Jeff Buckley: Amazing Grace

Schwann Spectrum: Spring 1995

By Wes Phillips

  First, there's the voice. Supple, serene, raw, imbued with primal intensity-an instrument so big and so expressive that it wouldn't be surprising if Jeff Buckley had to buy a separate ticket for it when he travels on an airplane, the way string-bass players must do. Grace (Columbia CK 57528), Buckley's debut full-length CD, is dominated by that voice. From intimate whisper to full-throated roar, frequently in the same song, Buckley's voice wraps itself around lyrics; sometimes illuminating them with its passion, at other times illustrating them wordlessly, conjuring the naked emotions that inhabit them. It cn seem as if those words were, somehow, not quite the point.

  "Words are really beautiful," he told Interview's Ray Rogers, "but they are limited...The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is. I need to inhabit every bit of a lyric, or else I can't bring the song to you-or else, it's just words."

  Speaking to Paul Young of Buzz, he went further. "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 the experience."

  With that voice and possessing an access-pass, if you will, to his emotions, it's not surprising that Buckley attracted attracted unprecedented word-of-mouth enthusiasm when he started playing solo gigs in downtown New York bars. Even jaded downtown-scene habitués were forced to take notice of the intensity of Buckley's readings. What he was trying to accomplish in those performances, he says, was to "put myself through a new childhood," dismantling his old identity by inhabiting songs that he'd always known and loved and, through the act of singing them, to own his art. "The cathartic part was in the essential act of sibging," he told Rolling Stone. "When is it that the voice becomes an elixer? It's during flirting, courtship, sex. Music's all that."

  The simplest way to identify Buckley-and to his way of thinking, the least accurate-is to link him to his father, folksinger Tim Buckley. While comparisons are made inevitable by career choice, vocal similarities, physical resemblance, even by their shared eclecticism, the younger Buckley hastens to minimize his father's influence. He was raised by his mother; he met his father only once, not long before the elder Buckley's death of a drug overdose in 1975. While there was music around him constantly when h was growing up, he only recalls one instance when his mother played his father's records-a song in which they were both mentioned. His step-father's gift of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, when he was nine, looms much larger in his list of influences.

  Indeed, one can hear a lot of Led Zep in the music of Grace: the vague hints of middle-eastern melodies and chugging rhythms; even more the inversion of the roles of lead guitar and lead vocal-allowing the texture of Buckley's voice to inhabit the space normally occupied by a lead instrument. Aulthough he attracted notice through his solo performances, as he sought catharsis he was also seeking a band. Columbia Records released an EP, Live at Sin-é (44K 77296), documenting his solo NY performances, but Buckley did not want to become known as a singer-songwriter, he wanted a band. In Mick Grondahl (bass), Matt Johnson (drums), and Michael Tighe (guitar), Buckley found it. Summer of 1994 saw the release of a promo-only EP, Peyote Radio Theatre (CSK 6206), which showcased two songs from the forthcoming Grace, along with an intense ten-minute rave-up of Big Star's "Kangaroo." Their approach to that song revealed the group's manifesto: here was a band that listened to one another.

  And finally, there is Grace, the long-awaited debut of Buckley and band. Ten songs-seven Buckley compositions and a cover played by the band, and two covers sung by Buckley, accompanying himself on guitar. The interpretations are instructive: there is the lament, "Corpus Christi Carol," sung in a high, clear, mournful falsetto; Nina Simone's famous "Lilac Wine," which finds in the perfumed wine an answer to "the times when I think too much"; and Leonard Cohen's ode to music and passion, "Hallelujah." Then there are Buckley's originals, which are complex and sometimes rambling. Though the album's overall tone is somber, individual songs explore multiple facets of events and emotions: "Grace" shows cinematic sweep in its soaring meditation on time and infatuation; "Mojo Pin" is full of rueful lust; "Lover You Should Have Come Over" and "Last Goodbye" detail the deaths of relationships; "Eternal Life" rails against intolerance and despair; "So Real" follows dream-logic to an epiphany. Loss and regret are the recurring motifs, both in his own songs and in the songs he chose to cover. In one form or another, all of Grace is informed by these twin themes.

  I caught up with Jeff Buckley in the midst of a grueling nation-wide tour supporting the release of the album. By the time we spoke in a telephone interview, the end of the ordeal was in sight-mid-December performances in New York and Hoboken would complete the schedule. Buckley sounded drained when we began, but grew animated responding to questions. He's articulate and soft-spoken, obviously energized by ideas and the act of communication.

Wes Phillips: I wanted to start by asking you how what you're doing now contrasts with what you were doing in New York - you first attracted attention playing solo in coffee-bars...

Jeff Buckley: I've always played in bands. I just spent a little time, really, playing solo. The reason I did the solo shows, really, was to find the right band. I didn't intend to be signed as a solo artist at all. I have a vision, an encompassing vision, as far as the records go. It doesn't matter how good the solo artist is, if the band is not together or if it's a dictatorship. That's why it's hard for me to listen to Prince.

Phillips: How has getting out of New York and touring affected your music?

Buckley: Just by playing it every night. You can take a text-say, all the material off of Grace-it gets washed through all these different souls, not only the four people in the band, and in my soul -which is completely changing all the time-but also, cities and people. Troubles, joys, other people that you meet-(the songs) become, not a platform, but an empty body that you fill with your happenings of your day, the week, of the moment; that's why songs are so great.

Phillips: I'm fascinated by the concept of grace and apparently you are, too. After all, you've written a song with that title and also named your debut Grace. What does grace mean to you?

