Jeff Buckley’s Grace (2005)

Daphne Brooks’s entry in the 33-1/3 series is more along the lines of an academic monograph, with dozens of footnotes for each chapter. I’m not fond of this approach—too much compulsive checking only to find “Ibid.” or its moral equivalent—but it’s a sign I appreciate of how much writers are really allowed by the series editors to do these treatises any old way they want. Brooks is an actual academic too, currently with a position at Yale. Her encounters with Jeff Buckley and his only album took place when she was a graduate student at UCLA. Her various experiences bring a nice personal touch to an intense meditation on Buckley and his sources. Buckley and Grace have mostly eluded me beyond the cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which exists on a plane unto itself and is basically as much of the album as I’ve known. Brooks identifies Buckley’s sources as including Ray Charles, Judy Garland, Mahalia Jackson, Nusret Fateh Ali Khan, Led Zeppelin, Edith Piaf, Nina Simone, and others. She frequently attempts to make a case for Jeff Buckley’s “punk-rock soul,” which I’m not buying. She describes a formative period for him in New York in the early ‘90s when he regularly played solo coffeehouse gigs. That sounds more like a beat to me. The book has opened up the album for me more, though I remain dubious—not about his great talent, which is much apparent, but about whether it’s for me. I must say it sounds better to me now, studying it with her, but nothing is close to “Hallelujah,” which in spite of my other doubts I have always heard as one of the most beautiful tracks ever recorded by anyone, a kind of miracle. Brooks does not get to it until the very end of her monograph and then does not have much to say about it compared to the rest. She wisely seems to assume it speaks for itself. But I would say the rest of the album benefits from her explications and heartfelt support. I also learned a lot of things I didn’t know, clearing up some misconceptions I had. His father Tim Buckley died when Jeff was 8 or 9 and Jeff remembered meeting him only twice. It's really amazing given how much the two have in common in terms of their music. Certainly Jeff had opportunity to study Tim closely, though it could not have been without pain. But Brooks makes a more convincing argument that Jeff charted his own way, and remains altogether an interesting figure himself.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.