<\/p>\n
Certain songs feel so familiar, it\u2019s as if they have been coded into our collective DNA. Jeff Buckley\u2019s \u201cHallelujah\u201d is one of those songs.<\/p>\n
This \u201csecular hymn,\u201d as one writer described it<\/a>, wasn\u2019t a hit when it was first sung by Leonard Cohen, nor when Buckley covered it on his 1994 debut album, \u201cGrace,\u201d but over time it\u2019s become a modern classic. In TV shows like \u201cThe West Wing\u201d and \u201cGossip Girl,\u201d the song has been used to lend emotion and gravitas to dramatic moments. And Buckley\u2019s version, which requires extraordinary range and breath control to perform, has become a popular-to-the-point-of-clich\u00e9 choice among contestants on TV singing competitions.<\/p>\n This summer, \u201cGrace\u201d made an unexpected appearance<\/a> on the Billboard 200 album chart. The record came out in 1994, three years before Buckley, only 30, drowned in Memphis<\/a>, where he was working on his sophomore LP. For music heads, Buckley\u2019s legacy has long been established.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n So what caused this resurgence on the charts more than 30 years later?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Resurgence, it turns out, may be the wrong word. It\u2019s not established fans driving this phenomenon; it\u2019s new ones: fans who are of a generation for which the boundaries between old and new music have been erased. Fans who live their lives \u2014 and soundtrack their feelings \u2014 on TikTok, where a snippet of a different Buckley song, the ecstatic ballad \u201cLover, You Should\u2019ve Come Over,\u201d<\/a> has also recently taken off. Used as backing audio in over 300,000 video posts on the app<\/a>, the song seems to be driving chart success for the album on which it originally appeared.<\/p>\n Jesse Rifkin, the founder of Walk on the Wild Side, a company that offers rock \u2019n\u2019 roll walking tours of Manhattan, has noticed a very distinctive customer base for one tour<\/a> that stops at several of Buckley\u2019s old Lower East Side haunts.<\/p>\n