Happy new year from all of us here at AUK, and what kind of New Year would it be without a prayer from Jeff Buckley? This song is thought to be named after the poem that Buckley performed live in New York in 1996 and was written for the follow-up album to the critically acclaimed ‘Grace’. While this hypnotic song is quite abstract, the imagery of light and stars and lines like: “Feel no shame for what you are…Join us in the streets where we // Don’t belong,” reach out to everyone, bringing us all together, including those who feel different, dispossessed, disenchanted. That’s a message for us all to absorb as we begin 2020.
Of course, his second album, ‘My Sweetheart the Drunk’, was incomplete at the time of his death and all we have are the initial ‘sketches’ of the songs he planned to release. Buckley’s music has endured and even grown in popularity since his untimely passing in 1997 when he drowned in the Mississippi during an impromptu evening swim. Check out both the song and the poem, completely different from the song’s lyrics, below.
Correction: Said poem (New Year’s Eve Prayer) was recited on December 31st, 1994.