Jeff Buckley, Grace

In an act of unabashed conformity, I fell in love with Grace exactly when the rest of the world was falling love with it�if not later. I didn�t discover Jeff Buckley; I had him recommended to me by countless friends and finally bought the album the spring of my freshman year in college, a full two years after its release, right when this dark horse Buckley was starting its run from the stable and onto everyone�s best-of-the-decade list (already) and into the stereos of countless heartbroken college girls and their sentimental, effeminite ex-boyfriends.

And I was one of the latter. I�d just come off the mother of all breakups (or so I thought), the requisite trial by fire for any college freshman worth his or her salt. You haven�t been put through the ringer until you�ve been through your first year of college and, concurrently, your first college relationship. Our doomed mismatch had all the important touchstones: vastly differing backgrounds, lots of obsessive emails, barely anything in common besides a class together, and then several preliminary breakups over the course of the winter before the big one in February. When I finally started the long, slow recovery process, I found myself with new friends, a narrowly-averted transfer to Grinnell College, a newfound interest in Buddhism, a cold Wisconsin spring where it still snowed in April, and this album Grace spinning constantly in my crappy old Sony stereo. I was still foolish and young and naive; I got melodramatic when recounting the tale of my lost love, got pedantic when talking about Buddhism, got sanguine when talking about Jeff Buckley. For spring break I flew to San Francisco to clear my head and see a friend, and I don�t think I listened to anything else that whole trip. I took my DiscMan into Golden Gate Park and sat against a tree while writing ponderous, narcissistic letters to friends at home about the shitty freshman year I'd survived, from which I'd emerged (of course) a stronger, wise, more reflective person. Meanwhile, I was still crumbling inside and pining for the girl who was so wrong for me, and about whom I�d spent the bulk of the winter term torturing myself.

Like a bazillion other nineteen-year-olds, I thought �Last Goodbye� was written for me and only me. Maybe not, but it's still one of the best breakup songs ever, and the line �Kiss me, please kiss me / kiss me out of desire, babe / and not consolation� is still one of the truest (and therefore saddest) lyrics in pop music. The album�s title track is an eerily prescient meditation on death, a tour de force in six. And then there are the covers. How strange, too that an album where covers comprise three of the ten songs should seem so consistent, linear, seamless. The next generation will probably think Jeff Buckley wrote �Hallelujah�, and for once I think perhaps such a misperception is deserved. Most importantly, the originals are so much stronger than the covers, without making the latter seem like filler or cheap homage. �So Real� was the first Buckley song I ever heard, when Wes played it for me several months prior, and the sheer sultriness, the seduction implicit in every nook and cranny of the song�and several others on the album�is enough to give heterosexual men license to lust after Buckley. I once read an interview with John Mayer, of all people, who said that if he could somehow sit down and write a song that was perfect in every way, the end product would sound exactly like "Lover, You Should've Come Over".

And then there�s �Dream Brother�, another one of Buckley�s unsettling death themes that make the events of a Memphis night in 1997 almost seem like part of some larger, cruel design; the ultimate practical joke that Buckley was playing after writing dozens of songs begging friends and lovers to stay alive and stay at his side. It was late in my sophomore year when I heard the news my that he had disappeared�in an act of questionable taste, a friend wrote it on my dry-erase board�which then graduated to the news a few days later that they�d recovered his body. In an act of mourning I left Grace on repeat in my room for three days, whether I was there or not (hell, the school was paying the electric bill), and I didn�t feel like I was being the slightest bit mawkish. All this is to say: maybe I wasn�t unique in my adoration of Jeff Buckley or my decision to use his music as a recovery mechanism after heartbreak. Maybe I�m not unique in ranking Grace among my generation�s greatest albums. But I don�t care. I�ll count myself among the masses this time.

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