Buckley: Grace is the thing in people that matters most. It's all their beauty and all their ability to deal with problems-with all the slings and arrows and all that-it carries you over. It transcends.

Phillips: Of course, it carries a specific meaning in religion.

JB: Yeah, well, that's not my world. I use words like "grace" in a human context... People, humans, that's the only existence that I understand. So I use grace in a more open meaning. I'm not addressing religion at all-except that of music.

Phillips: On "Grace", you recorded Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," which is a hymn to music.

Buckley: It's a hymn to being alive. It's a hymn to love lost. To love. Even the pain of existence, which ties you to being human, should receive an amen-or a hallelujah.

Phillips: It seems that your songs address loss, yearning, parting...

Buckley: Yeah. On this record, yeah. I intend to have a bit more joy of union next time.

Phillips: In your voice, you've got an extraordinary instrument that is almost overpowering in the way that you seem capable of accessing your emotions on the most direct level. Is controlling all that power a problem, when it comes to conveying the meaning of a lyric?

Buckley: No. It's hard to control my sorrow, my libido, my arrogance - emotions are supposed to take you over. Like joy. Really, they're something that control me, I don't control them. I just ask of them what they need, and I do their will - and probably, they do mine. We all do, actually. We're all very much on the surface, when you hear us play. Grace is just us getting together; we're so new, very new.

Phillips: At this point, you've been touring for how long?

Buckley: Seven months. Well, me totally? About a year, but a little of that was solo. Then the guys came on and we did about five months before we took a break. Now, we're back on tour for about five and a half months.

Phillips: After all that, you guys should be tight.

Buckley: Yeah! Well, things can be tight, but it really isn't that tight. The dialog is open; every moment that we play has purpose. The solidity between us is that everything is just out there, otherwise the songs can't really gather magic. It's such a shame when you get a good song and it just goes out there and nothing happens-it means nothing, people are just going through the motions. I really hate that. Also, it's my food, (quieter) I need it.

Phillips: I read somewhere your response to a comparison of your vocal technique with your father's, in which you said that he wasn't singing with his voice, just as you aren't singing with yours-that the tradition of singing in the upper registers goes back generations in your family.

Buckley: I need to qualify that. Really the tradition stems from my mother; she's just not famous, but she's the one who stuck around. She raised me. She loved me. He didn't. All the men in my life, they left. They split. They chickened out.

Phillips: So music was your true parent?

Buckley: My mother was, but (music) was her parent as well. She really lived by it, even just being a housewife. And my step-dad as well-a car mechanic-they just had it all the time, everywhere, they just had it all around. There wasn't anything that didn't have a soundtrack to it.

Phillips: In the promotional video for "Grace" (Columbia 31196), you spoke of having "a physical imperative to find out where to come from in my spirit, when I made music," and I was struck by your description of it as a physical imperative. What did you mean?

Buckley: The same thing that magnetically drags you to a certain woman, that certain restlessness in the bones that can be almost a sickness, if you didn't answer it. It's just your nature...I had a long bout of hedging my life into different projects, so that I could play music-and I was, ultimately, not satisfied. So I said, I've already chosen my home (which is New York and I'll never move; I love it there) and I don't want anything else in my life to be different. I want to have-or at least I struggle to have-a place where I'm recognized. A place in my soul or at least in my heart from where I express myself, where all of me is recognized and all of me is useful. Even the excesses, even the banal stuff-it's all accepted. Because limits...never wrote an album. The word No never did anything. When you're in other people's projects, there's always that No!. There's always that feeling of being curtailed. It gets to a point where you don't even want to speak; you don't even want to speak your heart. And that's where the music really fails.

Phillips: You draw on many disparate musical forms on Grace: qawwali; raga; interpretative jazz-Nina Simone, obviously; Led Zeppelin. Who were the biggest influences on you, when you were developing your musical identity?

Buckley: All those things that you mentioned, really. Anybody who just had such an immovable delivery and a soul to their sound, which is just so authentic to me. And not only authentic-I think that Nina is just quite subversive in her whole thing. A very subversive woman. Because in this culture, just feeling is a subversive act-and expressing it is rebellious. In her treatment of her songs, she just ripped them apart and then tenderly put them back together. And her voice-the sound of it and the timbre-was just so uncompromising. Sort of like Johnny Rotten.

Phillips: When you first hear Nina, it's almost difficult to determine if that voice is a man's, in the upper register, or a woman's, in the lowest. You almost have to connect first to a human being before even assigning it a gender.

Buckley: Right, that's it exactly. Like the bassoon at the beginning of The Rite of Spring.

  Also, tragic figures have always struck a chord with me. Like Piaf-she as much as says that she invites tragedy into her life-that's her blood. It's as if, when she was young, she went to a palm-reader who just told her, "You will always have a sad life." So she just relegated herself to that. She sacrificed any other kind of living in order that this certain kind of music came out of her. That appeals to me as well, in the same way that Morrissey does.

  We could talk about influences until we were both completely bored and out of paper, but they really don't matter. The thing that shapes you is not the identity of your mother or your father, or anything that you've listened to. The thing that shapes you is what you garner from every one of those people. Grace, really, is a tar-pit; it has a bunch of bones in it and from it will rise a new, special life that has nothing to do with the past, just the present. Well, maybe with the future, I hope. I want us to have a vibe that's all our own and a music that we can call our own, in this world that's too preoccupied with labels, genres-all that stuff. People are judged as succeeding or failing within those genres, but really, succeeding on a soul level is forgotten. Music is much bigger than the music business will ever be. And it's where we come from.