Jeff Buckley was born into a challenging but musical life. He had seen his biological father, whom he had lost when he was a child, only once, but he would carry both his last name and his career aspirations. Not only his father but his mother and stepfather were also interested in music. Buckley’s path was already charted in the house he was born into.
He had grown up at home with his mother’s piano sounds and had started singing in harmony with her as a child. His stepfather was the one who introduced him to names like Led Zeppelin, Queen, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix. The path of his life was clear from his birth. All he had to do was pick up his guitar, and his muses, who had been there with him since birth, would take care of the rest.
At the age of 12, he had already decided that he wanted to become a musician. He did it in the most extraordinary way possible. However, unfortunately, Jeff Buckley’s musical life was short-lived. He created outstanding music in this short life and has lived through the great legacy he left behind, even though he passed away very young. Buckley also holds a special place for Lzzy Hale, as she revealed in an interview with Revolver in 2018.
“After I met Joe Hottinger, we ended up trading a bunch of CDs,” the frontwoman said, remembering her teens. “Because he’s a child of the ’90s, and I was still kind of living about a decade behind in my interest in music [laughs]. So I gave him a bunch of the albums that I was just mentioning, like Cinderella’s ‘Night Songs,’ Black Sabbath’s ‘Heaven and Hell,’ and Alice Cooper’s ‘Love It to Death,’ and he ended up giving me Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace.’”
Lzzy Hale continued, “I had never really heard of Jeff Buckley before I met Joe, and he was like, ‘What? That is ridiculous!’ This album changed the course of what I thought was possible, both vocally and with musical arrangements. It’s such a mature record and definitely one of those records that I go back to and listen to and learn something new.”
The vocalists couldn’t hold back her compliments and added, “It never ceases to amaze me. There’s something otherworldly about it. It’s just monumental. It’s one of those albums that makes you realize there’s this whole other layer that’s possible.”
The album Lzzy Hale is talking about is Jeff Buckley’s first and only album. It was released in 1994 but did not attract as much attention as it does now. However, years after Jeff Buckley passed away, his talent and competence on the album began to get noticed, and the album’s critical acclaim has dramatically increased. Jeff Buckley left his mark on music history with only ten songs, but the echo of his talent has lasted much longer than his lifetime.
