There has always been something ineffable about Jeff Buckley. His voice, both a whisper and a wail, drifted between the sacred and the profane, unbounded by genre yet steeped in a tradition of raw, unfiltered emotion. Nearly three decades after his untimely death, the release of a new tribute documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival reopens the conversation around his legacy, offering a renewed look at the artist who burned brightly and briefly but left an indelible mark on modern music.
Jeff Buckley was not merely a musician; he was an experience. His sole completed studio album, Grace, remains an ethereal masterpiece, a collection of songs so achingly beautiful and devastatingly haunting that they still defy easy categorization. From the celestial shimmer of "Lover, You Should've Come Over" to the seismic intensity of "Eternal Life," Buckley traversed soundscapes with an intimacy that few artists have ever achieved. And then, of course, there is his rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” — a performance so transcendent that it has all but become the definitive version.
Any exploration of Jeff Buckley’s artistry must acknowledge the long shadow cast by his father, Tim Buckley, the avant-garde folk-jazz troubadour who himself died young at 28. Their relationship was fraught — not one of guidance and mentorship, but of distance and absence. Tim left when Jeff was just a baby, and the two only met once, when Jeff was 8 years old. That absence, however, did not stop the world from drawing comparisons between father and son. Jeff bristled at these connections. He was not an extension of his father, nor was he merely carrying the torch of Tim’s experimental sound. Instead, Jeff carved out a space entirely his own — one where his influences ranged from Edith Piaf to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Nina Simone to, of course, Led Zeppelin.
Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of Jeff Buckley’s artistry was his deep admiration for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the legendary Pakistani qawwali singer. Buckley once called Nusrat his "Elvis," a declaration that speaks volumes about how he saw music as a universal language that transcended borders. In many ways, he bridged American rock with Pakistani qawwali, fusing their distinct spiritual intensities into something uniquely his own. That Buckley and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan both passed away in 1997 feels like a tragic poetic symmetry — two voices, each a conduit of divine passion, lost within months of each other.
As a Pakistani Muslim American who is enamored by American rock music, this connection resonates with me on a deeply personal level. It is rare to see these two musical worlds converge in a way that feels authentic rather than appropriative. Buckley’s reverence for Nusrat's craft was not superficial; it was rooted in a genuine love and respect for qawwali’s spiritual transcendence, which he sought to infuse into his own music. In a world that often categorizes music into rigid, separate identities, Buckley’s artistic curiosity felt liberating — an affirmation that different cultural sounds can coexist and enrich one another.
What made Jeff Buckley so unique was not just his vocal range or his ability to effortlessly glide between styles; it was the way he embodied music. He performed like someone who was channeling something beyond himself, treating each song like an act of devotion. He could be tender and melancholic in one breath, feral and explosive in the next. His live performances, particularly those at Sin-é in New York’s East Village, have since become the stuff of legend — a young man with just a guitar, weaving magic with his voice.
Yet his career was, in many ways, one of almosts. Grace was critically adored but did not achieve commercial success during his lifetime. His second album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, was never finished, remaining an incomplete promise of what could have been. Even in death, Buckley feels like an artist we lost just as he was about to become fully realized.
The documentary premiering at Sundance reportedly explores not just his musical genius but also the quieter, human moments that made him who he was — his humor, his restlessness, his endless pursuit of perfection. It will inevitably highlight his final days, when he was in Memphis, preparing to record what would have been his second album. And, of course, it will touch on that fateful night: May 29, 1997. The night Jeff waded into the Wolf River Harbor, fully clothed, singing along to Led Zeppelin’s "Whole Lotta Love," and never resurfaced.
It’s hard to imagine a more tragically poetic ending for an artist who seemed to exist in a space between worlds. That he was listening to Zeppelin in his final moments feels almost too fitting — an echo of his love for grand, cathartic expression, for the kind of music that surges and swells like an ocean tide. It is a loss that still reverberates, a voice that still haunts, a presence that refuses to fade.
Jeff Buckley once said his biggest musical influences were "love, anger, depression, joy, dreams... and Zeppelin." In his brief time here, he embodied all of them. And though the water took him too soon, his music remains, drifting forever between sorrow and ecstasy, between longing and transcendence.
Aima Raza is a sophomore in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She can be reached at ar2548@cornellsun.edu.
