In recent years our family get-togethers have been accompanied by a speaker the size of a pencil case. Picked up in duty-free en route to a holiday, it has become a jukebox to some of our best days: the Citronella-scented nights in Southern Europe, when we ask my father what music he’d like us to play, and he replies, “well, what have you got?”, reminding us that not every song was once available at the touch of a button. ‘Honky Cat’ by Elton John, ‘Up the Bracket’ by The Libertines, ‘Praise You’ by Fatboy Slim, ‘Chaise Long’ by Wet Leg, endless Joni Mitchell. We take it in turns and the speaker acts as a doorway to our different memory lanes: Sheffield University in the late Sixties, Laura Ashley-hemmed Bristol in the early Seventies, Kings Cross in the mid-Noughties and, most recently, a birthing pool in South London in March.

When there’s food on the table and conversation underway we leave the speaker to rattle through playlists generated by algorithms, or pulled together over the years by my mother - itself a sometimes revelatory snapshot of the music that we played in our teenager bedrooms that filtered into her register. Sometimes a song rings out, over and above the family jokes and the chatter, causing one or two of us to pause. On Saturday, it was the fluting false hope of the harmonica that opens Jeff Buckley’s ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over’.

I think my brother and I both sighed within seconds of one another. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard this song in such a public way, even though there were just eight of us around a table, tucked into a corner of Kent so quiet you could hear cuckoos. It’s a song that transports me back to being 15, sitting in my poster-clad bedroom, scribbling its lyrics alongside the others on my exercise books, typing them into my MSN status. We didn’t share these, although I suspect my brother was charting a path through his own memories at the same time. Instead, we listened, allowing the familiar gentle sway of Buckley’s guitar chords to catch above everything else.

‘Lover…’ we agreed, is undeniably the best song on Grace, Buckley’s first and last album, and therefore his best song. Funny, this trait among music fans to list and categorise, before delving into the gritty trivia of the person who made it: Buckley released only one album because he died three months later, aged 30. It wasn’t suicide, nor drugs; Buckley had gone night swimming in the Mississippi River, while singing Led Zeppelin's ‘Whole Lotta Love’. A tugboat chugged past and tugged him under in its wake.

These things have contributed to Buckley’s legacy: a sweet jewel of a record, turned into a masterpiece by the fact of its lonely existence. Had Buckley lived, I said to T on Saturday night, his talent may have waned, or he may have become unfashionable; an embarrassing relic of Gen X culture. Instead, his reputation and music remain preserved as indisputably good, and indisputably tragic.

‘Lover’ could be described in the same way. It’s a song with a swell about it. Some people hear the harmonium and think of funeral marches (the opening verse describes one such procession, “parading in a wake of sad relations / as their shoes fill up with water”. This last sentence is a grim harbinger of Buckley’s own demise - he drowned in his clothes), but I have always heard something more nautical, the call of a boat’s horn out on the water. The chords progress steadily in 3/4 time, it’s a song you could waltz to, if you wanted. But I’m not sure who would: ‘Lover’ is not only a song of longing, but of a longing that can never be satisfied. It’s there in that tense change: “you should come over” is a request, a promise, a booty call. “You should’ve” pushes Buckley’s desire firmly into the impossibility of the past. What, it leaves you thinking, might that love be if she had?

The second half of ‘Lover’ amplifies Buckley’s longing (he would give “his kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder”, he “burns”, he’d bleed for the “sweetness of her laughter”) and yet the song never strays into mawkishness because it manages to paint heartbreak anew. I have returned to ‘Lover’ when I have been heartbroken, but I’ve listened to it as often when I have been in and happily out of love, too. Buckley captures the intimacy of loss - not the swooning passions of the newly reconciled, but the quiet comfort of knowing what the back of someone’s neck smells like and feeling better for it being there.

Buckley places this longing against the greater existentialism of ageing and missed opportunity. Mad to think he was still in his twenties when he wrote ‘Lover’, it is steeped in the melancholy of a much older man. “Too young to hold on,” he sings, “And too old to just break free and run”. Again, given his early death, the song gains a further layer of poignancy - he was to remain eternally caught between the two.

I can’t remember the last time I listened to ‘Lover’ before it caught us out; I’ve not listened to Grace in a while. I’ve not listened to much in a while. Since, though, I’ve mainlined it. The song is among those I have a near-muscular memory of, I find my own voice ratcheting through his glissando vocals, my fingers twitching at a ghostly harmonium. The baby sleeps in his sling and doesn’t wake as I sing, and so I suppose the vibrations drift through him, too. And it’s here that I remember the final, keening bargaining chip of the song, echoing the optimism of its opening. “Cause it’s not too late,” Buckley promises, the last of two reptitions. It’s not too late, for what? For another try, to stay the night, to redeem ourselves? I’ve applied them all in the past. For now, I suppose, it’s a reminder that it’s not too late to fall for that we’ve forgotten.