It’s Not Too Late: A Lifetime Measured By Jeff Buckley’s Grace
On this day in 1994, Buckley’s only album was released in the United States. Though his voice dripped with heartache, a levity and flick of hope always weaved between the woe. It’s the kind of music that can teach a person how to love, even when our days are draped with trauma and grief.
The 30th anniversary of Grace has come at a strange time in my life. I’m about to move across the country to fulfill a childhood—and current—dream, but I have spent the last month at my parents’ home in the blazing sun of Houston, where I first connected with Jeff Buckley’s only album over tragic circumstances. I’m unsure if it’s this familiarity with the suffocating heat or my hometown tinting the air with pitch-black melancholy. Maybe it’s a blend of all of those feelings, feelings I’ve reckoned with relentlessly while writing this essay about one of the most affecting records I’ve ever listened to.
It was hard for me to wrap my head around Jeff Buckley’s passing when I was younger. Not that I was even alive when he died, but learning about the accidental death of such a young and promising talent weighed on me. It was a beautiful night, and he was filled with the splendor of life as he waded into the banks of the Mississippi River singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” until he simply vanished. He was gone in the blink of an eye. Buckley once said, “I don’t really need to be remembered. I hope the music’s remembered.” I can say that both his legacy as an artist and the art itself have done far more for me than just exist as a token of remembrance.
Over the years, there have been questions about Buckley’s death, whether it truly was an accident or if he was on drugs or suicidal, but his mother has stood firm in her belief that it was an accident. Buckley was elated over his proposal to his then-girlfriend Joan Wasser and working on perfecting his second album, though following up on the evocative, masterful Grace four years later was daunting. He wasn’t a man looking down the barrel. Many years later, Buckley’s manager Dave Lory went to a psychic who told him Buckley was reaching out to him with a message: “[Jeff] didn’t mean for it to happen, but he didn’t fight it. It’s not your fault. It’s okay to let go.” It’s an assuring message from a man at peace, if you believe in that sort of thing.
The first time I heard Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah,” it unlocked a deepness in my soul that hadn’t yet been explored. I was nine, and my dad was in the kitchen going through one of his phases where he repeatedly listened to the same song for hours. He was playing “Hallelujah” through his shitty iPad speakers, but even through the crackle, it was the first time a song made my chest ache—a feeling that I still yearn for any time I listen to something new. I couldn’t place why it made me have such a physical reaction. My dad was gushing about his gorgeous voice; it was the first time I understood what he’d meant by that. Back then, my parents’ music was my church, and my purple iPod nano was the gospel. After hearing a voice stretching itself so high I imagined it was touching heaven itself, I added another entry into my holy book.
I was too young to understand why I was having such a visceral reaction to a song, but I’ve come to understand that it was his voice that haunted me. I wasn’t a very emotional kid. Honestly, I was pretty blissfully happy, so unlocking that deeper layer of profound sadness stuck with me until I needed it. Buckley said it best in “Last Goodbye” when he warmly sang, “You gave me more to live for, more than you’ll ever know.”
As someone who struggles to connect with their emotions physically, I am drawn in by musicians who move me. When I listen to Grace, it’s one of the rare times I feel every nerve ending tingle, every synapse fire, every cell dance—it brings my body to life. I feel truly present. I spend a lot of time floating outside my body, thinking about reaching the stars and beyond, but there is something about the down-to-earth nature of Buckley’s existence as an artist that grounds me. His battered, soulful tone touched me in an indescribable way, even when I was nine. It’s incredible how this unassuming guy could evoke such visceral emotions from everyone around him, that before my dad put “Hallelujah” on he was merely a stranger.
Cut to many years later, when I was spending far too much time escaping to the internet and living vicariously through old rock legends who passed far too young. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain. I once again stumbled across Jeff Buckley and, though his young passing was different from those other rockstars’ fateful encounters with substance abuse and suicide, I still found myself intrigued by the fleeting nature of his life as an artist. Interestingly enough, Buckley himself was also drawn to tragedy; perhaps it was built into his bones. He sang Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Judy Garland at Sin-é in the summer of 1993, which got him the record deal to record Grace in the first place.
