Jeff Buckley

"I wanted to fuse together my favorite elements of rock and soul singers into something I could call my own. The inflections of Stevie Wonder with the soaring qualities of someone like Buckley. It was his emotional intensity that inspired me more than anything. Also, Jeff came along at a time most singers weren’t using their upper register. His approach helped me embrace the fact that I was a tenor. I owe that guy a lot."

"Q: What songs do you wish you could sing? A: It would be great to sing [Purcell’s] “When I Am Laid in Earth” like Jeff Buckley did at Meltdown in ’95. It was astonishing to hear him sing this piece of music from Jacobean times, and it just feel like it could’ve been written for his voice. But he had such a gift of an instrument of a voice. He could turn that to all sorts of music that took his interest, and it didn’t sound in any way an affectation that he did it. He would sing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan pieces he’d learn phonetically; he didn’t understand the language. He talked about singing Mahler at that festival. I said, “That’s in German. Do you speak German?” “No, I’ll learn it.” I was curating that festival. Now it’s very poignant because it was his last performance in London, but we didn’t know that then. His life was ahead. There was all these great things that he was still going to do. That was just a very sad coincidence. We should be happy that he sang it that one time. You heard him sing something like [“When I Am Laid in Earth”], surely you’ve heard Grace, you’ve heard “Corpus Christi Carol” by Benjamin Britten — he could sing that as well as he could sing a song by Morrissey, although why anybody would want to do that, I don’t know. Or a song by Led Zeppelin; why anybody would want to do that, I don’t know, but he did. That’s his choice."

"It's a beautiful record (Grace). The thing that strikes you, I think, most of all, is his voice. I mean, it's a singers record, in my opinion."

"Coming up next is Jeff Buckley. A guy who is not only a great singer and a great player, but at one time was a very nice hotel manager. A lot of people don't realize this, but in about 1985-86, he used to work at the front desk at the Magic Hotel in Los Angeles. And I know because it was a real CD kind of a flophouse for musicians and Jeff worked at the front desk and took a lot of messages from me. So, Jeff, here's to ya."

"[On recording Jeff Buckley's, Grace] I really wanted to share this because I felt Anthony Snape did such a great job of this seemingly impossible song to cover: Jeff Buckley's 'Grace.' Jeff was like a comet passing through, and he left his mark forever. He is 'gone too soon,' but through his songs, he lives on."

"GAP: Who is your favorite musical artist? Brandon Boyd: Jeff Buckley. When he came out everyone was a little afraid to commit. Well not everybody, but a lot of popular artists were afraid to commit completely to what they were doing. They kind of used irony as a sheet around them, kind of protecting them from having to own up to what they said. Not only did he have one of the best voices I have ever heard, he was one hundred percent committed to what he was doing. He was unabashedly romantic in his lyrics, and the way he sang. He got some flak for it while he was alive, and it sucks because when someone dies people start to say maybe he was awesome, and they begin to analyze it differently. For those reasons, and I can go on forever about the guy. His voice has been influential to a lot of current artists, to people who might not even admit it, really. Just his range and where he would even try to go with his voice. The guts to go from one octave to two above. Not a lot of people are doing that...so also his falsetto influence has influenced me as well."

"The record I would like to talk about today is Grace by Jeff Buckley. There are only a handful of albums that I've ever listened to that have captured me in the way that this album was able to capture me, and actually still holds up so many years after having first heard it. You know, most albums were able to date and over-contextualize and they kind of lose their importance to us over the years, as we grow up and stuff, and there are certain records that aren't able to do that at all and Jeff Buckley's, Grace, is one of them. His voice is...he's the best male singer I have ever heard in my life and he even rivals some female singers; so, check it out."

"Once again, this album doesn’t really need explanation. Jeff Buckley’s only album is one of the greatest, most complete albums ever made. Listen to the whole thing. It’s so emotional, it never fails to get under my skin. It can still give me goosebumps, choke me up and inspire me to go deeper as an artist. It’s also one of the loneliest records – it’s most powerful to listen to all alone with headphones. It’s not the kind of album that you think of cranking up in the car when you’re driving down the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) with your buddies – it’s a solo experience. His vocal performance during “Lilac Wine…” God — that song! He sounds like he’s crying. You can feel his pain during that vocal performance. I can feel his pain just thinking about that song now. I often think about what he would have created if he’d stuck around a little longer."

