than seasoned pros: bassist Mick Grondahl and drummer Matt Johnson, who had only just started playing with Buckley before they entered Bearsville Studios in upstate New York during the fall of 1993. As Berkowitz said in The Making of Grace, a DVD documentary from the 2004 reissue of the album, the room was arranged in a way that allowed the band to continuously play without interruption. “There was kind of a loud electric setup,” he recalled, “there was a more acoustic electric setup, and then there was almost like a little small one person folk club stage where whenever he wanted to go over and play solo, he could. And everything was always miked.”

In terms of recording, producer Andy Wallace recalled Buckley as someone who was constantly thinking about the next idea, and that he kept revising lyrics and melodies—a testament to the artist’s perfectionism. “[Jeff] was always, ‘I want to do something new,’” Wallace said on the Grace DVD documentary, “’I want to do something different.’ He didn’t want to be locked into something. Of course, when you make a recording and say ‘This is the recording that’s going out and this is gonna represent you,’ it’s locked in. So he had a lot of difficulty with that.”

Since Grace was going to be a permanent statement of his first major label recording, Buckley made sure to remove one particular track, “Forget Her,” due to personal reasons (the song is reportedly about his girlfriend Rebecca Moore) and because he thought it was too commercial. Columbia Records were keen on that soulful, radio-friendly song as a potential single off the album, but they acquiesced to his wishes. That incident is an example of, to a certain extent, the amount of clout Buckley had with Columbia, whether it was over Merri Cyr’s album cover photo of him wearing the sparkly jacket, or the label’s marketing strategy for the album.

“I think that was part of the kid gloves treatment,” Browne says. “This was a label that had Dylan and Springsteen, Billie Holiday, Willie Nelson and all these kinds of legends, and I think in their minds a lot of people he worked with thought he could be one of those guys. And I had the same feeling when I saw him at Sin-é. I thought, ‘This is a guy who has so much talent, such a range of influences and passion for music, and who knows where this is gonna go.’”

“Grace” Track-By-Track

“It’s such an eclectic album, too,” Michael Tighe, Buckley’s former guitarist, said on The Making of Grace. “It’s great that there is that album that shows so many different sides of him musically.” Indeed, the music on Grace is so multi-dimensional, verging between subdued numbers and dynamic rockers. Lyrically, the tracks run the gamut of emotions: love, desire, anger, restlessness, melancholy, and hope. A credit to the album’s track sequencing, the music ebbs and flows rather seamlessly, conveying an aura of mystery, ecstasy and spirituality that took on an even greater meaning after Buckley’s passing.

”Mojo Pin”

A “song about a dream,” this almost six-minute evocative track of unrequited desire opens the record with Buckley chanting as if caught in a trance-like state. More than halfway through, this song builds up to a fiery crescendo, recalling at times latter-day Led Zeppelin. “Mojo Pin”—whose title Buckley said is “a euphemism for a dropper full of smack that you shoot in your arm”—is one of two songs on the album co-written with guitarist Gary Lucas, who also played on that recording and the title track. “Whatever I gave him as an instrumental piece,” Lucas told Impose in 2011, “he could turn into a beautiful song and that’s how “Grace” and “Mojo Pin” were made. I would finish these instrumentals and he would come back with a melody and a lyric that fit like a glove.”

“Grace”

In introducing “Grace” at Sin-é during a performance in 1993, Buckley said that “it’s a song about not feeling bad about your own mortality when you have true love.” The rapturous title song is melodramatic, sweeping electric folk rock—one feels caught up in its swirling energy when Buckley sings the passionate refrain of “wait in the fire.” According to Browne’s book, the song came from a moment when Buckley and Rebecca Moore said their goodbyes at an airport on a rainy day. “[Rebecca] was the first great love of his life,” Browne says, “and was such an integral part of his world when he moved to New York and started to settle for the first couple of years.”

“Last Goodbye”

After the emotional maelstrom of the previous two tracks, “Last Goodbye” sounds relatively straightforward and upbeat, even if it’s about an end of a romance. It was previously performed during the Sin-é days under its original title “Unforgiven”; before that, it had existed as one of Buckley’s earlier demos. “The ones that we made—”Dream Brother,” “So Real,” “Last Goodbye” and “Eternal Life”—mean a lot to me,” Buckley told Juice magazine, “because at the time that I wrote them, a long time ago, I was around an environment that thought that they were completely loser songs… I put them on the album to prove at least to the songs that they weren’t losers. They were worth recording.”

