Lana's Autograph

Submitted by Gabby

Jeff Buckley's State of Grace

Sydney Morning Herald: August 25, 1995
By Sacha Molitorosz
Submitted by Sai

The critics adore his debut album. His tour is the hottest non-stadium gig of the year. Will the 90s belong to Jeff Buckley?

A very fine line divides passion and pretence. The brooding artist, inspired and inspiring, is always a mere breath away from unwitting self-parody. Singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley is one of those most in danger of crossing that line.
  Appropriately, Buckley's songs are full of breathy suggestion. His debut album, Grace, includes a cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah (we are on dangerous ground here) built upon a gentle, vulnerable vocal track that finishes with an impressive run of quivering falsetto notes.
  "That's not a hallelujah of chasteness and piety," Buckley explains. "It's more menstrual. It has more to do with the hallelujah of orgasam, of pain, of joy, of flesh, of being tied to the earth. Not of invisible angels in heaven who may or may not come down to tell you how good or bad you are, or Santa Claus."
  Buckley is a spiritualist. He worships love and sex. Humanity is his idol. He challenges "the weird sort of monopoly the Church has over certain words, over certain feelings and morality and belief"-even in his song titles: Corpus Christi, Eternal Life, Hallelujah and the title track, Grace.
  "I see many other colours of sacredness," he says. "And grace is a quality in people that I just enjoy. It's a very human quality."
  Like many artists, Buckley plays God. And in the universe he creates-that is, on Grace-he seeks to communicate the most touching human experiences in the most profound terms: altogether an implausibly ambitious undertaking.
  He aims high; and thereby exposes himself to a dizzying fall. In interview, it is the same story.
  "I don't need much time to daydream into a notebook," Buckley muses. "I just do it when I have a notebook-and I always have one with me. But to have that coalesce into music, I need space, stillness...and no telephones.
  "And even if I write it takes a long time for a certain language to emerge. Because it's sort of like quitting smoking when you first start writing-it takes a while for the nicotine to leave your system, until you're totally pure. Then you start."
  He perceives his art as a zealot would his faith, going so far as to describe Grace as an "exorcism."
  When Grace was released last year, the critics were instant converts, ready-made disciples. Superlatives fell at the American's feet. The Herald's rock writer, Shane Danielsen, was moved to dub it Album of the Year, "without question."
  Predictably, a swag of father/son comparisons were made. Jeff's father, Tim Buckley, was himself a songwriter in the Dylan mould who recorded a number of lauded albums before dying young. Jeff was six months old at the time.
  Despite the comparisons, however, the consensus was that here was a talent in his own right, a major artist. Even so, Buckley doesn't play down the influences from the '60s and '70s. He simply speaks of them-Led Zep, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell-in push/pull terms.
  "The only way that I can possibly pay tribute to the people I idolize from afar is, in order to be just like them, I have to discard their work and totally jump into myself with my eyes closed and my nose plugged, totally empty handed," he says.
  "That's the only way you can really pay tribute to the people who have given you something. That is, to come from the thing that is very individual but you, and come from every fibre of it.
  "But, you know, it is great to imitate. How else do you learn? Children do it all the time. And some artists just bring out something in you and give you a key. I'm not talking about separating yourself from input, because then you die. But I'm just talking about when it comes to saying what I've got to say, it has to be from either my deepest eccentricities or just my every day face-but at least it's got to be me.
  "I mean (and here he imitates Bob Dylan), 'I can't keep singing like this all the time'."
  Buckley feels the same attraction/aversion towards his lifestyle. "I suppose that I've learned that I have a lot of license as a young man-a lot of insane freedom," he says.
  "But the only way that you can protect your freedom is a real strong knowledge of your own responsibility to protect it...otherwise you blow your head off in a hotel room somewhere or you end up dying in a f---ing Parisian bathtub. You can get into so much trouble. But it's part of being a male, I think, and everybody goes through it."
  The pop icon even more so. A case of the Jim Morrison syndrome: death by adoration and indulgence. Surely the temptation must be strong for a moody rock star on the rise? Buckley agrees. On the one hand, he acknowledges the dangers of diving into his freedom; on the other, he fears the converse dangers (for an artist, these are even worse) of resting in the shallow end.
  "I don't know any artists that are really emotionally well adjusted. In fact, I think we're all pretty much insane. We're just safe. Yeah, you know, because we don't actually come to your house-you just go to the record bin. You're better off like that, I assure you. And so are we."
  If Buckley in conversation is interesting and visceral, musically he is even more so.
  Grace moves from wall-of-sound interludes that affront with their power-guitars on overdrive accompanied by relentless drumming-to passages in which acoustic strings and a whispered voice barely conspire to hold off the silence; from aggressive desire to tenuous longing.
  His only tools are his voice, his guitar and his band. And his brooding, photogenic good looks.
  "I just let the emotion dictate what the arrangement is," Buckley says. "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."
  In the end, Buckley is no poseur. Depending on your perspective, he is either profoundly insightful or painfully self-indulgent. He would probably admit to both.
  The discussion returns to Buckley's secular spirituality, the antithesis of organized religion.
  "One thing's for sure: you really cannot learn about the earth or the world or about people by living in a building that you stay in all the time in robes with some kind of weird cone on your head and giving up sex. It won't work. It's like preaching-it just doesn't make sense. It's not evil and shouldn't be abolished, it just doesn't make sense for me."
  Buckley himself doesn't preach. Instead, he is charged with a vision he is trying to communicate. Whether or not you believe is a question of faith.

