Six Degrees of "Grace"

Rock and roll has always been less God's music than the devil's, but every once in a while a brave soul tries to subvert the natural order. When Jeff Buckley recorded his 1994 debut album, Grace, he had a serious pilgrim-in-the-darkness complex. The estranged son of singer Tim Buckley, who had died of a heroin overdose in 1975, Jeff had an upbringing he described as "rootless trailer trash" in southern California with his divorced, then married again, then divorced again mother. Though his music career seemed charmed and meteoric — once record company brass got a load of his pale cheeks, famous name and tragic-romanticism vibe, limos lined the streets for his New York City showcases — he tried to distance himself from his father's legacy, broadcasting his reverence instead for performers like Nina Simone, Edith Piaf, Van Morrison and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

. Grace sought nothing less than to confront the existential questions of the universe. "Where is love, where is happiness?/ What is life, where is peace?" he sings in "Eternal Life." "Mojo Pin" conflates love and addiction; "Corpus Christi Carol" adapts a 16th-century hymn about a stolen maiden and the tomb of Christ. Images of death abound: the regretful ex in "Lover, You Should've Come Over" stares mournfully at a funeral march, while the title track offers the anxious come-on, "Oh drink a bit of wine/ We both might go tomorrow." Buckley's musical ambitions were no less modest — the album caroms from calamitous Zeppelinesque thrashes to dainty folk strumming, from punk noise to pop sentimentality to operatic grandiosity. And his quest for salvation was no mere parlor trick. From the falsetto moan at the start of "Mojo Pin" through the looming emptiness at the close of "Dream Brother," he sounds haunted and raw, one giant exposed nerve.

Buckley died in 1997 at the age of 30, accidentally drowning in a branch of the Mississippi River. Grace is now permanently encased in myth. Ironically Buckley's own legacy has been a revived imprint of spirituality onto pop music. His cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" — not a religious song per se; just an ode to the transformative power of sex — inspired countless follow-up covers, and when a British TV contestant performed the song in 2008, Buckley's version landed at #2 on the download chart. Here's hoping that, while he was here, music brought him the deliverance and whiff of divinity he craved.

Everybody worships Cohen, but nobody can do what Cohen does. From the moment he arrived on the scene in 1967 he seemed preternaturally wise, delivering a debut album so accomplished and literary, it seems to have been channeled from a higher plane. He wrestles with weighty issues and spiritual themes, but unlike his young disciple, he never raises his voice or breaks a sweat. The alt-standards "Suzanne" and "So Long, Marianne" introduce the unforgettable archetype of the half-crazy, libido-charged hottie oufitted in thrift-store garb, while "Sisters of Mercy" shows that he held chaste types in equally high esteem: "They brought me their comfort," he muses of these metaphorical nuns, "and then they brought me this song." The disarmingly simple, almost ascetic acoustic arrangements are embellished with occasional fiddle, flute, glockenspiel and pump organ; not a word or image feels common or conventional.

If Cohen is a model of restraint, Laura Nyro is one of pop's supreme emotionalists. Her untrammeled vocal style and dizzying chord shifts predate Buckley's by several decades; she was similarly bent on breaking down genre boundaries. Her second album, released when she was barely out of her teens, grafts together avant-garde jazz and show tunes, hippie psychedelia and roof-raising gospel. Though it's loosely a saga about self-discovery and self-ownership, the lyrics are diffuse and stream-of-consciousness; even some of her most ardent supporters admit they don't always know what she's talking about. But the competing interests of God and the devil lurk around every corner, recruiting ghetto addicts in "Poverty Train," sparring for the soul of the sidewalk tripper in "Luckie" and liberating free-love advocates in "Stoned Soul Picnic."

When Buckley launched into a cover of "Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor" on his Live at Sin-é album, ululating his voice and singing the lyrics "Saaqii kii har nigaah pe bal khaa ke pii gayaa," the audience laughed nervously — the kid's joking, right? But Buckley saved his most intense devotion for the most devotional music he could find. Qawwali, the music of Sufi mysticism, aims to induce a trance-like state that brings the musicians and listeners closer to God. This album is a perfect introduction to its most famous practitioner: it includes beloved traditional songs like "Allah Hoo Allah Hoo" and "Haq Ali Ali," abbreviated into digestible 8-minute versions; the instrumentation layers guitar, harmonium, handclaps and percussion into urgent, mesmerizing drones that incorporate elements of Western melodicism. "He's my Elvis," Buckley gushed at Sin-é. "That's my guy. I listen to him every day."

Kate Bush was the first ultra-girly rock brain: she produced her own records, drew inspiration from literary works like Wuthering Heights and Ulysses, performed interpretive dances in her videos and earned a reputation as a studio noodler willing to obsess over records for years. Her multi-octave range could match Buckley's whoop for whoop; her willingness to nurture her own peculiarities laid the groundwork for Buckley, Bjork, Antony and Rufus to embrace their arty inner weirdos. The Sensual World deals with the gap between what people want and what they're capable of, the beauty that's within reach and the countless ways we're vulnerable to corruption. "Nature is perfect," she told VH1 upon the album's release in 1989. "God made the world in absolute perfection. And anything that a human being does can never really be perfect."

Grace gave permission to a new generation of male singers to explore their emotional pain, and none has pursued the path more forcefully than Antony. His 2005 album with the Johnsons is a song cycle about the fluidity of identity and the quest for psychological freedom, imagining a world in which victims of physical, sexual or emotional abuse — in other words, pretty much all of us — move beyond shame and come to terms with our stunted, transmogrified selves. A team of sexually ambiguous boys, including Wainwright, Lou Reed, Devendra Banhart and Boy George, add duet vocals to Antony's quavering falsetto and avant-garde piano-cabaret arrangements. Had Buckley survived to see what Grace wrought, he would have discovered that his path to salvation was crowded with good company.