‘Mojo Pin’: The darkness of a Jeff Buckley classic that stretches back to 1991
Everyone remembers where they were when they were introduced to Jeff Buckley‘s Grace, and even more so, surely remember the album’s opening hum of ‘Mojo Pin’ that guides Buckley’s vocal melodies, alongside the gentle strum of the guitar.
‘Mojo Pin’ began as an instrumental titled ‘And You Will’, first composed by Gary Lucas, Buckley’s bandmate in the band Gods and Monsters. The two had met at the tribute concert for Buckley’s father, Tim, in 1991, at St Ann’s Church in Brooklyn. After the performance, Buckley briefly returned home to Los Angeles, where Lucas mailed him a tape of two new instrumental tracks he had worked on: ‘Rise Up to Be’ (the song that would later become the titular ‘Grace’) and ‘And You Will’.
For Buckley, the compulsion to go back to Manhattan became too strong to ignore. Once he was back in the city, he revisited ‘And You Will’ and, at Lucas’ encouragement, began to write lyrics to accompany the melody. He began performing the song during his time at the East Village cafe Sin-é, also in 1991, placing ‘Mojo Pin’ among the likes of an early iteration of ‘Eternal Life’ and a cover of Édith Piaf’s ‘Je n’en connais pas la fin’, all captured on the Live at Sin-é EP, released in 1993. From the beginning, ‘Mojo Pin’ was a peek into Buckley’s strength not just as a performer, but as a storyteller.
The singer told his then-partner, Rebecca Moore (the muse behind many of the songs that encompass Grace), that ‘Mojo Pin’s’ story came about from a dream of a young Black woman shooting heroin between her toes. Of the term “mojo pin” itself, he later explained to Art & Performance magazine, “Plainly speaking…it’s a euphemism for a dropper full of smack that you shoot up in your arm”.
The track would not be the last of Buckley’s songs to be parsed from a tragic dream, as he seemed to have a particular talent, and certainly an empathy, for harnessing the energies he encountered, real or imaginary. The song also began his tradition of writing about the sadness that coincides with love and infatuation, as he attempted to strike a balance between the two. “Oh, if only you’d come back to me / If you laid at my side,” Buckley considers in the first verse, “Wouldn’t need no mojo pin / To keep me satisfied”.
The lyrics are composed in a dream-like state, too, fragmented in moments of relentless devotion and physical pain, as a result. Glimpses of “silver and gold” and “pearls in oyster’s flesh” contrast images of “welts of your scorn” on his skin from “whips of opinion down my back”, with a repeated call for more. ‘Mojo Pin,’ in turn, becomes a song that contemplates addictions: to love, drugs, pain, whatever the sensation may be, sometimes, even multiple at once. He sings, “Drop down, we too, to serve and pray for love,” as he and his lover are “born again from the rhythm” that is “screaming down from heaven”, finding a sort of salvation among the ache.
Buckley also veers into the imagery of horses, with the line “I’m blind and tortured, the white horses flow”, placing pain against purity, while, when he sings, “Black Beauty, I love you so”, the song transforms from tranquil to chaotic, with jagged guitars and a cry from Buckley reaching a dramatic peak. The darkness in the song’s story continues, even when he looks to the horses as images of freedom and a persevering love.
“This is a song about obsession… sometimes there’s somebody you feel you need, your whole universe tells you you have to have her,” Buckley introduced the track before his performance at London’s Astoria on January 18th, 1995: “Sometimes you pick up remnants of theirs, you know…You start watching their TV shows, then they’re away. You start buying the records that they have in their apartment. You start drinking their drinks. You start smoking their damn cigarettes. You start picking up little inflexions in their voice, you know, stupid sayings… Sometimes it leads to more dangerous stuff…this is called ‘Mojo Pin’.”
Buckley was no stranger to tackling devotion in his lyrics, and yet ‘Mojo Pin’ holds a particularly heavy weight that never seems to relent. To choose it as the opener for Grace, too, is resonant of that spirit perhaps, but it also suggests the trust that Buckley had in the song, to communicate the dual overwhelm of love and anguish that he was so often haunted by, while displaying his songwriting’s ability to capture fleeting images and string them into a story.