Jeff Buckley plays at the Metro on Monday and at the Phoenician Club on September 5 and 6.

Love Music

Love this

Ink Nineteen

December, 1994
By Hillary Meister

  "Some people hate stuff until they find a situation where they really need it," said Jeff Buckley. "They'll start off with 'this sucks, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks,' then 'boom.' Better watch out because someday they'll need that song. They'll need it more than anything in the world and then we'll have to have a huge feast on their words. Eat their own crow."
  I followed Jeff into the neither reaches of The Point in Atlanta, situated in the middle of Little Five Points. He meandered into the club in the late afternoon prior to his soundcheck, sat on the worn couch in the upstairs dressing room and pontificated on all the things that pissed him off. I told him his album Grace came at a time when I needed to hear music he calls "low-down dreamy bit of the psyche."
  "No grunge," I heard myself saying.
  "What is grunge?" he asks, but doesn't wait for answer. "That's just technology and attitude. Anybody can step on a fuzz pedal, but that doesn't mean you can write a song."
  Buckley's Grace has received remarkable acclaim. Recorded meticulously, with Andy Wallace (Soul Asylum) producing, the album features seven originals and three covers. Buckley devours music of all kinds and hence unearths gems that seem to have been written exclusively for his celestial voice. "The world of music is way vaster and way more eternal and way huger than the music business will ever be, ever" Buckley said. One particularly interesting cover on Grace is the madrigal "Corpus Christi Carol" by Benjamin Britten. "My friend Roy played it for me a long time ago so I gave it back to him. It was written in the '30s or the '40s. He copied a medieval...wrote it in the style of that."
  Buckley also incorporates dulcimer and harmonium into his songs, adding the necessary ethereal twists to his dexterous guitar playing. "It's a great sounding thing. I saw my first harmonium on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood...I always thought I had to have one. It used to be 'people need Sega, everybody has one.' Well, that's the way the harmonium used to be. It was all the rage in France in the 18th century. I think it was mixing the squeeze box with a piano." Buckley shifts position, runs his hand through wet, red-splotched shaggy hair, and looks pensive. "It's the same old climate. Everybody knows about Pearl Jam and Tears for Fears but nobody knows about Yo La Tengo and Thurston Moore's solo (work), Coctails, Shudder to Think...Oh look," Buckley pauses, picking up a CD from the coffee table. "Sky Cries Mary-harmonium!"
  Record company managers had been chasing Buckley down for years. Even before Buckley entered puberty, he fought off attempts by music business people that were looking to make the young Jeff into the next-generation Tim Buckley, Jeff's father who had died in the early '70s of a drug overdose.
  The Sr. Buckley experimented with forms of folk music, sometimes creating jazzy, improvisations in voice and instruments and sometimes creating what Jeff calls "embarrassing" attempts. But the familial connection ends at the genes leaving Jeff to stave off over zealous Tim Buckley fans, writers and record execs that would like to fulfill the connection further.
  At 28, Jeff is happy being Jeff and is bound and determined to stake his own claim in music-making of which he refers to as 'soul music.' "I always say soul. I think Sonic Youth is soul music," he said. Grace is filled with that passionate fire and live, his expression of it helps create the music as much as the instruments. "That's where the whole anti-passion, anti-body thing comes in with usual raising and expression of feelings. Because it's very sexual to express yourself and it's very liberating and it's audacious and people are taught not to be that way, they're taught to be tame."

