Jeff Buckley
Grace

THE REVIEW

And then enough.
I closed that box set, promising myself it would accompany me to the grave.

This story begins at the end, when a young thirty-year-old dies drowned in the waters of the Mississippi, while he was recording an album, his second album, the last one he made while alive (apart from various EPs), indeed... it seems his friend Chris Cornell finished off its technical parts.
In May, it takes courage to die, said De André, and yet it happens, and it happens even to angels, those you would never expect could die too.
A body returning to its primordial element: water. A body floating after two days and they recognize it by the belly button piercing of who it is.
The body of a certain Jeff Buckley.
“Jeff who!??!?!” says the clerk at the megastore downtown.
- But go put on that fuchsia lipstick and highlight your hair with those horrible highlights, you whore… -, I think, a bit irritated.
But who cares, what does someone like that know about sensitivity?
I close myself inside the headphones, the minidisc starts: “Last Goodbye” is this song's name: beautiful like few others, beautiful like there will never be again, just beautiful.

I think back to the concert I was lucky enough to see at the Vidia Club in Cesena… it was February 17, 1995, and I remember the biting cold of that night, I remember the piadina I ate before entering that tiny place, I remember the long beach of Rimini, and its bathing spots, I remember that Fellini-esque air that filled the nostrils.
I remember a lot of things from that night. I remember him, above all. Small, thin, with those messy hair and the ragged checkered shirt, the lost look of someone who still has to get confident, but when he does, he would give you his heart if only you needed it.
I remember him sitting at a bar table before the start of his concert, talking to a journalist. They even let us in… after all… “Who the hell is this Jeff Buckley? Who knows him? He’s made barely one album… called Grace… but no one knows him here… oh well..” said someone who ended up there by mistake.
Of course… no one knows him…
Yet I come from Rome, I have a high fever, a sore throat… and some time ago I heard this “Grace” on RadioRock: I put the hazard lights on the ring road, hurriedly grab a scribbled piece of paper and a pen that naturally doesn’t write, and wait for the speaker to tell me who’s singing this kind of sonic wonder… “Tim Buckley’s son”… - No way? Tim Buckley has a son…?!?! And since when?!?!? -
It’s clear I rushed to my trusted store, if you could ever have one you trust in Rome… and indeed I get the response “Jeff who!??!?!”. – ‘Screw you too’.
They say… perseverance is… diabolical? Yes and no. Anyway, I find the album after a couple of days and with that smirk of satisfaction, I go home, throw myself on the bed, and begin to listen.
Here. Here. Here.

The tracks of the cd follow one after the other… Mojo Pin…Grace… Last Goodbye… The tracks go... fluid… the tracks...? Where did they go…? I can no longer think of them as “tracks”… in fact, they become INDELIBLE MARKS, they become TEARS, they become ditches that carve my bones and I still can’t explain how much pain mixed with pleasure and sublimation they have caused me. I bear them like stigmata, and if I look at myself now, while writing, I can still see them, only now they are scarred, like stretch marks on the thighs of some girls.
I don’t believe I recognize this music in other music, as often happens, indeed, as too often happens. In Grace there's the originality that makes the album unique, and turns it into a “milestone”, like an album by the King Crimson, or the Beatles, or Bowie… indeed… the album with the capital A, the one you take to the deserted island, or in the coffin, as in my case.
I don’t know how to review, I don’t know how to talk about this or that artist in a technical and professional manner, I probably don’t even know how to write, but I can recognize the sensations, the emotions that few things in earthly life give you. I can recognize that rarity of sensitivity, and I recognize it precisely because it’s ‘rare’, and not fake.
And I also know how to recognize a Fender Telecaster, by now.

So I don’t know how to review. I only know how to convey what I feel when I listen to it.
And it’s this:
You know when you stay still in one position for centuries? So much so that it seems like an eternity has passed and instead only an hour or so has gone by...? Eh. Like that.
And you know when you make love? When you reach that unique orgasm? Unhoped-for? Desperate? When you cling to the other’s body so much that you want to shout “never leave me again” but then you know that love passes, turns, and leaves, sooner or later. Yet that moment, that precise instant… if you stop it, if you freeze it in time… it almost has the taste of eternity. Like Grace.
Grace is just that moment. The one that doesn’t come back anymore. And that you dream of forever.

And then enough.