It’s morbidly ironic how many artists have predicted their own demise. “Well, it’s my time coming, I’m not afraid, afraid to die,” Buckley sings on the Grace’s title track. He himself pulled inspiration from the songbooks of tragic stars like Garland and Simone, but to me, it always seemed like in these moments, he was reaching out to his father, who died of a drug overdose when Buckley was far too young to really know him. It was as if he had made peace with death because it was the only way he could connect with his father. Though Buckley’s voice dripped with heartache, a levity and flick of hope always weaved between the woe.
Around the time I was rediscovering Buckley’s music, the morbid reality of happenstance struck someone close to me. I’ve ridden shotgun for more tragedies than I can count because my friends are my family, too. When we crash, I am in the passenger seat, getting crushed right alongside them. I most leaned on Grace’s comfort when my worldview was shattered at 14. What did it all mean? Why do these things happen to people when it’s out of their control?
In the second semester of my first year of high school, I watched my softball coach, a man I grew up idolizing since I started the sport at six, sexually abuse my teammate and take advantage of her innocence. I’ll never forget the night I saw his picture plastered across the ten o’clock news. The following day, when I found out he took his own life in his pickup truck on the side of a highway, I still spent months questioning why something so unimaginable could happen right in front of my face. It was like something out of the movies, just a wild story you read on the news; something that happens to others but never to yourself. It can’t be a real thing that happened to a friend, could it?
I spent so much time alone bottling up these unanswerable questions about the balance of good and evil in the world and why tragedy tends to fall onto the people who don’t deserve it. Yet there was something in Grace’s adamant determination about love that kept me clinging to a hope still being possible in a world that broke me far too soon. It was like I was floating between reality and misguided naivety. My best friend at the time even told me I was being dramatic, that it didn’t happen to me, after all. While the abuse didn’t happen to me, the grief of finding out a person I idolized was a despicable human being—someone who would play on adoration for his own gain—was a crushing feeling beyond my ability to cope. Why does such evil exist? Why did it have to happen to my friend, someone who didn’t do anything but trust the wrong person? The fourth verse of “Last Goodbye” constantly sat in my mind during this period of reckoning: “Did you say, ‘No, this can’t happen to me’? / Did you rush to the phone to call? / Was there a voice unkind in the back of your mind / Saying, ‘Maybe, you didn’t know him at all’?”
As silly as it sounds, Grace had a song for all the stages of grief I kept cycling through over and over, as I was looking for answers to those unanswerable questions. I listened to the album on repeat for weeks, letting the soft croon of Buckley’s voice on “Lilac Wine” guide me through school hallways; the shrieking opening of “Eternal Life” kept me company at night when I would scream into my pillow; the thoughtful rumination of “Lover, You Should Come Over” shone a hopeful light on the grimmest of days; and the otherworldly poetics and gentle strumming of “Corpus Christi Carol” rocked me to sleep on the nights my head couldn’t keep quiet.
After months of my teammates leaning on each other and supporting our friend, I watched those same people turn on her and blame her for something she had no blame for. The pity turned into accusations, and the compassion engulfed into anger. Once again, I was at a loss as to why people I trusted and coped alongside could sour so horrendously. The only comfort I could find in those moments was listening to Buckley sing lullabies into my ears. “Wait in the fire.” All these people changed right before my eyes into unrecognizable strangers, yet the chant evoking the Sufi idea of fire cleansing my spirit felt like a reasonable action to take when I was clearly in the pits of hell.
“Eternal Life”’s line “What is love? Where is happiness? / What is life? Where is peace? / When will I find the strength to bring me release?” ripped through my headphones, as I tried to understand why these girls made a victim of cruel circumstance their enemy. It was painful enough to try and reckon with the fact that this man we once knew was now forever a monster, but I was confronted with the idea that these girls had darkness in them as well. I stayed in my head during so much of this time because I was scared of stepping out of it, of knowing what it means to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I let the flames lick my skin for years after that. The heat came from a smoldering flame like an exorcism as I stayed on the team, but the whys still remained.
