Grace In The Unlikeliest Of Places

By Scott Smith in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 28, 2005 9:07PM

Do you wear your best clothes to work in the yard? Did your Mom put your “A” papers on the bottom of the refrigerator door? No, of course not. So why did the Chicago Tribune bury a great feature piece on Jeff Buckley on Friday when most folks were hitting the stores or the Tums?

Come Monday, it’s usually easy to catch up on any important news that breaks over a holiday weekend. But we don’t just read the paper or check a website for the usual who, what, when and where. Our RSS feeds are the grist for the mill of our minds. Kevin Pang’s feature on Uncommon Ground’s annual Buckley tribute is the kind of poetic piece that feeds our hearts.

Last year, we previewed this yearly event and pondered why Buckley—an artist who operated on the margins before his death and is still an influence for only a relative few—inspires this kind of devotion.

Replete with the kind of quiet detail found in Buckley’s music, Pang’s piece reports on the tribute event itself (complete with photo gallery) and describes Buckley’s performances at Uncommon Ground back in 1994. Though he spends several column inches trying to explain why Buckley’s work resonates still today with those select few, the explanation is best summed up with this line from the fourth graf:

“Oh, the things a melody can do to a man. “

Anyone who ever felt a tightness in his or her chest after hearing a particular lyric or was transported back to high school when hearing a certain pop song over a store’s loudspeakers knows of what Mr. Pang speaks.