There’s a new Jeff Buckley collection out. It’s an album of rough cuts and demos by Jeff and former Captian Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas from the early 1990s. If you’re not familiar with Jeff Buckely, well, first, shame on you. Second, go to the store and buy Grace, probably the best solo debut album of the 1990s. Cut to track six. Then track seven. Wipe the tears from your eyes. Thank me.

Buckley died while swimming in a Memphis river several years ago, a tragic ending made all the eerier by the references to water and drowning and death on Grace, and that he died at age 27, the same age as his father – also a very talented singer/songwriter, with a hauntingly similar voice.

Since his death, Jeff’s mother Mary Guibert has worked tirelessly to secure old master tapes of Jeff’s demos and studio cuts. This is the third juicy morsel of those efforts, following the double album Mystery White Boy, and last year’s Live at L’Olympia.

What’s most likeable about Buckley is not his choirboy falsetto or the romance in his lyrics, but his neck-deep record collection. Between live and studio albums, he’s covered the disparate likes of Leonard Cohen, Edith Piaf, the Nymphs, Hank Williams, Alex Chilton, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Nina Simone, Morrisey, Inger Lorre, Ira Gershwin and the great Pakistani crooner Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And all of them exert a strong pull over his original stuff.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 17th, 2002 at 1:27 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.