Jeff Buckley, God Bless Him!

Jeff Buckley’s voice makes me weep like a baby. It’s just so fucking beautiful. Three full octave ranges in his voice. At least. I’m listening to the only album he completed almost 10 years after he died, and I can’t believe he’s gone. I remember talking with a friend about him when I was in university a few years ago and she told me how she loved Jeff Buckley and I said to her “It’s terrible what happened,” and she actually looked at me and said “What?” Then I got the painful job of telling her how one of her most favorite singers of all time in the entire world had lost his life when he drowned in a Memphis river. I felt like a complete asshole.

His voice seriously is like an infection. It just stays under your skin and you’re not the same after hearing his songs. After pinching a few of his songs off the Internet I finally bought his Grace CD today and am in the middle of listening to it. I’ve been tearing up every now and again, for the beauty of his voice, for his death which just seems to serve as one of many examples as to how life is far from fair sometimes, and for Hallelujah, the song MTV latched onto when covering the September 11th attacks five years ago. The coverage will soon be relived all over the TVs and the Internet tomorrow. As I lived in Washington D.C. then, I’m really not looking forward to seeing any of the coverage, but I know I’m not a special case. I highly doubt anyone else is, too.

Anyways, my most favorite (so far) Jeff Buckley song, “I Want Someone Badly” isn’t even on this CD. In that song, he just completely bares his soul, stretches his voice high up over the lyrics and the backing vocals which are quite reminiscent of something out of the early 1960s soul groups. I love this song so much because his voice is just oozing with pain, dripping with loneliness and I can totally sympathize with it. I just wish I could emote like that too. Everyone has so much to say, has so many feelings they would like to share but he just does it in a way that is unbelievably articulate and vulnerable and just plain amazing.

I’m a woman obsessed now. I can’t stop playing his songs, even though they make me long for an alternate universe where he has grown older and has made a few more albums and I have seen him in concert. Anyone stumbling onto my small pathetic corner of the Internet, please get away from my page and point your browser in the direction of amazon.com or CDnow.com or whatever else and buy his CD Grace. Don’t be stupid like me and download his songs. BUY HIS CD. Really! You certainly will not regret it.