Jeff Buckley
Grace

« ...she is the tear that will remain suspended in my soul forever... »

There are a plethora of reviews about Jeff Buckley, and I certainly will not add anything new to what has already been said, but, believe me my friends, I feel compelled to write a few lines about a singer, a boy, an angel who changed my life.

He changed my life with his angelic voice, with which he expressed all the melancholy he carried with him, with which he whispered sweet sad words, with the sound of his guitar with which he composed magnificent pearls. A genius, himself the son of another genius, Tim. Jeff has always lived in the shadow of his famous father; in life, he went unnoticed, and there was always little audience at his concerts. Then, on May 21, 1997, he lets himself go into the waters of a Mississippi tributary and goes further and further out. Always further. Until he disappears. His body will be found 5 days later. It sounds like a made-up story when you hear it like that. But this is the true story of an artist who had one of the most beautiful voices in the history of music.

"Grace" is an album full of melancholy, anger, disappointments. The slight noise of fingers on the guitar accompanies a warm, soothing, angelic voice. Songs that are created to remain in the heart of those who listen to them, songs that achieve artistic perfection. "Mojo Pin" introduced by Jeff's gentle voice plus the plucking of the strings, to culminate in pure anger as the track progresses. "Grace" that every time gives me chills in the final part: a voice for which every word would be wasted. The melancholic "Last Goodbye", "Lilac Wine", "Dream Brother", "Corpus Christi Carol" combine with the furious "Eternal Life" and the romantic "Lover, You Should've Come Over" make this album very varied and with different pieces among themselves, yet always referable to the main theme to which Jeff Buckley always returns: melancholy. A separate chapter is the cover of the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, which boasts numerous attempts at imitation, but Jeff's version remains unsurpassed. Someone calls it "the mother of all covers". Because, after Jeff's intense interpretation on the album in question, the version to compare with for everyone was this one, instead of Leonard Cohen's original. Jeff's passionate voice and his heart-melting guitar seem the perfect companions for the sublime opening: "Now I've heard there was a secret chord/ That David played, and it pleased the Lord/ But you don't really care for music, do you?".