"Dr. Drew: What will you remember most about the '90s? Sebastian Bach: The album Grace by Jeff Buckley. Unless you've heard it, you wouldn't know why. Dr. Drew: What's your favorite album for a night of steamy monkey love? Sebastian Bach: Jeff Buckley's Grace is the most romantic, sensual album I've heard in my life."

"Q: What are you listening to on your Walkman? Sebastian Bach: I listen to Jeff Buckley. He's my favorite singer. We actually cover a Jeff Buckley tune called "Eternal Life" in our set. When he died it really hit me, because he was an incredible singer who only did one album, Grace, and his voice was so beautiful that I couldn't believe it when he died. Since he's not around to sing songs anymore, we decided we'd give it a shot."

"You ever heard of a guy named Jeff Buckley? He's one of the best singers I've ever heard."

"My singing used to be awful, admits Folds. I don't have Jeff Buckley's voice. I don't write songs as an excuse to hear myself sing. It's the other way around: I sing so I can hear my songs. It can be kind of scary. You're on the radio next to ― well, on the shelf next to Jeff Buckley. We're in the Bs. People can flip through and pick up his record instead and hear a lot better singer. He has that knack. I've had to really work at it. Of course, he probably doesn't play piano as well as me. I'm not going to get all competitive with the guy because obviously he's not doing so well these days."

"I had this really interesting whispering vibrato. It sounded so intimate and spiritual and ethereal, and it reminded me of Jeff a bit. I think I can sing with just about anybody, but he's one of the few singers who truly intimidates me. He's one of the best I've ever heard."

"Jeff Buckley is one of the greatest vocalists that I’ve ever heard. Listening to him is inspiring, moving, spiritual. What a gift. He’s inspired many admirers and imitators but no one can duplicate him."

"In September 2007, a poll of fifty songwriters conducted by the magazine Q listed "Hallelujah" among the all-time "Top 10 Greatest Tracks" with John Legend calling Buckley's version "as near perfect as you can get. The lyrics to 'Hallelujah' are just incredible and the melody's gorgeous and then there's Jeff's interpretation of it. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of recorded music I've ever heard.""

"Certain people compared us, I've been mourning the fact that it would have been great to sing a duet."

"The last few records that I bought that I really enjoyed...Jeff Buckley. It wailed me. I was like walking around in tears, just so grateful that I discovered this record."

"I think he had one of the best voices I've ever heard. Grace, I think, is the best album of the '90s."

"Jeff was a beautiful man. Grace is an album full of the most beautiful songs, and he possessed an equally gorgeous voice. When we lost him, we lost a fantastic talent."

"The reason why I think that record is a great album is just the uniqueness of hearing a man sing so beautifully, and the record, to me, spills with emotion, the whole time."

"Jeff Buckley's Lilac Wine is the most beautiful thing ever recorded..."

"There was a period when I couldn’t get through the day without hearing him sing 'Hallelujah' 3 or 4 times. He had a one in a billion voice and an emotionally piercing guitar style and...I know everyone is saying this, but it hurts so much to lose an artist who was capable of so much before he'd had a chance to do his best work. I guess I should be thankful for what there is: the album "Grace," his first EP, the bootleg live cassettes floating around, and whatever SONY will inevitably scrape together for release. It’s a fucking shame."

"I just wanted to pay tribute to him and talk about the situation. When asked if it was a conscious thing to give an Eastern flavor to the song, Sheik says, "definitely... I know that he was, like, a big fan of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and he was listening to a lot of that kind of music. There's also just a really mournful quality to that kind of string playing. "I wanted to send him off and say a few things about how much his music moved me and other people."

"His voice is an incredible instrument, angelic, and powerful, and mean, at the same time. Tortured. He has been a huge inspiration and influence to me over the last two years. This tune is just unreal."

"This beautiful-looking guy with a fur coat and mad, curly hair walked in. He went to the bar and got a pint of Guinness, then plugged in his Fender and began to sing. Everybody was completely blown away. Who was it? It was Jeff Buckley."

"Even if he didn't sell a huge amount of records in the U.S., he had a lot of impact...On writing "Grace": I just had faith that whatever he did would be good...I was stunned ― it was so beautiful and perfect...It surpassed anything that I thought he was going to do...I remember thinking, man, this music will shake the world. I was just scared by it."

"It was the kind of collaboration I dream about, actually. His voice sounded, you know, like an angel. Like a gift from God."

"I don't hear that many current records that really change my life. I've found it in Jeff Buckley, and I find it in Björk, on occasion."

