In 1994, Jeff Buckley’s voice was a breath of fresh air on the music scene. Surrounded by albums weighed down and covered in dirty, distorted and droning major chords, all overlaid with detached and self-ashamed lyrics, the flighty and unapologetic wails on Grace feel nothing short of salvation from grunge’s four-year reign.
Critics didn’t want Grace — they wanted another whiny alt-rock white boy — and in some ways, they found him in Jeff Buckley. With countless classic rock influences, including the likes of Jimi Hendrix and a strong Led Zeppelin influence, like his peers, Buckley knew how to look back to the past to find his own musical future. Despite his similar quality of vocals as raw as an open wound, his expression of emotion is about as far from grunge’s as one could get. He wails, but in prayer for things grunge wouldn’t touch, like true love, even hitting the nail grunge pretended didn’t exist right on the head by pulling the album around “So Real,” which mentions explicitly a ‘realness’ grunge could not admit to for fear of losing credibility.
Nothing about Grace feels manufactured or stilted, despite Buckley’s reported perfectionism. Unlike contemporary Billy Corgan, Buckley’s strive for meticulously enjoyable work was shown in the organizing of his band and process before recording, rather than through post-recording editing. Buckley’s voice rings as true as it was recorded on the album, giving it a feel similar to a live album, suiting the rawness incorporated in the vocal.
Grace is a carefully selected roster of the singer’s own creations and three covers, “Hallelujah” receiving the most critical praise of any, but with “Lilac Wine” and “Corpus Cristi Carol” strongly supporting the development of the record, even with slightly lesser reputation. The range of artists covered is indicative of both Buckley’s musical knowledge and his deep dive into certain aspects of the human existence, covering topics from love to family, desire and the eternal question of how to continue after loss.
With a ghostly and striking warble, Buckley reaches the deepest and most emotional parts of life, managing to wrap them between the fibers of each song in a way that is received in its most genuine form. Every plead on “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” knocks the wind from the listener’s chest, and in lines like “she’s the tear that hangs inside my soul forever,” the listener finds Buckley’s confessional and unarmored poetry — an honesty that almost makes the listener feel as exposed as Buckley makes himself. The singer’s heart-on-his-sleeve approach to lyrics makes the album all that much more of an enamoring listen — the listener follows as Buckley discusses loves that tore him apart (or that he tore apart), a relationship’s young, hopeful stages, childhood and the aimless search for a place to belong in after all of it — unable to help but find themself and their own complexities within Buckley’s compositions.
The instrumental is painstaking and yet at first glance, effortless in its perfection. Entirely surrounding and immersive, the gentle and elevating strings throughout lift lines and choruses into heaven, while the stunningly advanced guitar grounds each song back down to earth. Ringing like a live band adjusting to every one of Buckley’s moves (while in reality often the foundation Buckley wrote his lines onto), the band creates a movement of an album, forming an entrancing experience not unlike sitting among an orchestra.
Capturing the eternal goal some musicians strive for and never reach, Grace puts a soundtrack to the pain and beauty that is life. Through its display of many of the raw wounds in Buckley, and festering within most of us, Grace is a striking and eternally gutting listen. Universally accepted perfection in music may not be possible, but Grace would like a word.
You can say, it’s So Real.