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Wikipedia Summary for Jeff Buckley
Jeffrey Scott Buckley (November 17, 1966 – May 29, 1997), raised as Scott Moorhead, was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. After a decade as a session guitarist in Los Angeles, Buckley amassed a following in the early 1990s by playing cover songs at venues in Manhattan's East Village such as Sin-é, gradually focusing more on his own material. After rebuffing much interest from record labels and Herb Cohen, the manager of his father, singer Tim Buckley, he signed with Columbia, recruited a band, and recorded what would be his only studio album, Grace, in 1994.
Over the following three years, the band toured extensively to promote the album, including concerts in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Australia. In 1996, they stopped touring and made sporadic attempts to record Buckley's second album in New York City with Tom Verlaine as producer.
In 1997, Buckley moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to resume work on the album, to be titled My Sweetheart the Drunk, recording many four-track demos while also playing weekly solo shows at a local venue. On May 29, 1997, while awaiting the arrival of his band from New York, he drowned during a spontaneous evening swim, fully clothed, in the Mississippi River when he was caught in the wake of a passing boat; his body was found on June 4.
Since his death, there have been many posthumous releases of his material, including a collection of four-track demos and studio recordings for his unfinished second album My Sweetheart the Drunk, expansions of Grace, and the Live at Sin-é EP. Chart success also came posthumously: with his cover of Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" he attained his first number one on Billboard's Hot Digital Songs in March 2008 and reached number two in the UK Singles Chart that December. Rolling Stone included Grace in its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and included Buckley in their list of the greatest singers.
The only goal is in the process. The process is the thing ¦with little flashes of light here and there. Those are the gigs, those are the live shows. But it's the life in between that's all I got.
If you feel blocked, do not turn to others, but look inside, in silence, for the enemy of your progress.
On my record cover, you can barely see my face. I still think I look really geeky.
Sensitivity isn't about being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom.
Your soul can fly outward, stringed to your ribcage like a shimmering kite in the shape of an open hand. Be still and listen to the evidence of your own holiness.
The words come from here. From memories, from dreams, from people I've known. I'm always writing and reflecting on life. I want to suck it all in.
So I'll wait for you... And I'll burn Will I ever see your sweet return? Oh, will I ever learn? Oh, Lover, you should've come over Cause it's not too late.
I was captured by music at a really early age. I was really captured by it. Everything about it. It was my mother… It was my father… It was my play thing. It was my toy. It was the best thing in my life.
There is no good singing, there is only present and absent.
Be the best. No negativity. No weakness. No acquiescence to fear or disaster. No errors of ignorance. No evasion to reality.
We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.
Music is endless and even though I've heard a whole bunch of music from so many different places and fallen in love countless times with all kinds of different music.There's still something about it,I guess it's called Freedom.
You can't kill the past by denying the past. You can kill it only by making it obsolete. And even in that, you have to find honor in the past. You can't hack off pieces of yourself, and expect them to grow again.
Love heals all wounds and not just time alone.
Music should be like making love. Sometimes you want it soft and tender, another time you want it hard and aggressive.
To do something that will just fly away is kind of special. Every time somebody tell you they love you, that I love you flies away, and you wait until the next one.
I just want to have a completely adventurous, passionate, weird life.
Love, anger, depression, joy and dreams. ...And Zeppelin. Totally.
If you're going to write, then write a novel with a Haitian woman in it and try and describe her accurately. When you can do that, you can write about people.
Love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah.
I don't see myself in an ivory tower.
People have a certain perfection about them, no matter who they are. Like when Janis Joplin sang. Gorgeous!
There are thousands of great artists that wouldn't be doing the same kind of work if there were no music business machine. The ones who are popular would be doing much different work, too. Michael Bolton would be pumping gas.
I don't write my music for Sony. I write it for the people who are screaming down
the road crying to a full-blast stereo.
I dunno... I feel out of step. Musically. Just out of step, not even behind or ahead. Just sort of like... I dunno, sometimes I feel like I'm still... just not... in sync. I don't know how to explain it. I just am.
Fight despite the crowds of the walking dead.
When all of this music sounds like you know what you want to say, then it will have been of all worth, ever. You will be something complete unto yourself, present and unique.
I like a spirituality with a God that knows how to drive a car, that knows how to take his girl to the dance club, dance all night, have a little drink, kiss the kid when they come back in and go to sleep. God doesn't need a chauffeur -- he needs to drive himself.
Kiss me, please kiss me
But kiss me out of desire, babe, and not consolation
You know it makes me so angry 'cause i know that in time
I'll only make you cry, this is our last goodbye.
There's no time for hatred, only questions. Where is love? Where is happiness? What is life? Where is peace?
Time to write and sing, to laugh, to listen, to discover, to cry,
to love music.
My kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder It's never over, all my riches for her smiles when I slept so soft against her... It's never over, All my blood for the sweetness of her laughter... It's never over, She's a tear that hangs inside my soul forever.
I'm far from being a consummate artist. I mean, this is just my first album, and the work is very new. I'm just beginning, and I'm certainly not worthy of demigod status. There's absolutely no danger of me reaching that.