“Lilac Wine”

Written by James Shelton, “Lilac Wine” was previously recorded by Elkie Brooks, Eartha Kitt, and Nina Simone—the latter a main influence on Buckley, who gave the song his own stark and torch-inspired interpretation. Its inclusion on the album is an example of the singer’s acknowledgment of the female artists who shaped him musically. “Jeff was kind of riding this other frequency as a subcultural figure,” Brooks says, “a part of that range of white male artists who were unafraid to break open that patriarchy of cock rock/classic rock culture and embrace a different sort of genealogy of influence. Jeff Buckley did this extraordinary thing by actually being very open-hearted about his indebtedness to Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf and Nina Simone, as well as contemporaries like [Elizabeth Fraser of] the Cocteau Twins, and Patti Smith, whom Jeff idolized and performed with.”

“So Real”

Originally recorded a B-side recording session, “So Real,” which Buckley co-wrote with Tighe, was the track that was used over “Forget Her.” It’s a delicate and dreamy track that supposedly drew from Buckley’s previous female relationships, according to Browne’s book. “He didn’t have enough songs,” said Matt Johnson on The Making of Grace, “to really make a ’12-song Jeff Buckley-wrote-every-song’ kind of record. At least he didn’t have enough songs that he liked. It wasn’t until “So Real” was written with Michael at a rehearsal space after the most of the basic sessions were done that he got really excited and was like, ‘Oh my record is saved, because I have the song “So Real”’ now.’”

“Hallelujah”

It is ironic that “Hallelujah,” the Leonard Cohen-written song that most people associate with Jeff Buckley, was never originally released as a single. As of August 2014, it’s gotten over 19 million plays on Spotify, and the video racked up 45 million views on YouTube. According to Alan Light’s 2012 book, The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah”, Buckley apparently discovered John Cale’s version of the song from the 1991 Cohen tribute album I’m Your Fan while housesitting in Brooklyn. Assembled from multiple studio takes, Buckley’s shimmering and wistful interpretation of “Hallelujah” is one of those rare examples in which an artist can take someone else’s song and truly make it his own. Subsequently, his immortal rendition has introduced “Hallelujah” to many acts who have also covered the song—among them Regina Spektor, Brandi Carlile, and Fall Out Boy.

“Leonard was 50 when he recorded the song,” says Light, “and the feeling of it was retrospective—much more a grown up looking back on their life and the obstacles they’ve overcome and on the need to survive. Jeff’s version made it a younger person’s song. It made it much more about exploring those themes, feeling disappointment, and loss and heartbreak. Everybody talks about the intimacy of his recording, that it feels like he’s whispering into your ear, you hear him take the breath before he starts the song, it feels very one-on-one. And I think those are the things that younger artists responded to and then took it and ran with it from there.”

“Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”

Like “Last Goodbye,” “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is another bittersweet song concerning a broken relationship with the narrator pleading for his lover to return “…cause it’s not too late.” Author Brooks likens this soulful, gospel-sounding ballad to vintage Ray Charles, whose song “Drown in My Own Tears,” was previously covered by Buckley at Sin-é. “Ray Charles was a very important part of that repertoire,” she says. “[He] is such an interesting figure because he was a masterful translator. We know the classic tale of what it meant for Ray Charles to take these sacred melodies from the black church and convert them into soul and R&B. So to me, he becomes an important iconic figure for Jeff to try and emulate, someone who can translate fluently between genres.”

“Corpus Christi Carol”

It’s not often that a rock artist would cover a Benjamin Britten composition—as was the case of Buckley’s take on “Corpus Christi Carol.” Accompanied by madrigal-like guitar playing, the singer’s falsetto absolutely soars on this sublime hymnal recording—a further display of his incredible vocal range. Buckley once explained that he recorded the song because his friend Roy had introduced him to Britten’s work. “That was his thank-you to Roy,” says Brooks. “It’s an important song in the arc of the album… I think of the album as a very richly detailed narrative… so that “Corpus Christi Carol” comes to this very important juncture, affirming a kind of spiritual consciousness that’s wide open, yearning and inquiring.”

“Eternal Life”

“Eternal Life,” a protest song Buckley had composed that pre-dated his Sin-é residency, is unquestionably the most angriest track on Grace. A blistering rock number whose tension is heightened by Karl Berger’s string arrangement, “Eternal Life” speak of the problems of humanity—Buckley told Rolling Stone in 1993 that song originated from “the man that shot Martin Luther King, World War II, slaughter in Guyana and the Manson murders.” In introducing the song during a performance at Sin-é in 1993, he said: “Life’s too short and too complicated for people behind desks, people behind masks to be ruining other people’s lives, initiating force against other people’s lives on the basis of their income, their color, their class, their religious beliefs, whatever.”

