Several years ago, I wrote a blog for a music website about my discovery of Jeff Buckley’s music. That website has since taken down the blog. So, I’m going to try to reproduce it here, simply to document how much he and his music mean to me.

I discovered Buckley approximately a year before he died. I was trying to learn how to play the guitar, because I wanted to play in a rock band. I had been raised playing the piano. Like many suburban kids, I’d taken traditional piano lessons. But I wanted to approach the guitar differently. Creatively. I picked a guitar teacher who I knew played in a local rock band. I think I was hoping his energy would rub off on me as much as – or even more than – I wanted him to teach me how to play the guitar.

My teacher set me up with scales and chord progressions to learn; it strangely felt a lot like piano lessons. But one day, I told him what my existential struggle with guitar was: I had classical music training, but I wanted to approach the guitar with raw creativity. I felt like my classical training was stifling that sense of creativity. My teacher’s solution was to tell me to go out and get a Jeff Buckley cd.

I still remember that moment of going to the record store (when those were still a thing) and finding “Grace” under the “B’s” for Buckley. To be honest, I thought Buckley looked ridiculous on the cover in his glitter jacket. The album cover is now iconic, but it offended my sense of the grunge/alternative aesthetic that was the THING in the 90s. Still, I liked and trusted my guitar teacher, and he had told me I would love Jeff Buckley. So I purchased “Grace.”

I took the album home to my apartment. It was a college kid’s apartment, and the living room was covered with lush green shag carpeting. I popped “Grace” in my boombox (yep, a boombox) and lay down on the green shag to listen. I wasn’t actually expecting much.

I was hooked from the first hypnotic notes of “Mojo Pin.” I’ve been a fan of Jeff Buckley ever since. “Fan” isn’t even the right word. It sounds cheesy, maybe even gross, but “lover” is a better word. I listened to the whole album, stretched out on that hideous green shag carpet, and at the end of the album, I felt like a different person. Buckley quickly became my favorite solo musician; he still is.

I never saw him play live. I thought I would some day; I fully expected he would have a long career, and that I would see him play live eventually. Soon after finding Buckley, I did start playing in a band. It was a time before widespread internet culture. So when Buckley drowned in 1997, I didn’t hear about it. I was working on my band, working on myself, and discovering other music.

In July of 1998, my older brother was in a car accident. My dad called me to tell me my brother was in the hospital in Seattle, and that it didn’t look good. In the weird way of life in a college town, I was living that summer with a guy I barely knew. He wasn’t even often at the apartment; most of the time I had the place to myself. But my roommate was there the day my dad called with the news about my brother. I didn’t have a car, and my roommate offered to drive me down to the hospital. My roommate had a truck, and he was doing something weird with it, so there was no passenger seat. I had to sit on a bunch of cushions on the passenger side, no seatbelt. As we pulled out of the driveway, my roommate popped in a cd.

“That sounds like Jeff Buckley,” I said. It wasn’t the album “Grace” which I knew well. But it sounded like Buckley’s voice.

“It is Jeff Buckley,” my roommate confirmed.

“Oh, he has a new album!” I exclaimed. “That’s great!”

My roommate was quiet for a moment, then he said, “He died, about a year ago.”

And that was how, on the day I found out my brother was going to die, I also found out that Jeff Buckley had died. As we drove down to the hospital, we listened to “Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk” on repeat. My roommate dropped me off and roared away in his truck. It was one of the most empty feeling moments of my life.

Soon after that, I bought my own copy of “Sketches” and listened to it incessantly. And then I put it away. I put Jeff Buckley away, too. Listening to his music hurt too much.

It wasn’t until much later, in 2009, that I came back to Buckley’s music. I was surfing on Youtube one evening, and a suggestion to watch Jeff Buckley playing live at Glastonbury came up. I had not been listening to his music; the suggestion seemed to come out of nowhere. I figured, “what the hell, why not” and clicked on the song. It was “What Will You Say” at the 1995 Glastonbury festival. By the end of it, I was sobbing. And just like that, the floodgates opened. I looked for every live performance, every interview, every documentary on Buckley I had never seen. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to shut his music out of my life. And I wouldn’t want to.

The world is full of talented musicians. But Buckley went somewhere special with his music. I wish he was still here. But since he isn’t, all I can do is keep talking about him, and hope more people, people who need his music, who need music in the way he did it, will find him.