.jpg)
After appearing on his only studio album, 1994’s Grace, Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” overtook Leonard Cohen’s original—and countless other attempts—to become the definitive version of the song. It demonstrated Buckley's talent for taking lyrics whose genius was arguably being a little underexploited by their original performer, and squeezing a whole new spectrum of meaning and emotion from them with just a voice and a 1983 Fender Telecaster. In many people’s eyes, it is not just the definitive version of that song but the best cover of any song ever performed by anyone, ever.
So it is with no small amount of trepidation that we use the recent release of the documentary It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley as an opportunity to draw your attention to another cover of Buckley’s—one that was cut from the original release of that same album but can be found hidden away on on disc 2 of its “Legacy” version—and to tell you that it is, in fact (please don’t freak out), an even better example of Buckley’s talent for covers. That example is Buckley’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mama, You Been On My Mind”.
Firstly, some credit for Dylan. As is the case with Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, the recording of his own song is an impressive one in its own right, and if the cover didn’t exist, it would be deservedly praised for bringing the poise and elegance of its lyrics to life with beguiling simplicity. Dylan wrote himself a fantastic set of lyrics here, and he sings and plays in such a way as to ensure that there is as little obstruction as possible between the feeling those lyrics are putting out into the world and the one a listener gleans from hearing him. He almost speaks his words, and that makes sense, because they’re very good words and the main focus should be on people hearing them (not always Dylan's highest priority, it must be said).
Buckley’s superpower was his ability to charge a vocal performance with all of the feeling and force of, say, a Janis Joplin or a Bruce Springsteen (or indeed a late-career Dylan), while maintaining the clarity of an elocution teacher. He could do feeling without sacrificing meaning, and that’s a rare skill indeed.
Dylan only allows for a bar and a half of nondescript strumming before launching into the song’s opening lines: “Perhaps it’s the color of the sun caught flat and covering/The crossroad I’m standing at/Or maybe it’s the weather, or something like that/But mama, you been on my mind.” It works pretty well, because the lyrics themselves drop us in hot with little explanation (the second word is an unexplained “it” and that mysterious “it” is speculated about for a further two lines before the final one finally gives us something in the way of exposition), so the impression being created here is pretty unambiguously one of intimacy between the speaker and “Mama” (who is of course an ex-lover, not a mother), which we as the listener sort of feel like we’re intruding on. It’s like we’re reading a letter between two people with a lot of history.
Buckley opts to set the scene more, with a few phrases of simple guitar work that feel breezy and loose and a little slow—he creates a sort of anticipatory lull, which is then broken, stunningly, by the clear ring of his voice and what it’s saying. The effect is so entrancing it loses none of Dylan's Speaker-Mama intimacy while whacking up the extent to which you feel it. If Dylan gives us the words scrawled onto a page, Buckley beams them onto a wall with a bright white light in a pitch-black room.
Dylan then proceeds through the rest of the verses with a trance-like uniformity, adding the odd inflection of harmonica here and there, and otherwise leaving us to devote the vast majority of our focus to the lyrics, which tell the ex in question not that he misses her exactly, but just that he’s been thinking about her and he’d like her to know that and maybe she’s been thinking about him too.
Buckley, on the other hand, delivers his lines like a Shakespearean actor. He oscillates between fast and slow, loud and soft, with squeaks of high pitch and unexpected caesurae of his own making, and all of this combines with his mazey, jangling guitar work to bring the listener on an adventure through the speaker’s mindset. The song doesn’t have a story as such—it’s more like a window into a particular headspace—but Buckley gives it one by highlighting the tiniest of changes in tone and demeanor, as the speaker toys with the possibility of his own desire before landing, possibly dishonestly, on what he actually wants to know ("if you can see yourself as clear/As someone who has had you on his mind.”)
The great question of the song is whether we believe him. In Dylan's version, your answer might change once or twice, based on a particular word here or there. In Buckley's, you could change your mind a thousand times, in response to a particular bend of a guitar string, or a pause, or a tremble in his voice. It's an odyssey of indecision, which the song is all the richer for, and a perfect showcase of the still-singular talents of one Jeffrey Scott Buckley.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.