“Everything was out”: the classic band Jeff Buckley thought sounded out of tune
Every single band that gets into the limelight should be known for their beautiful music before anything else. There are many instances where things can go wrong in the studio or their backs are against the wall, but the best artists in the world can roll with the punches and see what they can get out of the worst situations. And while being in tune feels like a no-brainer half the time, Jeff Buckley knew that there was a certain beauty that came from not being totally harmonious all the time.
Because listening to his music, Buckley was always interested in the spaces in between the notes half the time. He had enough musical experience to realise when notes were rubbing together in the wrong way, but the minute that people heard tracks like ‘So Real’ and ‘Grace’, his sense of melody was always tasteful, usually borrowing from rock and roll’s past and finding a way to put some other magic that no one had thought of.
Even in an era that was still dominated by the biggest names in grunge, Grace is one of the most spiritually beautiful records of the time. It might be hurt by the fact that Buckley died so soon after it was released, but hearing him sing his breathtaking version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ sounds like listening to an angel who didn’t realise how little time he had to spend with us on Earth.
He had the stamina of any great rock and roll frontman, but he knew that the best singer-songwriters didn’t have to simply have a guitar in their hand. There was a lot that could be done with distortion and feedback, and when Buckley heard Led Zeppelin for the first time, it was like someone being converted to the unholy Church of Rock and Roll.
“He was the one that showed me that there aren’t any wrong notes.”
jeff buckley
It’s safe to say that Zeppelin’s debut is one of the stone-cold classics of the genre, but everything about their music had a certain aura no matter what era you caught them in. From John Bonham’s grooves to the way that Jimmy Page shaped a guitar riff, it was clearly taking from the blues but had a different approach that no one could have put their finger on when making tracks like ‘Kashmir’. But for Buckley, it all came back to the way Robert Plant sang.
Despite the ‘Golden God’ comparisons everyone makes, Buckley was more concerned with the way Plant conducted himself in the studio, saying, “Because of the way Plant sings, if you put them into a different musical setting, they would sound like R&B songs. With Led Zeppelin, everything was out of tune, and Plant sang wrong notes. But he was the one that showed me that there aren’t any wrong notes.”
And throughout Grace, Buckley delivers a case study of what learning from Plant can do. Many artists like Greta Van Fleet simply try to copy his style wholesale and see if they can get away with it, but listening to tunes like ‘Dream Brother’, it’s clear that Buckley wants to honour what Plant did and take it into different areas, even when he incorporates strange chords that no one had ever heard in a pop song.
Although Buckley got swept away into the cosmos that fateful night in 1997, he had already learned the lessons that most singers take a lifetime to figure out. It’s easy to train a voice to be able to sing every note dead-on with perfect accuracy, but some of them don’t have as much mojo as the “wrong” notes.
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