Buckley’s untimely death strikes even deeper due to the theme of his album. (Courtesy of Instagram)

There are seldom few pieces of media that posses the emotional depth to genuinely bring me to tears — Kendrick Lamar’s “good kid,” “m.A.A.d city,” Bill Hader’s “Barry” and John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” are some of the only pieces of media that I can remember as having cut me that deeply. Besides these select few masterpieces, there is one other piece of art that has undeniably made me cry more than anything else ever has; one piece of art that has hit me harder than I initially thought possible: Jeff Buckley’s lone studio album “Grace.” 

Coming in at 11 songs, “Grace” is a nearly hour long tour de force of emotion, as Buckley’s lyricism, ethereal and melancholic melodies and passionate voice effectively cause his music to morph into an auditory knife that is more than capable of wounding its listener. However, as much as it pains me to admit, the emotional masterpiece that is “Grace” likely benefits more than anything from something besides the actual music itself: Buckley’s untimely death. 

For those who are unfamiliar with Buckley’s story, he tragically died shortly after his meteoric rise to fame, the singer drowning in the Wolf River alongside his close friend Keith Foti. The drowning seemed not only inexplicable (Buckley did not fail his postmortem toxicology screen nor did he have a significant level of alcohol in his system), but the suddenness of it was truly jarring. He was simply ripped from his seat of glory, forced into a heart-wrenching, eternal silence. 

As aforementioned, it is this sudden tragedy, this disturbing reality that there is nothing more to be heard from Buckley, that makes “Grace” so emotionally powerful. It fundamentally changes everything about the album, elevating the emotional stakes of every single note and every single second.  This sudden onset of nothingness and this looming sense of misfortune turn the eerily titled tracks “Last Goodbye” and “Eternal Life” into a pair of haunting predictions about the tragedy that is yet to come. They effectively transform Buckley’s sudden and prolonged bits of silence on “Dream Brother” into a tragic allegory that is so much more than just a way of allowing his guitar playing to shine. They take the already tragic love story on the greatest song of all time, “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” and elevates it to a level of emotional storytelling comparable to Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” or James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” There is simply something so upsetting about knowing that he will never even get the chance to exchange “all [his] blood for the sweetness of her laughter,” that all these pleas will soon cease and turn into silent nothingness, and that a life of deep regret and guilt may await the woman who stands on the other side of the broken relationship. In short, everything about the album just takes on a sense of helplessness — of death knocking at the door, waiting to turn whatever suffering Buckley is going through into something more profound, more permanent — in light of his untimely, tragic death. 

However, please do not misinterpret my words. I am in no way happy that Buckley died so young and so tragically; I wish that I did not have the opportunity to write this article, and I wish I had more Buckley vinyls to hang on my wall. In short, I am not pleased that it took the untimely drowning of a young man to create a piece of art that is so terribly moving. 

Nevertheless, I think to truly appreciate “Grace,” one has to be able to admit and understand exactly what makes it the sharp and dangerous blade that it is. In other words, in order to get everything out the album that a listener possibly can, one simply must be willing to face the reality that so much of its intense pathos stems from the fact that, when the final track comes to a close and the silence of the end sets in, that that silence will remain, and remain, and remain until the last syllable of recorded time.