Music: Keeping Up the Ghost

Oddly, the people doing the best job of memorializing Buckley are the so-called song pimps, whose business it is to sell an artist's back catalog to movies and TV shows. A few years ago, Sony ATV, Buckley's publisher, put tracks from Grace on the compilation discs it uses to lure entertainment executives. Soon producers were forking over mid--five figures for Buckley's Hallelujah cover. Cohen murmured the original like a dirge, but except for a single overwrought breath before the music kicks in, Buckley treated the 7-min. song like a tiny capsule of humanity, using his voice to careen between glory and sadness, beauty and pain, mostly just by repeating the word hallelujah. It's not only Buckley's best song--it's one of the great songs, and because it covers so much emotional ground and is not (yet) a painfully obvious choice, it has become the go-to track whenever a TV show wants to create instant mood. "Hallelujah can be joyous or bittersweet, depending on what part of it you use," says Sony ATV's Kathy Coleman. "It's one of those rare songs in this business that the more it gets used, the more people want to use it."

So far the song has appeared on The West Wing, Crossing Jordan, Third Watch, Scrubs, Without a Trace, The O.C. and, two weeks ago, LAX. (It has also sneaked onto the iTunes Top 100.) Some shows use just a snippet, but The West Wing and Without a Trace let itplay for minutes over their season finales, a tacit admission that neither the writers nor the actors could convey their characters' emotions as well as Buckley. It's proof that in his brief life, Jeff Buckley did achieve some kind of grace.