This will never end, Jeff Buckley

Everyone — and I know that when you start a sentence with everyone you're inevitably generalizing, but I'll risk generalizing anyway — has a moment of epiphany somewhere in their lives: that second when the club (which isn't their father's or uncle's) scores a goal and we realize we're FC Porto fans; or when we go to a friend of our best friend's birthday party and bump into someone who makes us think "this is going to be the mother of my children."

My epiphany occurred in Aveiro, in a friend's car who gave me a ride home—and I'm sorry, but this story isn't going to be as interesting as the beginning of this paragraph suggests. Until then, I'd dismissed Jeff Bucley's music as AOR, the acronym for the less-than-thrilling category that goes by the full name of Adult Oriented Rock; I simply couldn't understand what was so original about that music, which seemed (forgive me) cheesy to me.

It wasn't the first time my friend and I had had this argument—some time ago, I'd dismissed Blue Nile with the same argument. Plus, they had slapped bass and synthesizers—it sounded like music for 40-year-old divorcees, and I wasn't 40, with no mortgages, or kids.

[the “It’s Never Over” trailer, Jeff Buckley”:]

But that night, my friend simply put a song on the radio's cassette player: it was called Nightmares by the Sea and it was from Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk , the posthumous album from 1998. Note well: Jeff Buckley had already died, I was sad for my friends who were fans, but until I heard Nightmares by the Sea I had never been able to have the connection that they had with his music.

But Nightmares by the Sea was something else: much darker and more contained than the raw emotionality (I thought) of Grace , the debut album (from 1994), much closer to Television and post-rock, dry guitars in duel – and at that moment I fell in love with that song.

This led me to re-listen to Grace , which I came to appreciate, but still not with the same religious devotion my friends gave it. Until I went to the cinema to see Breaking the Waves followed by The End of the Affair . It was during that double feature that a trailer came on that used "Lover, You Should Have Come Over ," from the album Grace —and at that precise moment, I was overcome by an emotion I hadn't recognized, and everything—the failed loves, Jeff's death, my years-long rejection of something that was so clearly my cup of tea—came crashing down on me, and I burst into tears (an elderly gentleman kindly put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Don't worry, it never gets better"). To this day, I don't remember which movie used the song.

What I do know is that, since then, Grace has become a religion. And the most ridiculous thing is that I was already a fan of his father, Tim, and had managed, through a lot of effort and some summer jobs to earn money to go to London, to buy the elder Buckley's complete discography—which, in those days, was hard to pin down.