His singing and song choices defy the standard norms of cis masculinity in rock: A music professor breaks down the theory behind Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine [Video]

You can’t talk about Jeff Buckley without talking about his death, so let’s get that out of the way first. He drowned at age 30 while swimming alone in the Wolf River. 

Buckley’s recordings would be haunting even if he were still alive, but his life being cut so short adds an extra layer of emotion to his already intensely emotional music. The tragedy is only heightened by the fact that Jeff’s father Tim Buckley was a well-respected art-folk singer who also died very young. Tim sings and writes beautifully, but he still sounds like a regular human. Jeff sounds like an alien, or a being from another dimension.

As befits Jeff Buckley’s strangeness, Grace is a strange album. It’s nominally “alternative rock”, but Buckley doesn’t sing or write like a typical 90s alt-rocker, and he includes a couple of songs that are conspicuously not rock at all. One is Corpus Christi Carol, a …