In , the album So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley was released, featuring remastered tracks for hardcore fans and audiophiles. In , to mark the 20th anniversary of Grace , limited edition Lilac Swirl gram vinyl albums were released.
A new album of previously unheard material, You and I , was released in March We hope to see more highly-anticipated releases in the coming years.
The scuffed wood floors and chipped brick walls provided a homey, unfussy atmosphere to hone his raw talent. He was experimenting and it was an opportunity to do that in front of a very friendly audience. And if he if made mistakes, he had fun with that. So the place served him very well in that way.
Or at least a good experience. He loved to wash the dishes. We loved to let him wash the dishes. The buzz around Buckley continued to escalate as spring turned to summer, and the sidewalk outside of St. Soon the streets were equally jammed with limousines ferrying major label executives down from Midtown, all angling for their shot at signing the rising star. Buckley assembled his band for Grace just weeks before sessions for the album started. People, the warm bodies.
Male or female. Bass, drums, dulcimer, tuba, anything. Any way that the band would work out. He met bassist Mick Grondahl after a gig inside a crypt at Columbia University that summer. He noticed me and we exchanged numbers. Soon the year-old Texas native had a message on his answering machine from Buckley inviting him to audition at a rehearsal space. Buckley surprised his new band by revealing that he had a deal with Columbia — and session dates on the very near horizon.
Just six weeks after their first rehearsal, the trio were due in Bearsville Studios, 90 miles north of Manhattan in the rural artist enclave of Woodstock, New York. The tardy rhythm section eventually arrived, and together they set off on the two-hour trek to Bearsville.
Buckley halted the Grace sessions for several days due to an unfortunate comparison to Michael Bolton. Michael Bolton desperately wants to be black, black, black. He also sucks. Years later, when Buckley was living in Memphis to work on his intended follow up to Grace , he purchased a pile of cheap cassette tapes from a street vendor — including several copies of a Michael Bolton album.
Berkowitz, who was with him at the time and well aware of his feelings about the singer, was confused. He consumed the idea and the feel. He was really a blues singer, I think. He had that religious depth of feeling that blues music has, or that Billie Holiday had. As the program director for St. I know it by John Cale. The song would evolve constantly throughout his live performance career. He would play a song with a slide one night, and then maybe never do it again.
Feel, performance, emotion is what he was tinkering with. Buckley frequently revisited the song during sessions for Grace , recording more than 20 takes as he sought to match the phrasing and nuances that he heard in his head. It had a magic to it, and that was there from the beginning. But not everyone was impressed.
Just days before the Bearsville sessions were scheduled to end, Buckley informed Andy Wallace that he had a new song he wanted to flesh out. The musicians worked up a quick arrangement and laid down a backing track more or less on the spot. Watch him lowering his eyebrows, pouting deliciously, and making seductive, Alfie-like asides to the camera in this interview , released as a DVD alongside Grace's 10th Anniversary Edition.
Nothing new about that of course - rock and roll lives and breathes through its self-appointed, self-made, heroic men - but Buckley had sold a merry story about him being a male Phoebe out of Friends, falling in and out of coffee shops and dive bars, playing his songs to anyone who would listen, and, damn it, I'd fallen for it. And now I've grown up. These days, I find that kind of calculated sexiness deeply spurious. Thirdly, Buckley was a hit-and-miss singer-songwriter.
But Grace also hoists on its shoulders the hugely under-par clunky, clompy rocker, Eternal Life. And don't start me on the stuff on Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk - although I'll be less cruel in my criticism, as I know they were sketches, not finished songs. No, I didn't think so. Fourthly, his interpretation of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, lovely though it is, is often seen as the pinnacle of his musical achievements, proof of his masterful way with an arrangement as well as a vocal.
But it wasn't his interpretation. And although Buckley took it to another level - thanks to a quietly restrained, and tender, vocal performance, let me tell you - he very often took the credit for its genesis.
Fifthly, there's Buckley's legacy. Not a day goes by when another woe-is-me bleeding heart comes along, someone who's taken his wide-eyed, romantic visions, and his operatic way with a tune, and made them farcical or lily-livered.
Coldplay wouldn't be Coldplay without Buckley.
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