I don't choose the songs; the songs choose me.
I'm actually the son of Mary Guibert. My mother was born in the Panama Canal zone and came to America when she was five with my grandmother and grandfather, and that was the family I knew. Everybody sang; everybody had songs all the time, and they loved music.
The only goal is in the process. The process is in the thing with little flashes of light: those are the gigs, the live shows... it's the life in between. That's all I've got.
Maybe someday, I'll just make, like, a complete on-demand record that everybody wants to hear. But that would be impossible and, also, I just changed my mind. I don't think I'll ever do that.
Maybe I'm not a good enough artist that people just think of me. Maybe in the future, I'll bloom into something that will just make people look at me for what I am.
I'm concerned with the future. I'm concerned with my life, my present, my friends, people I love, people who love me. I have no intention of taking on a legacy that wasn't bestowed on me.
I once tried to sing jazz for real. But jazz didn't do it for me. You can't have jazz without a jazz world, which doesn't exist anymore.
Sensitivity isn't being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom. I enjoy a lot of mystery.
I'm convinced part of the reason I got signed is because of who I am, and it makes me sad.
I figured if I played in the no-man's land of intimacy, I would learn to be a performer.
You can tell everything from the eyes.
The music business is the most childish business in the world. Nobody knows what they're selling or why, but they sell it if it works.
Grace is a quality in people that I just enjoy. It's a very human quality.
You can't be, like, smashing guitars against Marshall stacks all the time. As a matter of fact, after a while, it just looks like posing -- it never really gets down to any message or any real expression.
I just let the emotion dictate what the arrangement is.
I don't know any artists that are really emotionally well adjusted. In fact, I think we're all pretty much insane.
I disoriented myself from everything about being a human being and just played and played and played and sang and sang and sang.
I'm sick of all these labels and these manufactured subdivisions of music that don't even exist. And even though I'm pierced myself, I'm sick of everyone equating body piercing with musical courage. If you ask me, it takes a lot more than that.
All these people that want to make me out as part of Generation X had better watch out, or they're going to get X'd out themselves.
I'm not 'Grace.' That album is like a brick onto itself. It's like a coffin that I put certain feelings and observations in so that they can be capsulized forever. I wanted to put them there so I would be free to move on.
When I sing, my face changes shape. It feels like my skull changes shape... the bones bend.
The Smiths hasn't been equaled. That goes for the composition of the songs, the lyrics, and the performance.
Music was like my first real toy. I was an only child for a while, and I was alone a lot of the time -- and I liked it. I still like being alone.
I've always felt that the quality of the voice is where the real content of a song lies. Words only suggest an experience, but the voice is that experience.
I made a statement all my own.
I've already created my own thing.
I'm convinced I got signed because of who I am. And it makes me sad.
I sacrificed my anonymity for my father, whereas he sacrificed me for his fame.
I'm lying in my bed, blanket is warm, this body will never keep me safe from harm. I still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal. Touch my skin to keep me whole. If only you'd come back to me. To feel you at my side, wouldn't need no Mojo Pin to keep me satisfied.
Thinking so hard on her soft eyes and memories of the signs that it's over. It's over.
Maybe I'm too young to keep good love from going wrong, but tonight you're on my mind, so you never know.
Kiss me out of desire, but not consolation.
The people who raised me musically are my mother, who is a classically trained pianist, and my stepfather.
I resent the fact that a parental warning sticker has to be included on an album as cover art. To me that's censorship.
I don't want my reputation to take me over, I just want to be judged on my songs. I want people to come and see me because they want to, not because fashion dictates it.
I want to be ripped apart by music. I want it to be something that feeds and replenishes, or that totally sucks the life out of you. I want to be dashed against the rocks.
A tune has to resonate with whatever is happening around it.
I am very observant of people's character.
I just want to be a guy with a guitar.
Words are beautiful but restricted. They're very masculine, with a compact frame. But voice is over the dark, the place where there's nothing to hang on: it comes from a part of yourself that simply knows, expresses itself, and is.
She's a tear that hangs inside my soul forever.
To young to hold on and to old to just break free and run.
The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It's worth being bashed against. It's worth getting scarred by. It's worth pouring yourself over every one of its coals.
I don't really need to be remembered. I hope the music's remembered.
Words are really beautiful, but they're limited. Words are very male, very structured. But the voice is the netherworld, the darkness, where there's nothing to hang onto. The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is.
They will accuse me of stealing from my father. They already stand in baited judgement, waiting for my first move, waiting to dump their loads of garbage on me.
When I was 12, I decided to become a musician. 'Physical Graffiti' was the first album I ever owned.
What I'm trying to do is just sing what comes to my body in the context of the song. And if you go by the emotion of the song, it's almost like stepping into a city. Cities have certain customs and rules and laws you can break, and that's what I was doing.
A song just doesn't have verse-chorus-verse. It could just be one line. There are Chinese love songs that you have to learn one melody for a three-minute thing, and nothing ever repeats. I like that.
I do like structure, and I'd love to be better at it.
All music industry places are the same, really. They have the same dynamics and the same concerns and the same needs.