Lilac Wine

Nina Simone recorded the original, and her version is tidal — Buckley's is spectral. Where Simone grounds the song in gospel weight and orchestral certainty, Buckley approaches it as if he is not quite sure whether the wine or the memory it evokes is real. His guitar work here is arpeggiated and loose, creating a sound that shimmers rather than anchors, and the production has a deliberate haze to it, a gauze laid over the frequencies. His vocal delivery is something between a man and a dream of a man — he slides between registers mid-phrase, lets notes dissolve before they fully resolve, and at moments appears to be improvising around the written melody in the way a jazz singer might treat a standard. The lyric describes a kind of psychological dissolution, the way intoxication and longing become indistinguishable, the way memory of a person can function like a substance. There is genuine ambiguity about whether the speaker is remembering a person or hallucinating one, and Buckley's interpretation leans fully into that uncertainty. Culturally, his 1994 Grace album positioned this track as the emotional core of a late-night journey through grief and desire — it fits most naturally at 2 or 3 in the morning, when the threshold between feeling and imagining becomes permeable and you are not sure you want it to close.