em>Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.
In this Love Letter To A Record series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.
Brigitte Bardini – Jeff Buckley, Grace(1994)
I think I discovered Grace at the exact time I needed to. I was just getting over heartbreak and I found solace in this record. I felt such a deep connection to everything that Jeff was expressing and also completely in awe of the arrangements and skills involved in playing so many of the guitar riffs.
I began to delve deeper and deeper into Jeff Buckley’s history, including live performances, interviews, his musical influences and the overall world of Jeff Buckley. One might say I was a bit obsessed. Watching him perform and how immersed he was in the music, being so interconnected with his voice and his guitar was really inspiring to me and I realised that I needed that for myself. I decided to pick up the guitar and the first song that I began to learn was ‘Lover You Should’ve Come Over’.
The tracks on the album are so unique in terms of their sound. I remember watching an interview and I think it was Gary Lucas who was describing how one of the songs, maybe it was ‘Grace’, had a guitar riff he wrote that resembled church bells. This really gives insight into the way the record feels as I think it connects to people on the most human level. The deep desires, fears, mortality, love and pain…all the things that we all share and on top of this, having Jeff’s angelic vocals singing “wait in the fire”, there’s almost a holy aspect to the whole thing and not even in reference to God, but more just a universal bond.
I owe a lot to this record as it’s the reason that I began learning guitar and writing my own music. Listening to the record as well as delving into who Jeff was as an artist I felt that need to make music that it seems he had, it just seemed like the most pure and natural thing and something that was just organically a part of his being. I feel very connected to this as I intuitively knew that it was something I needed to do to be happy and something that is organically a part of my being as well.
It’s extremely special to be able to talk about this record now and the part it played in the release of my debut album, Stellar Lights. I hope that my record could do for someone what Grace has done for me.
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Brigitte Bardini’s debut album ‘Stellar Lights’ is out today. Listen here.
