‘Grace’: Anna Calvi breaks down the songs that changed her life
Any musician usually knows the power behind a great song. It’s one thing to be able to make a great production, but once you start putting your own spin on classic tracks with nothing but a guitar or a piano at your disposal, you’re bound to make some incredible discoveries that even you didn’t know were possible. While Anna Calvi has been indebted to the world of indie rock for decades now, she admitted to being stunned by the songwriting of Jeff Buckley’s Grace.
But if you’ve ever listened to Buckley for more than five minutes, there’s hardly anything on his debut that isn’t capable of leaving you speechless. A handful of moments aren’t as intense as before, but his way of weaving his melody around every one of his guitar lines is the work of a mad genius whose time was cut way too short.
While that style isn’t exactly on the same level as Calvi’s art-rock stylings, one of the foundations of her genre is about looking at every side of any songwriter. And considering what he brought to the table, Buckley felt like an art rocker trapped inside a rock star’s body half the time, almost like if a band like Led Zeppelin got more in tune with strange prog-rock than blues and metal.
When talking about Grace to The Independent, Calvi mentioned tracks like ‘Lilac Wine’ as some of her favourites from the whole project, saying, “I used to adore ‘Last Goodbye’ and the title track, now I really love ‘Lilac Wine’, ‘Corpus Christi Carol’. I find so much to listen to on ‘Lilac Wine’ in terms of Buckley’s delivery. Every word is so perfectly placed, as though he’s wrapping his soul around it.”
For those actually willing to listen further past his breathtaking cover of ‘Hallelujah’, ‘Lilac Wine’ might be one of the most unconventional rock songs to come out of the 1990s. Even in a decade that was known for bringing bands like Butthole Surfers to the top of the charts, hearing Buckley shake with emotion on ‘Lilac Wine’ is one of the most tender moments that any artist has ever attempted.
Whereas Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys managed to capture a voice that sounded like someone crying whenever he opened his mouth, Buckley was the one who ushered in a different kind of rock and roll croon. He had that same melancholy in his voice, but this sounded like he was shouting from deep within his soul, almost like an exorcism was taking place the minute he started singing.
It’s easy to see that kind of delivery rub off on Calvi as well. While her voice has a distinctly different timbre than anything Buckley attempted during his lifetime, the core thing she seemed to learn from him is fearlessness in art, never being afraid to put her voice into different sonic spaces and see where it takes her. After all, rock and roll is about breaking the conventions of what has come before, and even if Calvi’s end result did sound exactly like her idol, she should be given props for using him as a model for what a human voice could produce.
