Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” in 11 Map Points

Grace is quite an achievement. 

The product of ill-fated singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, it was (as you may already know) his only album before his accidental death at age 30. A lot of material and cultural backstory goes into this kind of music, much more than you might realize. Let’s get right into it.

1. Anaheim, CA

Anaheim was Buckley’s birthplace in Orange County, a suburb of Los Angeles. The son of singer Tim Buckley (we’ll get to him in a moment), he lived an ordinary life (ignorant of his past, Harry Potter-style, according to some sources) as “Scotty Moorhead,” raised by “trailer trash” cousins. The musician genes really came through, though - by nineteen, he was studying advanced music theory at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, later playing in a band with fellow Southern Californian Captain Beefheart’s guitarist Gary Lucas.

2, 3. Washington, DC / Panama Canal Zone, Panama

Tim Buckley was an important musician in his own right. Starting out as a humble folk singer, he embraced serious avant-garde influences with his later works, like the somewhat disorienting Starsailor. However, he died of a drug overdose when Jeff was 8. Jeff later performed some of his songs in a tribute concert, including “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain,” which was actually written for him as an infant. The experience seems to have been quite traumatic. “Dream Brother,” which was written to a friend in the funk band Fishbone, pleads with him not to abandon his own pregnant wife like Tim Buckley did - “don’t be like the one who made me so old / don’t be like the one who left behind his name.”

Buckley’s mother was Mary Guibert, an immigrant from the Panama Canal Zone area, who raised him for most of his childhood. She would later oversee the release of the posthumous Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk album and overall work in service of Buckley's legacy.

Look at those two album covers. The resemblance between their faces is crazy…

4. Sin-é, Manhattan, NY

The only specific street address on this list has the lovely name of 122 St Marks Pl, New York City, NY. This is the (former - it closed in 1996) site of the acoustic club Sin-é, where Buckley honed his chops after moving to the East Coast. Acclaimed artists like Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan of the Pogues also played here; the name of the club is “that’s it” in Irish. He gained fame as a regular here, and one of his first recordings was the acoustic EP Live at Sin-é, which included early versions of a few songs that later made their way onto Grace - and rocketed him into sudden fame.

5. Faisalabad, Pakistan

In New York, with new collaborator Gary Lucas, Buckley discovered more and more great music. An expanded version of Live at Sin-é finds him covering songs by classic musicians like Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, and… Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?

A renowned singer in the Sufi Islamic sacred musical genre of qawwali, receiving the titles shahen-shah (king of kings) and ustad ji (great master) over the course of his immense, star-studded career, Khan famously made his voice into an instrument just like Buckley, becoming a huge behind-the-scenes inspiration. Buckley can be heard to say “Nusrat, he’s my Elvis” before covering complex Urdu-language composition “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hae” on the expanded Live at Sin-é. 

Khan’s unreal capability for vocal melisma, which he could famously keep up for hours(!!), was a major influence on Buckley’s most impressive (some would say show-off) performances. The hypnotic lick at the end of the chorus on “Grace” is the most obvious example, but his embellishments all over the record bear as much resemblance to South Asian virtuoso singing as to anything you’d hear in Western popular music. (Plus, listen closely to the string parts in “Last Goodbye” and “Dream Brother.”) Additionally, his Islamic philosophy impacted Buckley’s lyrics. The recurring motif of “waiting and burning” or “wait[ing] in the fire” mentioned in “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and “Grace” is lifted right from Sufi mysticism - that concept is a common metaphor for patience and meditation in works like those of the poet Rumi.

Khan was born in Faisalabad, Pakistan in the 1940s and died in 1997, coincidentally the same year as Buckley.

6, 7, 8. Tryon, NC / Westmount, QC / Lowestoft, Suffolk, England

Three cover songs feature prominently on Grace. Firstly, Nina Simone’s “Lilac Wine,” previously discussed in issue #8 of this publication, is a slow ballad, featuring a near-acapella performance and delicate, light vocals. Buckley covered more Nina Simone songs at Sin-é, such as a gender-swapped “Be My Husband.” As said previously, it’s a beautiful song full of delicate yearning; check out my previous article on the subject for more information. Simone was born in the small town of Tryon in rural North Carolina, an unwelcoming environment that shaped the darkness of her music.

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is another important cover here. More has been said about it than I can even imagine, since it’s Buckley’s most popular song (featured in Shrek!), but I will say it’s a great tune, showing off his capacity for soulful pop singing much more than the more experimental and rock-oriented compositions on the rest of the record. Cohen was born in Westmount, a wealthy suburb of Montreal, but traveled the world, most famously living on a picturesque Greek island for a while. “Hallelujah” originally appeared on the under-appreciated Various Positions (1984).

Finally, sequenced masterfully right before the loud, Zeppelin-inspired rocker “Eternal Life,” there’s the delicate, almost Cocteau Twins-ish take on Benjamin Britten’s hymn “Corpus Christi Carol.” He’s not talking about the town in Texas here - this carol-slash-fairytale about an itinerant lover stumbling upon Jesus’ tomb dates back to 15th and 16th-century Britain, where it was written by an anonymous poet and copied down by a greengrocer’s apprentice. This is one of Buckley’s highest recorded vocal performances, performing in an achingly beautiful classical countertenor’s range. 

Britten was a 20th-century British classical composer born in the rural beach town of Lowestoft, Suffolk, and was known for his modernization of obscure history and British rural folk tales; “Corpus Christi” is just one example, but I’ve sung his “Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” in chorus, another classic folk story which he turns into a tale of the absolute highest suspense. 

9, 10. Louisville, KY / Aberdeen, WA

Buckley’s influences are varied, but the core of the record is its quintessentially ‘90s alternative rock spirit. One major influence seems to be Slint, which shows up a ton in “So Real” and beyond. These Louisville underground punks, part of the so-called “first wave” of the controversial and perplexing genre of post-rock, used constantly-changing time signatures, dissonance, and crawling tempos to depict characters going through alienation and paranoia in songs like “Washer,” a style that perfectly fits “So Real.”

“Goodnight, my love / Remember me as you fall to sleep…”

Also, as with any alternative act, a certain amount of acknowledgement must be made towards Nirvana, who used their publicity and popularity to unearth all things underground and alternative, from Ween to Weezer. While Kurt Cobain died too early to actually know Buckley, the impact the Aberdeen, WA trio caused with their unprecedented explosion of major-label signings for weird-sounding groups massively shaped the sound of the ‘90s and gave Buckley a fundamental sonic palette to base his music in. This is more of an indirect societal influence than an actual musical similarity, though.

11. Memphis, TN

A good thing can’t last forever, of course; Buckley’s journey came to a shocking end in Memphis- the home of the blues- right in the middle of producing his second studio album My Sweetheart the Drunk, leaving listeners with only the demos. Most agree his drowning in a tributary of the Mississippi River was accidental. In any case, it left the music world with one of its biggest “what if”s of all time.

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