Lines stretched around the block in East Village Manhattan. The people were waiting for a small coffee house to open, not for coffee but to see an angel fall to Earth. A man equipped with a soaring Telecaster and a choir of a voice.
Jeff Buckley developed an eclectic music taste of hard rock, soul, funk, folk, and South Asian vocals. He developed his own style of guitar playing and singing based on these influences with the panache of Robert Plant, the rhythm of Nina Simone, and the poetry of Bob Dylan. Buckley established a residency at the Sin-e Cafe in 1992, two years before he would grace the mainstream. He would establish a cult following of fans who would come see him perform at the dingy little coffee bar. Soon he would sign to Columbia Records. Columbia recorded many hours of his performances and released them after Buckley’s death in 1997.
“If You See Her Say Hello” is a Bob Dylan song from his 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks,” which Buckley covers. The Dylan song arrives near the end of the lost love narrative of his breakup album. Dylan sings the song’s heartbroken lyrics with his typical carelessness, but Buckley turns the loveless resilience of Dylan’s musings and turns it into an anthem of lost teen love. Buckley turns the weight of heartbreak into a soaring bird flying over New York City.
The song that would create the most buzz from this record is the cover of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do.” Buckley employs quite a few vocal techniques to amplify the two minute long song into a 10 minute epic. A simple song about going on a walk with a lover is given the emotional weight of any soap opera in the last few decades. This song is hands down Buckley’s greatest vocal performance.
The record closes with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It’s a song that was moderately popular before Buckley’s assortment of cover versions, but after Buckley put his hand in the ring the song skyrocketed in popularity. Buckley takes the croaky voiced Cohen original and injects his songbird tenor into the lyrics musing on faith and love. The version on “Live at Sin-e” is 10 minutes of a man and his guitar, faith and music and where they collide. Buckley creates a ten minute symphony, I can’t think of a better way to end an album.
Buckley would turn some of the songs that appear on the EP “Live at Sin-e” into complete musical statements on his only studio album “Grace.” Songs like “Last Goodbye,” “Mojo Pin,” and “Hallelujah,” became Buckley’s defining statements and part of rock ‘n’ roll canon. Buckley didn’t know at the time that “Grace” would be his last complete musical statement, and how impactful and beloved it would become.