As almost a meditative practice before writing this essay, I rewatched the Grace documentary, and I was instantly transported back to being 14 and grieving a man I had never met. It was comforting to fall in love again with the same soft-spoken, messy-haired musician that was my beacon of hope. Listening to the wistful way he spoke about music gave me the same sense of ease it had 10 years ago. Similar to those other musicians I attached to who also died too young, I latched onto the fleeting nature of life, how experience and memory are all we have. It was almost as if I grieved over Buckley then because I couldn’t grieve over the death of a man I believed I’d once known. “Don’t wanna weep for you,” Buckley cried out on “Mojo Pin,” and I didn’t. I didn’t weep over a man blackened by cruelty.
Just as I was coming to grips with the fact that I would never truly understand what happened to my teammate, another one of my friends was again taken advantage of by someone she trusted. Once again, I looked to Buckley to find the meaning in the pain. I searched for a bright spot to latch onto, and the redemptive “Lover, You Should Come Over” welcomed me into peace and allowed me to be present with her. By this point in my life, I’d never been in love—in reality, I still don’t think I have—but listening to Jeff Buckley sing about everything being worth it because love wins gave me the strength to support her and hopefully help heal that wound. I’m not sure if real life can be truly cinematic and full of the grace Buckley wrote about, but it was worth it for me to stick around and find out for myself.
Soon after that, my friend moved away to live a life removed from the abuse that happened in her own home. I closed myself off; I couldn’t handle the constant collisions with tragedy. I was becoming bitter and cynical beyond repair, so I retreated inward and kept so many friends at arm’s length. I said farewell to my Grace obsession and replaced it with the music of the more explainable tragic figures—the deaths of Janis, Jimi and Kurt weren’t any less tragic, but they had a digestible explanation that Jeff’s death was never offered. I was too tired to keep trying to understand why kind, beautiful people kept getting hurt through no fault of their own.
I have always tried to make sense of what happened to my friends. They were the kindest, most generous people I have ever known, and all that got them was the pain of having your trust broken by a person who was supposed to protect you. It broke me in ways I’m still not sure that I understand. However, seeing them create new lives from the ashes of their past gave me the only closure I could ask for. To this day, even though I don’t keep in contact with either of them, I look to those two unbreakable women who keep pushing forward in life even after the unthinkable could have brought them down for strength when life tries to take me down, too, knowing that I can survive.
I grew up believing in religion because that is what I was told to believe in, but I think those two years made it difficult for me to believe that such horrible, undeserved things could happen in a world watched over by God. I would listen to “Hallelujah” over and over again, looking for a semblance of reasoning as to why something so tragic could happen to someone so good. I kept coming up empty. Yet I watched these broken girls rebuild themselves and continue living; maybe that was the message, that nothing in this life is meant to make sense. The only thing we can do is keep living.
As I’ve gotten older, the pain and ache that coats Buckley’s voice rings truer than ever. However, a man who had dealt with an absent father his whole life still beamed with optimism, passion for his art and vigor for the simplicity of existence. I can thank Grace for many things: introducing me to Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen; keeping me company during a time when I was lost; reigniting my creativity. But most of all, Grace was a source of unexplainable comfort, delivered by a kind soul who left us too soon. It was an accident that shouldn’t have happened to the same man who applied to be a butterfly keeper just a week before he passed.
Yet now, when I listen to that same album that helped me grapple with the reality of unexplainable tragedy, I hear the hope of the man who made it—the man who believed in love, whether it be romantic, platonic or familial. Jeff Buckley believed that love has the strength to heal even the most cavernous of wounds in the same way it healed mine and my friends. At the very least, that’s what he wanted the rest of us to believe. He said it best: “’Cause it’s not too late.” It’s never too late to start loving again.
Olivia Abercrombie is Paste‘s Associate Music Editor, reporting from Austin, Texas. To hear her chat more about her favorite music, gush about old horror films, or rant about Survivor, you can follow her on Twitter @o_abercrombie.
