Songbook: Volume Four

Can’t believe that it has been nine years already….

Songbook: Jeff Buckley “Grace”

One of my favorite places on the planet is the Long Room in the library of Trinity College Dublin. If you’ve ever visited it is the room you enter after viewing the Book of Kells. Just moments after gazing at this centuries old, amazingly illustrated manuscript you walk into this room that consists of books from floor to ceiling for two stories. It seems to stretch forever and there doesn’t even appear to be aisles, it’s as if there is just wall after wall of books that are each hundreds of years olds. You can smell the words seeping off of the pages. The first time that I stood in that room and experienced what was around me convinced me of one of the main tenets of life.


I wish I could tell you that I can remember the first time I ever listened to Jeff Buckley but that moment has been lost in the mists of time. It was almost certainly on Alternative Nation or 120 Minutes as I sat in my dorm room working through another interminable set of circuit diagrams. I probably read a review of Grace in either The Onion (before it was cool) or Rolling Stone (which really never was). All I know is that every time that Last Goodbye would come on I would stop what I was doing and take a moment to watch the video and listen to the song.

I bought Grace while I was in school, junior year if my other memories are correct. That is something in and of itself, that even as a poor college student I liked Last Goodbye enough to pick up the disc and then, in a continually misguided effort, place a couple of songs on a mix tape that I gave to a girl in an attempt to impress her. It didn’t work but I don’t blame Jeff for that. I wouldn’t have dated the college version of myself, either.

But I would listen to the disc often. In the age of flannel and Nirvana and, god help us all, Bush as a popular band here was something different. Here was a guy with this massive voice and a magnetizing presence on screen. He seemed to have been created more than he existed. Like a guy really shouldn’t have a five octave range and play a mean guitar and look like a model and carry himself like he didn’t care about anything in the world other than his music. It was the type of music that you listened to late at night while sitting in the dark because you knew, you just knew, that somewhere in there were the answers.

Still, I was a fan but not a huge one. When he played in Chicago the night before I graduated from college I didn’t complain that I was going to miss the show. Even if I had been home I wouldn’t have gone, making my way to the Metro was something I just didn’t do back then. That took a bit of courage that I didn’t quite possess. Jeff was just another college rock guy in my ever-growing CD collection. His music was part of the soundtrack of my life.

Time passes. I find myself working in downtown Chicago doing a job that I am surprisingly good at even if it entails looking at numbers on a screen at making sense of them. The job also provided me with a barely policed internet connection that I took great advantage of by surfing the web. And while sitting in my little cubicle I clicked on a music news web site and read “Jeff Buckley missing in Memphis.” And with a shocked look I read that he had waded into the Wolf River and had disappeared. With dread I followed the story until the sad end when his body was found floating at the foot of Beale Street. He was just 31 years old.

In “Killing Yourself to Live”, Chuck Klosterman wrote that Jeff Buckley became famous for dying. That he went from being an avant garde artist with a good voice to a genius due to dying young. I don’t quite agree with that because it discounts all that he had done. But this is true, from that moment on I and a lot of other fans would discuss Jeff not in terms of what he was but what he could have been. And oh, what he could have been.

There are glimpses and traces of brilliance in his music. Phrases that seem to mirror your soul, a reinterpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluiah” that completely alters your view on the song. Over the years his family has continued to release his live recordings and other songs that he was working on prior to his death and with each one I found another aspect that I had never noticed before. His mom posted to a web site once, “As long as there are people out there who are being touched by Jeff’s music, we will continue to make it available.” And I fall into that category.

Here is the only way that I can explain it, the only way to try to express how entwined his music has become with my life. One of the things that they released was a live DVD of the show at the Metro. I picked it up and was watching it when I found out that I was heading to ND for B-School. I took it as a sign and decided that prior to every test I would play the DVD while studying. Over two years I probably played this DVD a hundred times. I could tell you every note, every introduction to a song, even the words yelled by the crowd. It never got old, it always focused my attention on the subject and when the last notes of “Halleluiah” ended I knew, I just knew, that I had nothing to worry about. And I was right; it always worked out in the end. It’s odd but if you ask me what music I will remember from Notre Dame twenty years from now it won’t be the playlist from the Backer, it will be Jeff Buckley standing on stage in Chicago years earlier and giving it his all.


One night I was sitting at the edge of a bar talking to a girl about everything and nothing at all. Music came up and I mentioned that I had just finished listening to a Jeff Buckley CD and she just looked at me stunned with her jaw slowly dropping to the floor. She grabbed my arm and mouthed, “Halleluiah is my favorite song.” And for a fleeting instant, the world became much smaller…

Because that moment proved that Jeff Buckley accomplished what all of the authors in the Long Room had, they were remembered. Years after the fact two people could connect over their reactions to a simple piece of music that he had created. It is the legacy that we are all striving for: to simply be remembered after we are gone. And for as long as I’m around the power and the brilliance of his music will be remembered.