DISCLAIMER: These won’t be proper reviews -as if I could write those- or have interesting technical tidbits on them. These are more of a “ah, that song reminds me of…” thing. Like the part you skip on a recipe. So it goes.

Album: Grace.

Release date: August 23, 1994.

Track: 10.

Moods: Unknown silence. Motionless sound.

Have you ever been in a downpour in an empty building? It’s eerie, unsettling, but somehow beautiful. August of 1995. I was roaming around my high school. I graduated in may of that year, but somehow felt slightly nostalgic for the place. Since it was about 800 m or so from my university, it was easy to just walk into it. It was around 5 pm, not a single soul around since afternoon turns had been removed by then.

It started as a drizzle, but as I started to briskly move towards shelter, the deluge felt. Water dripped on the tree canopy, happy raindrops sliding through the eucalyptus and ash trees, right into my head.

“Drenched and depressed” I thought, a wry smile in my face. I walked towards the building anyways, and I remember coming out of the green path and the concrete stairs outside the building were a waterfall. I considered my options for a long while, the white noise of the rain eventually being so constant I blurred it out. I carefully moved across, hoping not to become another statistic, and made it into the building.

The building was dark, and the tunnel like hallway seemed as claustrophobic as I remembered it. I walked aimlessly, the squishy squash of my Voit trainers the only counterbalance to the sound of rain. I had no music with me that day, as my walkman was back home.

Too many thoughts in my head. I was struggling with the first semester of university and I frankly was considered quitting. I can’t remember more of that walk, but I left after the rain had subsided, somewhere around 7 pm.

Took a long warm shower, and tutted at the sorry state of my trainers. I sat in bed, still no music around. I grabbed a copy of Les Inrockuptibles that my dad bought me that summer. Front cover: Jeff Buckley. I bought a previous issue because it had a story about R.E.M. and my brother translated it for me. I guess my dad, looking for a way to bond, bought me another issue, and gave it to me. I was curious about this Jeff Buckley fella, and again, my brother did a favour a translated the article for me.

I didn’t buy Grace right away, but I listened to it a few times on those old listening stations music shops used to have. I heard so many times, but never bought it. I have no idea why. Always came back for the same track: Dream Brother.

That soothing intro, creeping into you, note by note, with Buckley’s honey vocals. Then that tremendous explosion of sound, unearthly. I’m always at a loss of words describing Jeff Buckley, as I feel it’s someone whose music you experience, not read about.

I was in Germany when Buckley died in 1997. My dad and his perfect memory recognised him from the magazine cover. His death shadowed me on that trip and I could faintly hear Dream Brother in the distance, everywhere I went. The abandoned post-soviet era buildings, the gray skies, the strange languages I had no idea how to deal with. For a kid who grew up with American TV shows, the thought of being on a “country of communists!” was strange, but at the same time, I found every country on that trip beautiful. The mix of brutalist and modernist styles, cold and unforgiving, clashed with how warm a lot of the people were with us, who could barely understand their language.

I bought Grace and Mystery White Boy in 2006, when Mixup, the local record store monopoly in Mexico started selling out all their unsold CDs. They were cheap-ish and listening to both versions of Dream Brother became an obsession. The loud “CLICK!” noise on the live version, right before the crescendo, always gives me goosebumps.

Dream Brother is a song that takes me to memories of strange countries finding their way after the fall of the Soviet Union and sad afternoons of trying to find myself. I haven’t found myself yet, but this song will always be by my side. Hope you like this one.

-Sam J. Valdés López