Gracious Legacies

By: Aidan Monks

Swimming in a slack water tributary of the Mississippi, a pastime Jeff Buckley elected to partake in while waiting for his bandmates to arrive from New York, he drowned in the wake of a passing tugboat. 

The singer-songwriter was only 28, his first album Grace having released to lukewarm critical and commercial receptions only three years prior. Although his decade-long enlistment as a session guitarist between venues and bands in LA was well-known (so much that Buckley had amassed a circle of loyal listeners by the time his sets in the East Village transpired) he was still considered a relative newcomer in the industry. Venues he frequented in the early ‘90s, including the now-extinct Sin-é at St Mark’s Place, which nurtured the up-and-coming talents of legendary acts like Sinéad O’Connor, Shane MacGowan, as well as a host of bands of New York’s anti-folk scene, played host to his now-iconic live recordings; these feature characteristically sensitive, prayerful, often instrumental renditions of cuts by the Smiths, Bob Dylan, and Billie Holiday, among others. Buckley was also in the intermediate stages of recording his follow-up LP, My Sweetheart the Drunk, of which only fragments were released a year after his tragic death with the support of Buckley’s band members, producer and friend Michael J. Clouse, and the late Chris Cornell. When it was discovered that Sony was mixing and mastering the recordings towards this second record, Buckley’s mother intervened, likening the raw originals to her son’s lifeless body:  "If this was his body here and we were preparing it for his funeral, we would not put him in a suit. We would put him in a flower shirt and some black jeans and his Doc Martens and leave his hair all mussed up.” They were to be released as Buckley left them.

These fragments known as Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (1998), his library of his live recordings, and Grace (1994) are the bodies of Buckley which remain, as with any noteworthy artist prematurely lost from the world: a discography that inevitably listens with the melancholy of memory as much as anything. When you go to listen to a track off Grace – probably ‘Hallelujah’ – you do so, perhaps unknowingly, in search of Buckley. It’s no wonder then, to the dismay of Boomers worldwide, that some of the most famous and lyrical cuts from that album have gone on to TikTok fame, especially the agonised ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’, consolidating his relevance across generations of popular culture, having shot to astounding posthumous renown after the re-release of his ‘Hallelujah’ cover – the best version for any sane person’s money – as a single for radio stations en bloc. As far as I can tell, it is actually one of the weaker tracks featured on Grace, although inarguably the most successful and, most probably, responsible for Buckley’s afterlife. ‘Hallelujah’ is now an indie standard. In 2007, ten years after Buckley’s death, the song was about as inescapable as ‘Lilac Wine’-infused edits of Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod following the release of Netflix’s One Day last year. The legacy of Grace endures across milieus and modernities; culture tends to transform, and still there is Grace in its miscellaneous contexts.

So, as with every great album either critically panned, dismissed, or slow-selling upon release, it is surprising to hear of Grace. Bearing in mind, this is the same record now regarded as a staple of alternative music, one of the greatest albums of the 1990s – at least, according to Pitchfork and Juice – and, at one point, hailed as the best album ever by David Bowie. When Buckley died, it was praised enthusiastically by stars such as Dylan, Robert Plant, and Jimmy Page – perhaps unsurprising since Buckley typically cited Page and Led Zeppelin as his most conscious inspirations, and the album was accused by contemporary critics of relying too heavily on the sounds of influences, Nina Simone and Cocteau Twins appended. Criticisms from negative reviewers at the time ranged from accusations of derivation, adherence to the withered and cliched archetype of the Bohemian artist – which falsely assumed this mimicry was something Buckley pursued – to absurd reservations about various songs’ emotional sanitation. Looking back at these reviews, they really indicate – as much as anything I’ve ever read – the uselessness of music criticism in the mainstream press or, less absolutely, the certain subjectivity of listening. What I hear when I press play and Buckley’s haunting, whining vocals flutter into place on ‘Mojo Pin’ cannot be what Rolling Stone and Village Voice writers heard when they penned their derogatory opinions in 1994. Then again, I have thirty years of hindsight and a posthumous legacy stalking my shoulder as I write. 

 Yet, the album is a masterful example of variety; the classical and jazz influences, namely Buckley’s covers of James Shelton and the ‘Corpus Christi Carol’, speak to this. Partially, the disappointment which infected negative reviews at the time arose from the difficulty critics found in classifying the album’s genre. To be certain, the listing straddles genres enough to be counted on two hands (at least), rather than the fresh-faced alt-rock starchild the musical literati had expected – and wanted – Buckley’s first studio album to introduce him as. In other words, he defied expectations so exceptionally that the critical literature, largely dominated by false assumptions, couldn’t help but respond hostilely. The most impressive aspect of the record is that, despite the wide-ranging sounds and musical backgrounds which the songs on Grace exhibit, the tracery of which can still be heard in Buckley’s razor-sharp musicianship, it listens seamlessly. No transition is profoundly manifest. Nothing is explicit or inauthentic, even if Buckley’s own image didn’t thoroughly elude the cliched baggage his music ultimately does. One can only imagine the fully-realised My Sweetheart the Drunk, of which the recordings we have indicate a superficial shift in style towards grungier depths and moodier riffs (‘Yard of Blond Girls’); a new trajectory in line with 1990s contemporaries, including Cornell, whose production work was instrumental in bringing the final Jeff Buckley album to life. One can imagine Buckley’s music spinning multitudinously across mainstream, avant-garde, cliche, and convention, but always retaining his standard of generic fusion. The stuff that defines Grace as a unique listening experience. 

After all, much is made of discontinuities between musical epochs, and between high art and mass art, but Grace is a product of it all.

The album has enjoyed renewed attention over the 21st century, especially the 2010s and 2020s, engaging its vibrant afterlife with new-found meanings, analyses, and audiences. In 2004, for its tenth anniversary, Grace received a ‘Legacy Edition’ re-release CD with an additional disc of bonus tracks, studio outtakes from the recording process, and a live rehearsal tape or two. It also came with a fresh making-of documentary. Personally, I was disappointed to see that the album’s twentieth, twenty-fifth, and last year’s thirtieth anniversaries went uncelebrated by Columbia Records who otherwise have access to the rest of Buckley’s 1993-1994 sessions, outtakes, rehearsal recordings, as well as the colossal catalogue of live performances from his early career – especially in the wake of Buckley’s surging popularity among Gen Z listeners. An album reissue with vast swathes of unreleased content exhibited alongside remixes of familiar cuts – Dylan’s Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions is the ideal for any die-hard admirer – is the only means by which the music industry can formally celebrate an artist and their work post-mortem. Grace deserves a release like this. Or perhaps a retrospective of Buckley’s entire corpus, from selections of the albums to a curated listing of live recordings and studio rehearsals, each an individual and indispensable body of Buckley’s invention – each with a legacy to esteem. I could not – as with any Buckley disciple – wholeheartedly oppose the release of all recordings from the My Sweetheart the Drunk sessions, if not from a place of curiosity then down to a genuine suspicion that somewhere lurking in the recordings he scrapped before his death there are veritable gems. But this is a legacy which remains in the hands of those who knew and loved the man rather than the performer, for whom Jeff Buckley remains more than an artist alone; a legacy that will be known – if it is known – as it was kept, in grace.