“Dream Brother”

Co-written with Grondahl and Johnson, “Dream Brother” closes Grace on a very ominous and mysterious note, the perfect bookend to the equally-dreamy “Mojo Pin.” With touches of Indian raga, this ethereal track evokes the feeling of being swept away. Lyrically, the song served as a cautionary message to Buckley’s pal, former Fishbone member Chris Dowd, as it indirectly references Buckley’s own estranged dad Tim: “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… “It became his sort of parting advice to Chris,” explains Brooks, “because Chris was reaching a crossroads in terms of raising his own child, about what it would mean to follow the path of others—like Jeff’s infamous father—and being an absent parent.”

“Grace”, Like Death, Is a Mystery

After much anticipation, Grace was finally released on August 23, 1994. Press reviews of the album at the time were generally very positive. Stephanie Zacharek of Rolling Stone gave it three stars, writing that Buckley’s uncertainty of what he wanted to be “is the very thing that holds Grace, his debut album, together”; Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote: “In the most impressive album debut by a singer and songwriter since Tracy Chapman’s first record, the 27-year-old Jeff Buckley reveals a voice of astonishing emotional fire.” The album wasn’t without its few detractors—among them the venerable music critic Robert Christgau, who gave the album a ‘C’ rating. “Young Jeff is a syncretic asshole,” he wrote, “beholden to Zeppelin and Nina Simone and Chris Whitley and the Cocteau Twins and his mama… So let us pray the force of hype blows him all the way to Uranus.”

Browne, who was then a critic for Entertainment Weekly, recalls receiving an advance promo cassette of Grace and being taken aback by the record’s production—a sentiment that was also shared by Jeff’s New York friends. “Those of us who heard him at Sin-é weren’t used to hearing him with a rhythm section,” he says. “It didn’t seem grossly overproduced or anything but a more polished product than what we heard at that club, which makes sense. I remember having to play it a couple of times to let it sink in. But I found in my own experience that those are sort of the records that are the most enduring… in the sense of getting adjusted to hearing to him in such a produced, sonically grand landscape. I ended up putting it on my ten best of the year.”

Despite the general critical acclaim and the fact that “Last Goodbye” was a hit on the alternative music charts, Grace was a commercial disappointment as it sold 2,000 copies in its first week, says Browne’s book, and later peaked at number 149 on the Billboard album chart. While it didn’t make a significant dent in sales in America, the album was received much better worldwide: it went top ten in Australia’s album chart and earned France’s “Gran Prix International Du Disque—Academie Charles CROS” award in 1995.

Buckley and his band went on a long world tour in support of Grace that continued through 1996. Following that, Buckley experienced pressure as he struggled to work on the follow-up record, with initial sessions overseen by Television guitarist Tom Verlaine. Amid the tumult, Buckley relocated to Memphis to continue working on the record. Prior to his death from an accidental drowning in the Wolf River on May 29, 1997, he was planning to resume recording with his band and Grace producer Andy Wallace—the resulting material from that time was released posthumously as Sketches for ‘My Sweetheart the Drunk’ in 1998.

Buckley once described the potential follow-up to Australian radio station JJJ in 1995 as “…a really radical evolution from Grace, just because we’ve been together as a band for so much longer than that. On Grace, we had just been together for maybe five weeks and Michael [Tighe] wasn’t even in the band. And now everybody really has a really integral part in the way the music’s made. It’ll be better.”

“I think Jeff was still grappling with this idea that Grace was too slick,” Browne says. “I think so many people told him that, that he was starting to be semi-dismissive of the album as too polished. He was fascinated with indie rock and with the Grifters and all those bands. It’s such a mixed signal as to what the second record could have possibly sounded like. Grace wasn’t a huge hit album when it came out, so he could have surpassed it in sales because by then he had enough of a name and a reputation. So I think at least he could have moved many records on that second album. It’s one of those grand mysteries, along with his death.”

***

Whether it had to do with his premature death, the belated popularity of “Hallelujah,” or that it just took time for the public to catch on, Grace continues to garner universal acclaim in the 20 years after its release. In addition to its “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” Rolling Stone chose Grace for its “100 Best Debut albums” list and Jeff as one of its “100 Greatest Singers.” Among the album’s famous fans include Morrissey, Paul McCartney, and Jimmy Page, one of Jeff’s idols. “I started to play Grace constantly,” Page said in the BBC documentary Everybody Here Wants You. “The more I listened to the album, the more I appreciated of Jeff… and Jeff’s technical ability to which he was just a wizard. It was close to being my favorite album of the decade.”

