“HE LOVED MUSIC, IT WAS IN HIS SOUL”

“ JEFF 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 Pepper’s, 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.”

THE WAY YOUNG LOVERS DO

RECORDED: SIN-É, NEW YORK, JULY/AUGUST 1993

RELEASED: “LIVE AT SIN-É” EP, NOVEMBER 23, 1993

From Buckley’s first release, an EP chronicling some of his regular live set at the Manhattan coffee bar

Jeff was such a virtuosic singer, probably one of the most gifted singers we’ve ever had. So a lot of his musical expression came from that, which is why