on jeff buckley

"Be awake enough to see where you are at any given time and how that is beautiful and has poetry inside."

I've been a Jeff Buckley fan since my early teens, when I discovered that loving music was the closest thing to religious zealotry I could reach; that music is a magic I felt compelled - from someplace deep inside of me (or beyond me) - to chase forever. I am a literary soul, but music is my heart. And falling madly in love with Jeff Buckley, as a green thirteen-year-old, not only introduced me to one of my life's passions; but it also made me feel weirdly connected to Mr. Buckley and to the lost, poetic souls like him. Maybe Jeff and I met in a past life (yeah, I went there): sometimes, when I listen to his Live at Sin-é album, two decades melt with the reverb and I am sitting at a beer-soaked table on the very-Lower East Side circa 1990, and I'm transfixed on this unknown, otherworldly, portentously angelic singer called Jeff Buckley on the spotlit stage ahead. 

Probably these synesthetic moments don't mean that Jeff and I are soulmates. But listening to Jeff Buckley takes me to a place I never want to leave: it's a place of encompassing beauty, of innate poetry, of endless grace and inspiration. It's a place of real, viable magic.

The brilliant Maria Popova is killing it over at Brain Pickings this week - I was elated to find there this rare recording of an interview with Jeff Buckley from 1995, two years before his death. It's a short excerpt, but it's enough to get a sense of this consummate artist's evolved vision. It's a real gift.

(Jeff Buckley's (far superior, in my opinion) cover of Bob Dylan's "If You See Her, Say Hello")