YMMV / Jeff Buckley

• Awesome Music: "Hallelujah"
  • As far as his own music goes, special emphasis goes to "Grace", "Lover, You Should've Come Over", "Morning Theft", "Vancouver", and "Jewel Box".
  • Jimmy Page thought Buckley was playing in alternate tunings (something Page is fairly familiar with). When he saw him perform, and realized that he was playing it all in standard tuning, he became one of Buckley's biggest supporters.
• Covered Up: His rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" has arguably become more widely used, more popular and better known than the original.
  • To a lesser extent this was true of Chris O'Dowd's "What Will You Say" and Inger Lorre's "Yard Of Blonde Girls", though the former was given to him.
  • There's a variation of this with "Mojo Pin" and "Grace", as they were both Gary Lucas songs that Jeff added lyrics to and continued to play after he went solo. Jeff, however, got Gary Lucas to play the parts for the album as he felt it was wrong not to.
• Funny Moments: Most of the monologues on the Live at Sin-é Legacy Edition. It's like the man was a walking jukebox.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While he has a following in his native country, it's the UK and Australia where he eventually achieved multi-platinum status (for comparison, Grace went Gold in the USA, 2x Platinum in the UK and 7x Platinum in Australia).
• Harsher in Hindsight: The title track from Grace, in which Buckley sings "And I feel them drown my name", is eerie considering how he died. The final track on Grace - "Dream Brother": also ends with the line "Asleep in the sand with the ocean washing over."
  • In the song "Grace" there's also the line "And my fading voice sings of love." Right before he got pulled down by the undercurrent, he was singing a song called "Whole Lotta Love." Then his friend noticed it had gotten very quiet.
  • In his cover of "I Know It's Over'', Buckley sings the line "the sea wants to take me", eerily paralleling the circumstances of his death.
• Long Song, Short Scene: Jeff only ever played the song "I Woke Up In A Strange Place" on a handful of dates on his 1996 Australian tour and for one radio session, and is not known to have ever studio recorded it. Many only became aware of the song from the "Mystery White Boy" live album, which includes one such live performance.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "You And I" is a dark minimalist dirge, the only light coming from Jeff's vocals...which sound slightly mournful.
  • Before he died, Buckley once said that he intended his second album, My Sweetheart the Drunk, to be Nightmare Fuel. Specifically, he planned for it to be dark and disturbing, but with moments of sweetness distributed throughout. Once he died, however, these plans were mostly put to rest. Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk still has moments of horror in it from time to time (specifically "Murder Suicide Meteor Slave" and "Demon John"), but it doesn't really seem indicative of the original intent.
  • One of the creepiest parts of "Murder Suicide Meteor Slave" comes at the end wherein a monotone voice says "happy" over and over again with slower and slower pronunciation until eventually it sounds almost robotic.
  • One of Jeff's most fondly remembered concerts was a gig at The Garage in London. The reason for its fame is a 26-minute long rendition of "Kanga Roo" that completely runs the emotional gamut. It's quite scary at parts due to Jeff's outright screaming. Nowadays it's nearly impossible to find, and the few copies that do exist online have horrible audio quality.
  • His rendition of "Hymne à l'amour" sounds like an EVP recording from the afterlife. The romantic sugar of Brenda Lee, Viki Carr and Englebert Humperdinck is stripped away, leaving you with the real message. It isn't even recognizable as the old Edith Piaf standard at first.
  • The dissonant, screeching guitar bridge on “So Real”, a song that’s already pretty tense and desolate-sounding in of itself. Seriously, the song sounds like it’s in pain.
• Posthumous Popularity Potential: Sadly, Buckley didn't achieve widespread success until after his drowning.

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