#BBCRadio6Music #AlbumOfTheDay #JeffBuckley #1990s
Album Of The Day
Jeff Buckley - Grace (1994)
How would you describe Jeff Buckley's Grace in a sentence?
Happy 25th Birthday to:
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"Maybe I’m too young, to keep good love from going wrong."
🗣
THAT FALSETTO
🎸
Those guitar lines.
Describing Jeff Buckley’s Grace as angelic and doomed often feels more like hindsight than insight. As the record floats into focus and THAT FALSETTO coos “screaming down from heaven... the white horses flow, the rhythms fall slow...” goosebumps rush from your forehead to toes.
Alongside the likes of On The Road, Dylan, The Bell Jar, Hendrix, Patti or A Clockwork Orange, Grace has - for many - become one of those rights of passage experiences, handed down from one generation to the next. 25 years on from its release, perhaps this Album of the Day is your moment when its shadowland first passes over you.
At least one track has been hard to avoid. Does the omnipresence of ‘Hallelujah’ overshadow the legacy of this body of work? Then again, the moment when you really listen and you get beyond “the minor fall and the major lift” you’d be forgiven for forgetting what a transcendent masterpiece the Leonard Cohen rework is - the overuse in finales of movies and teen dramas (hello The OC) or open-mic-night Alexandra Burkes can’t dull the majesty of it.
Debatably, ‘Hallelujah’ is not even the best track on the album, but what is? ‘So Real’? ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’? The grumbling bass beneath the pirouette of the ‘Last Goodbye’? The rush of the title track? In fact, it’s perhaps not even the best cover on the album - that being slightly Nick Drake take on Nina Simone’s ‘Lilac Wine’.
The album is an embarrassment of riches, crystallised for all eternity. It’s a storm cloud of a record that swoops and squalls. It jostles your soul. Dive-bombing you one moment with flashes of innocence lost. Sprinkling epiphanies on the wings of desire the next. Then - like a slow wave of grief or a low-level existential crisis - it comes crashing down on you.
He sings: “She’s a tear that hangs inside my soul forever. Maybe I’m too young, to keep good love from going wrong.” You gasp. You quickly exhale as an intricate guitar line weaves between drums that sound more like crumbling empires. It’s a dizzying test of your emotional dexterity on the best of days, a comforting veil that falls around you on your worst.
Whether you’ve picked up on the record second hand through a generation of music supervisors and artists with Grace baked in their DNA or even if your first play that truly clicks is still to come, you’ll struggle not to appreciate why this record is deemed a classic. Happy 25th birthday, Grace.
📝 By Sean Adams
