#89, "Morning Theft," Jeff Buckley (1998)

150 Favorite Songs: #89, "Morning Theft," Jeff Buckley (1998)

 I'm not the only person I know who has complicated feelings about Jeff Buckley. I can't really listen to Grace these days, unless Kat is picking out a record and puts it on as background music, but that's mostly because I used it all up completely many years ago. The songs don't even sound like what they are anymore; I don't hear them as a collection of bridges and choruses and hooks. Even the obvious pop songs on the record, like "Eternal Life" and "Last Goodbye," seem unrecognizable as anything other than these weird talismans of me-at-a-certain-point. They've been like that for years and years now. 

This is the sort of thing that happens when you spend a lot of your life unsure of how to relate to the people around you, and so you choose to relate to songs, instead. Even those relationships get weird. 

That's especially true with Jeff Buckley for me. His music always sounded the way I wanted life to sound. Charles Simic wrote in The Monster Loves His Labryinth that life, at its best, is a beautiful sadness, and when I was younger, I identified with that sentiment very strongly. Jeff Buckley sang the songs that were the saddest and most beautiful. The fact that he died young and mysteriously on top of that, and that on his live recordings he's got a silly sense of humor that reminded me of a few friends of mine that I'd always looked up to, made him loom large as a figure for me. 

I've always had a hard time hearing Jeff Buckley as just another singer, or listening to his songs as just songs, is what I'm trying to say. I remember once being asked "What's your favorite Jeff Buckley song?" on a first date by someone I’d met online, because if you met me online during my dating years, I had probably mentioned Jeff Buckley somewhere. I didn't even know how to answer it, because it wasn't how I thought about his music. I probably just said, "I don't know, what's yours?" 

But there's another answer, too, and that answer is "Morning Theft." It's not one of the more famous ones, coming from the posthumous "sketches" album. That’s an unusual record—it’s in two parts, with the first one being the scrapped version of his second album, which he nixed because he didn’t like the production, while the second part are demos for the version of the album he wanted to make, but didn’t, because he drowned instead. “Morning Theft” comes from the former, but I’m glad it exists. It's very slight, built mostly around just one chord, with his voice restrained from the soaring that marks most of the songs on Grace. There aren't many voices who can match his version of "Hallelujah" or "Corpus Christi Carol" or "Everybody Here Wants You," but anyone can sing "Morning Theft." 

All of that is part of why "Morning Theft" caught my ear differently from the rest of his music, but there's a line that hits near the end, the weirdest and most frustrated metaphor I've ever heard to describe a failed relationship: "You're a woman, I'm a calf / you're a window, I'm a knife." 

And, geez, I'd felt that before. Who hasn't? There are so many ways to say "we don't relate to each other at all" and "I don't know what I'm supposed to be to you anymore" and all of that, but so few of them are so stark, so memorable, and so effective at communicating the essential truth of those situations, which is that they're complicated. Who do you blame? Well, hell—if you're a window and I'm a knife, I'm not really sure that blame even factors into it. 

And that's been reassuring to me at various times in my life, in ways that are very concrete. Jeff Buckley singing "Hallelujah" is a beautiful sadness, this abstract thing that hangs in the room as it happens, that can convey ineffable emotions that it's otherwise difficult to access, whether it's on an episode of Scrubs or airing over footage of the Twin Towers collapsing and soot-covered New Yorkers, or just in my bedroom in the middle of the night when I'm still awake twenty years ago. And that's important—but when I think about Jeff Buckley as I liked to imagine him, it wasn't just the soaring holy man with the untouchable voice. It was the person who sang those songs, and I don't think that person ever seemed more real than on "Morning Theft." a