I woke up on Tuesday, June 3rd 1997 with the prospect of the Leaving Cert weighing heavily on my mind. I lay still in bed. The covers were warm. I wanted to stay, wrapped in their loveliness but I had to get up. I had to study. There was one week to go. It all seemed like the most important thing in the world. After breakfast, I flicked through the newspaper, postponing the inevitable. A tiny paragraph stood out and danced upon my senses: "Singer missing - Presumed Drowned"; Jeff Buckley was dead. My anxiety was replaced by emptiness. In disbelief I read and re-read the news. It didn't change. I stood in the kitchen, too dismayed, too bewildered to cry.
Jeff Buckley was a young musician with an angelic voice, a rich, poetic soul and a beautiful humanity. I had discovered his album Grace a few years ago. He was relatively unknown; he made only one record, but he was mine, and I adored him - then he was gone. That same morning I sat in my back garden listening to Grace on my walkman. Jeff's voice shone like the summer sun above me. For a short time the Leaving Cert and all its stress vanished. My mind and my heart were taken up with higher, heavier things. For the first time I realised how much death there is in Jeff's music. I was angry with myself for not noticing before. Sitting in the garden between the shadows and the sun, listening to a dead man singing his songs of death, was one of the most saddening, heart-rending, yet beautiful experiences of my life.
There was something almost prophetic about the songs. On the title track, Jeff proclaims "I'm not afraid to die". The album ends on the tragic line "Asleep in the sand with ocean washing over . . ." One year on, it's no easier to understand why Jeff Buckley was taken away but I do find comfort in the musical fruits he left behind him. Jeff's music is warm and tender and honest. It's an absolute joy. Listening to Last Goodbye I often forget that I'm not in Heaven. The cello bleeds emotion and Jeff's voice stops off at my heart on its way to the stars. As time passes, the splendour of Jeff's music keeps developing. The lyrics grow more poignant, the voice more touching, the arrangements more gorgeous. My feelings venture further into a realm of enchantment and bliss.
I returned to my back garden on the evening of June 3rd. As the sun sank into the horizon, I realised that it was about to rise elsewhere, to light someone else's sky. I can only hope that Jeff is doing the same. The Leaving Cert isn't the most important thing in the world. The music that one man makes probably isn't either but the way that music makes people feel just might be.