Other than his cover of “Hallelujah,” perhaps another of Buckley’s greatest legacies is how he has influenced other musicians. One of them is the London-based sound designer and composer Maria Castro, who first came across Grace through a friend shortly after Buckley died. At the time, Castro relocated to Britain to pursue a music degree. “In my first year abroad, Jeff’s music was undoubtedly my best friend,” she says. “It kept me company in those moments when I was alone and missed my friends and family. His music spoke to me at a very intimate level. I felt deeply touched by his lyrics and loved the melodies and harmonies, the arrangements in Grace… but above all, it was Jeff voice and his ability to express feelings and convey such a profound sense of humanity, so fragile and delicate and yet so passionate and vibrant, that truly captivated me.”

It was during Castro’s time as a student that she composed the classical piece, Elegy, which was dedicated to Buckley. “I love all the songs on Grace but there is one in particular that was my favorite then, and probably still is: ‘Lover, You’ve Should’ve Come Over,'” she adds. “Jeff’s rendering is particularly poignant on this song and it still sends shivers down my spine when I listen to it. On the whole, the album is stunningly beautiful and an amazing achievement for a young musician’s first studio recording.”

Recently, the song “Grace” was interpreted by the New York string quartet ETHEL as part of its musical program titled Grace. “We realized that we had an golden opportunity,” says the group’s violist Ralph Farris, “to bring it new venues and new audiences, some of the most extraordinary rock music that had ever been recorded… but to find an opportunity to bring his music into a concert setting was absolutely just leaping at us.”

Farris was introduced to Buckley’s music in 2001 through his girlfriend. “I immediately just fell in love with the music and voice, and, honestly, several times I cried,” he says. “I cried because the music is so extraordinary, the delivery is so extraordinary, the songwriting is amazing. Everything about this record is magnificent and just makes me yearn for more.”

Steve Adey, a British singer-songwriter, recalls watching the video for “Grace” on MTV one late evening. “The atmosphere and dynamics left a powerful resonance too, which still sounds great to me,” he says. On his 2006 album All Things Real, he paid homage to Buckley on the hauntingly stark “Mississippi.” “Having listened to Jeff’s music, it would be difficult not to be influenced,” Adey says. “There is a mournful sense of foreboding that I can strongly connect with. On Grace, the well-chosen covers combined with original material encouraged me to take on bold covers and not do half-arsed efforts.”

If Grace was released today, it would fit right in with the musical climate. Because of its universal themes, the performances, and the overall production, the album doesn’t sound like a dated piece from 20 years ago. “It’s a nice vindication that even though it wasn’t a big hit, not everything has to be to endure,” says Browne. “The first Hootie and the Blowfish album [Cracked Rear View] came out in 1994 and sold a lot more, but I don’t hear that many people talk about it on its 20th anniversary… that’s a period artifact. Grace has sold so much less but it’s lasted.”

“He created something to be the perfect soundscape around his songs,” says McKeown. “It’s an extremely rich record. There’s so much you can say about it because it’s a classic work.”

There are definitely moments of angst, melancholy and heartbreak on some songs off of Grace, all of which are further augmented by the void left by Buckley’s passing. But the affecting album is also very uplifting, hopeful and spiritual, still touching on every fiber of the soul two decades later. As indicated by the title song and the album’s namesake, grace overall is about perseverance and not being afraid. “Grace is basically a death prayer,” Buckley once said. “Not something of sorrow, but of just casting away any fear of death. No relief will come—you really just have to stew in your life until it’s time to go. But sometimes, somebody else’s faith in you can do wonders.”

Acknowledgments and Bibliography

Special thanks to Steve Adey, Maria Castro, Ralph Farris, Daphne Brooks, David Browne, Matt Johnson, and Alan Light for taking the time to speak with me for this story. Additional thanks go to Jack Bookbinder at Fun Palace Entertainment.

Bibliography

Books

Brooks, Daphne. Grace. New York: Continuum, 2005.

Browne, David. The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Coley, Byron. “Jeff Buckley.” Spin Alternative Record Guide. Ed. Eric Weisbard with Craig Marks. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 60-61.

Light, Alan. The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of Hallelujah. New York: Atria, 2012.

Moon, Tom. “Jeff Buckley.” The New Rolling Album Guide. Ed. Nathan Brackett with Christian Hoard. New York: Fireside, 2004. 115-116.

Newspapers

Browne, David. “The Unmade Star”. The New York Times 24 Oct. 1993.

Holden, Stephen.“CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK; In the Flux And Flukes Of Pop Fads, 21 Albums For Adults.” The New York Times 9 Sept. 1994.

Magazines

“Buckley Bound for Biopic Treatment.” Billboard 28 June 2006.