Many music fans don’t even know who Jeff Buckley was – they just know him as the guy who sang “Hallelujah”.

I consider Jeff Buckley to be the most astonishingly gifted singer I’ve ever heard in my life. He was a virtuoso singer who possessed a singing voice that was not of this Earth. Jimmy Page himself has stated that Jeff’s only studio album, “Grace” was the best album of the 1990s. And he’s right.

The irony is that Jeff never wanted to be a singer. He started out as a metalhead who just wanted to be a great guitarist and actually attended the Guitar Institute of Technology (now the Musician’s Institute) in the mid-1980s (probably around the same time as Paul Gilbert). So Jeff was also a highly accomplished guitarist as well as an astonishing singer. In an interview with Music Radar, guitarist Allen Hinds says this about Jeff: “At MI, we used to work everyday on playing over the hardest jazz songs. Not many people knew this, but Jeff could play like Holdsworth. He was great, shy but great.” It seems to me that since Jeff’s tragic death at only 30 years of age, the quality of the music produced by the recording industry up to present has been getting progressively crappier yet more popular. Consequently, people of true ability and artistry like Jeff will soon be forgotten

SUGGESTED VIEWING
“Everybody Here Wants You” (2002), a BBC Documentary featuring Jimmy Page and Brad Pitt discussing Jeff’s impact on them.

Jeff Buckley – Everybody Here Think’s They Need You Documentary from Aria Sleeps on Vimeo.

SUGGESTED LISTENING
“Dido’s Lament” where Jeff performs the aria from Henry Purcell’s opera. I consider this to be Jeff’s greatest vocal performance.