Jeff Buckley will play at The Talk House in Miami on December 4 and at the Jazz & Blues Club in Orlando on December 5.

Ascent Of A Singer

Sun Sentinel: December 6, 1994
By Deborah Wilker
Submitted by Sai

The son of a late folk hero, Jeff Buckley may be the next up-and-coming star.

  The tip-off was the sparkling new tour bus moored out front the Stephen Talkhouse on Sunday. Not just any bus. This was one of those $150,000-or- so jobs, with jet-black windows and a Park Avenue interior. Not the kind of traveling digs most struggling young punk-folk singers can afford.
  Then again, if your name is Jeff Buckley, you're not like most of the other up-and-comers on the road.
  Buckley-who's name will be everywhere next year as the Sony marketing assault coalesces-is the son of the late great folk hero Tim Buckley. The elder performer was one of rock's more intriguing "could have been" stories. A late-'60s staple pegged as the next Bob Dylan, he drew an avid following through the early '70s, then died of a drug overdose in 1975 at age 28.
  The younger Buckley, who is now 28, has been honing his act on the cafe scene of New York's Lower East Side for the last four years. Last year there was a well-received EP, Live at Sin-e, named for the Irish pub where his weekly gigs drew raves. This year came the emotional debut set Grace, and a crafty Sony campaign designed to make Gen-Xers think the kid bubbled up out of nowhere.
  Now the record label is bankrolling Buckley's first major tour (and his bus)-a two month schedule of clubs and cafes that brought him to the Talkhouse Sunday.
  Sharing the bill was opening act Brenda Kahn, a less promising artist also popular in Manhattan's downtown clubs, and also freshly added to the Sony roster.
  Like the revered beatniks of the past, Buckley projects the requisite disinterest, while mumbling detached non sequiturs about the people in his band and the inspiration for his tunes. He also plays down his looks (he's got Mel Gibson's eyes), cementing his unwashed hair into a center part, and sporting geek pants and a faded orange bowling shirt.
  But when he sings, Buckley creates a sound so intriguing he can hold a room transfixed with just one whispered note. Rendered in a voice that somehow encapsulates all that was great about Roy Orbison, Robert Plant and even Tiny Tim.
  There is a level of control and range in his singing that could never have been learned-an innate ability to go from wail to hushed sigh, maneuvering notes with uncommon confidence.
  Though doused in an unusual Far Eastern exotica, several of the songs during Buckley's 70-minute set on Sunday still ran together, among them So Real, Eternal Life and Mojo Pin. Yet there were moments when you knew Buckley might well be the next star. He cast Lilac Wine with a soprano trill, nearly hypnotizing the crowd of about 200, many of whom were music industry decision-makers in town for an ASCAP powwow.
  When a small group of football fans clustered in the back of the bar let out a sudden, loud groan over a Dolphins' interception, Buckley didn't waver-though the noise clearly upended the artistic moment. No question, the kid's a pro.
  Still, if Sony wants to make money with him, he'll need more imaginative songwriting, melodies that will challenge his vocal talent while engaging public taste. While there is an argument to be made for keeping Buckley just as he is-offbeat, raggedly impassioned and firmly underground-there is also something to be said for asking a singer of this caliber to sink his chops into conventional stuff like Orbison's Pretty Woman. Oh, what he could do with it.

