Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.

My last year in high school and first year at uni, I ran into a lot of music that was ....well, obviously not just for me, but I was the only one that I knew that liked it or cared about it. Stuff like Soul Coughing, G. Love and Special Sauce and Jeff Buckley. I forget how I got "Grace" -- Jeff's only real album, since he died while recording the second one -- but everything about it was gorgeous. Complex guitars that I couldn't figure out, rocking really hard one moment, swooning vocals like angels singing just for the hell of it; the melancholy and the air of romance of "Lilac Wine" and "Hallelujah", the two most perfect covers I've heard (originals by Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen, in case you were wondering). Maybe I was just in or just out of love with this one girl, but everything about this one album struck all the right chords with me. "Grace" has recently been reissued with a bonus disc of a _ton_ of great stuff and a DVD of Jeff's vids. The second disc is worth it by itself, if only for the cover of Big Star's "kanga-roo" and the remix of "Dream Brother" -- also included is the one song that I could not believe wasn't on "Grace" when I finally ran across it on a bootleg, "Forget Her". Something about the mournful "I walk the streets to stop my weeping" gets me every time. His estate (viz, his mom,) and record company have been releasing and re-releasing pretty much everything he's ever done but bigger and better, e.g., "Grace" as detailed above, the "Live at the Sin-e" EP that used to be 5 songs and maybe 20 minutes long is now two discs long. Despite what seems like a record company milking what they can out of it, the packages have been done with care and (with the exception of the boxed singles,) don't seem to be made just to milk money out of consumer's wallets, but a real effort to get some of this beautiful music to people who want to hear it.

The video below is from the official site, http://www.jeffbuckley.com and the two mp3s are yousendit.com links and will expire after a week, so get 'em while the getting is good.

Forget Her video
Lilac Wine (Grace Version)
Hallelujah (Grace Version)