Uncut UK – October 2019

OCTOBER 2019 • UNCUT • 59

“ LOV

SIC, I AS

I IS SO L”

A “natural
songwriter”,
given space:
Jeff Buckley
at the Green
Mill Chicago,
November
18, 1994

JEFF BUCKLEY

i

h

w

p l

Photo by PAU L NAT K I N

PAUL

NATKIN/GETTY

IMAGES

‘‘J

EFF was never going to sit still,

never,” explains Buckley’s former

manager Dave Lory. “He wanted to

do a heavy metal album, he wanted

to do MTV Unplugged, he wanted to

do a Pakistani record. He let me read

one of his diaries once, where he

wrote that he wanted to make 18 albums. He could have

done anything.”

As it would turn out, however, Buckley left only a slim

legacy when he drowned in the Wolf River Harbor of the

Mississippi in May 1997, consisting of only a handful of

EPs, one studio album, live recordings and an unfinished

follow-up. Yet what he created over a period of just six

years has proved to be a powerful and enduring body of

work in the decades since; quite an achievement for a

musician who came to songwriting late, and found it

consistently challenging.

“I think he was a natural songwriter, but his process was

quite slow,” explains guitarist Michael Tighe, occasional

co-writer and right-hand man in Buckley’s band. “There

were moments where it would all come together very

quickly for him – I remember him playing me the riff for

‘Lover You Should Have Come Over’ in his apartment in

the East Village, on 12th Street. It had that Ray Charles

swing, I thought it was real cool.”

“It wasn’t until after the Tim Buckley tribute concert at

St Ann’s [in Brooklyn Heights] that Jeff said to me, ‘I think

this is what I need to do,’” recalls his mother Mary Guibert.

“He just loved being in front of an audience, making them

laugh, making them cry, moving them. But after he went

to New York [in late 1991] he began to really concentrate on

writing – he took a class at NYU on poetry, and he started

buying Bukowski and all these other poetry books.”

“Looking back on it, there’s no way he could have done

18 albums unless he did covers,” says Dave Lory. “You

know, I thought he had writer’s block at times, but it was

more that he was a composer – it was all about the sounds,

that was how he wrote, and it takes longer to do it that way.

Jeff was unpredictable, and we always felt that by accident

he would write a hit, he would write his Sgt PepperÕs,

because he was so talented. With most songwriters, you

have to guide them: ‘You’ve gotta put the hook there’ and

all that. But we just let Jeff go and be Jeff.”