Jeff Buckley: "I'm not anyone's son"

L'evenement du Jeudi: February 9-15, 1995
By Yann Plougastel
Submitted by Sai
Translated by me

In the 1970s, Tim Buckley was the rock poet of his generation. Twenty-five years later, the son he did not know carries the torch.

The rumor began to take off in April 1991, in New York, in a smoky club where a band of nostalgic hippies were hosting a tribute to Tim Buckley, a rock star with a tormented personality, who died of an overdose in 1975. 
  A lanky boy, dark-haired and austere, stepped on stage to sing I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain, whose lyrics say: "Flying fish / Tells me of my child /Wrapped in bitter tales and sorrow / He begs just for a smile / He never asked to be his mountain / He never asked to fly..." There was silence. The audience thought they were dreaming. It was him. The man introduced himself, "My name is Jeff Buckley." The son...Then there was a disconcerting mini-CD where Jeff, in a harshly contralto voice, on a powerful and repetitive rhythm, covered "I Do Not Know The End", a title immortalized by Edith Piaf. He said: "She was enjoying that amazing voice with incredible vibrato, thanks to the street, where she had to be heard, I understand her, to be psychologically in the middle of nowhere, lost in an ocean of despair, I know what it is."
  The rumor became more and more insistent. There, in New York, in a Village club, a strange bird was burning with black lyricism. At the rendezvous, there was Led Zeppelin, Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, Charlie Mingus, and Van Morrison...
  We knew more about him. His father and mother separated in 1967 when he was born. He only saw his father once, a few months before his death: "I am no one's son, a clueless guy, born in southern California, who was raised singing in the car with his mother, a classical pianist and cellist", he explained, annoyed by the questions about his parentage. There was Tim. There is Jeff...
  And to point out the important role held by his stepfather, who was working as a mechanic in a garage listening to Led Zeppelin at full volume: "I grew up with this music." As well as that of his mother: "My phrasing, my melodies, I believe that they also come from the tears of my mother. To hide them, she shut herself up in the shower. The sound of the water and her sobs made me think of a siren..."
  At age 17, with a diploma in his pocket, he makes his way to Hollywood, accumulates several jobs: a gas station attendant, a waiter for a strip club, and starts a band with the old guitarist of Captain Beefheart, the hallucinated companion of Frank Zappa. "We were playing like Phil Glass on angel dust trying to be Sun Ra or whatever." This is surrealism, but there is already something, a way to bet on mystery, trance and sound to bring the listener to a stage of pure emotion, without critical look or distanced judgment. "To make music is to get into the skin of a scared kid or a passionate romantic lover..."
  With "Grace", his first album released last summer, he immediately enters the big leagues and gives the full measure of its originality. A convulsive party. A sensual chaos. A caustic dive into the land of sounds. In his quiet and orderly times, he returns to an aesthetic blur, which refers to Dylan, Cohen, or Buckley, Tim. It is rage or orgasm.
  "For me, the trance is the perfect unity between my body and my mind...There is no longer any separation between what I say and what I feel, a feeling that has always attracted me. It's like sex: there comes a time when we can not intervene, where we have to give in. For me, only sex can save this earth. All combinations, all positions are possible, but, at the arrival, there is only that precise moment when I let myself go with the impression of being eternal," he comments.
  Remember this name. Jeff Buckley. Because this flamboyant boy, a whirlwind of melancholy and screams, is simply graceful...

February 11, 8 PM, the Bataclan
50, Blvd Voltaire, Paris, 11, tel: 48.06.21.11
"Grace", Sony CD

"Grace" Autograph

Submitted by Gabby