"He was just really spontaneous, and it was just exciting. I was having a hard time in the band I was in, and so to meet Jeffrey was just like being given a set of paints. Do you know what I mean? It was just like I had all this colour in my life again. I mean, he idolized me before he met me. It's kind of creepy and I, I was like that with him. This is embarrassing, but it's the truth. I just couldn't help falling in love with him. He was adorable. I read his diaries, he read mine, you know we'd just swap, we'd literally just hand over this very personal stuff, and I've never done that with anybody else. I don't know if he has. So in some ways it was very, there was a great deal of intimacy but then there'd be times when I'd just think "oh no, I'm just not penetrating this Jeff Buckley boy at all. I just felt like a groupie or something, sometimes. It wasn't like being his partner at all. He just had something you wanted, it didn't matter who you were."

"I’d love to sing with Jeff Buckley. He is currently making his first album, and if it’s anything like a radio session I heard by him, it should be amazing. He’s written this song called ‘Grace,' which literally makes the hair on my neck stand on end. I was sweating like a fucking June bride when I first heard him. Music has never done that to me before."

"I'm here because I adore his spirit, and I adore him, and the place from which he creates."

"I just love his spirit, and his whole energy, and I also love when men use their voice so unselfconsciously, and just really...feminine, masculine, all over the place. And he just, um...he was, and is, my favourite."

"Never heard such a range, and such a purity. When he would place one note next to the other, you could actually see its kind of roundness."

"I saw my favorite bands, Rage Against the Machine, ten years ago also, Jeff Buckley, in '94, so as well I learned a lot about music through coming to this festival, so it means lot to me taking chance to headlining here."

"He tapped into something...and he was the conduit...and it makes me think of this: where does art come from; where does a true genius come from?"

"Yeah, I found him because, it was actually my wife had him ― had the disc, had him ― she wishes...had the disc, and it came on one night, and you hear that opening tune of Mojo Pin ― it's that real soft, that haunting thing off in the distance ― and I remember asking, "what is that?" She says, "that's Jeff Buckley." Where have I been? Do I know nothing? And since then it's just been a bit of an obsession, I guess."

"There's an undercurrent to his music. There's something you can't pinpoint, like the best of films or the best of art, there's something going on underneath, and there's a truth there, and I find his stuff absolutely haunting. It's just...it's under my skin."

"He's Plant and Page, in one, on a technical level; it's mind-blowing."

"The fact that people are finding him now, a decade later ― almost a decade later ― is a testament to what he was doing. For me, the big...the thing that distinguishes him the most, is that he was about love; he was very interested in love. He had no qualms, no shame with addressing the topic, and the subject of love. And that's...I wouldn't think was brave for him, I think it was something he was led to do ― he had to do ― but, you know, you look around, most of us are trying to be tough guys, and trying to be De Niros, and so on, and so forth, and here was a guy who went the complete opposite direction, in the middle of the '90s. I have a lot of respect for that, 'cause I have this feeling, at the end of the day, you know, when were all said and done, it's all that's gonna matter, isn't it."

"People my age all flocked to see Jeff, you know. Because we were so, just to hear that voice again. He would have been so pissed off with it by now. All these old toothless hags hanging around the stage door, you know. He was just shit hot, I gotta say."

"Interviewer: With Jeff, what stage of Jeff's career did you actually become aware of him and his work? Chrissie: He was playing at The Garage, on his own ― he didn't have a band ― I don't know what year that was. It was probably fairly early; I mean, there was a short career...and he was standing next to me at the bar, afterward ― so we started talking ― and I actually had a rehearsal studio, which we'd been working at that day, just around the corner, and I said, "hey, do you wanna come around, and...I'd gone to see him with John McEnroe, actually, who was in town...and Jeff was just there on his own, maybe with very small crew, if any crew ― I don't remember ― it was just him playing guitar. I asked John to give him a hand with his amps, and that was fun to see ― to see John act as a roadie for this kid ― anyway, we all went around to my rehearsal studio and had kind of a jam ― or he had kind of a jam ― I was mesmerized. He was such a great guitar player, Jeff. That seems to be something that people have...I think when someone's a good singer and songwriter, you tend to overlook that, but he was a shit hot guitar player. He really blew us away that night, when we saw what he was really up to with the guitar."

"Jeff Buckley was a pure drop in an ocean of noise."

"[Talking about Grace] Apart from being my favourite word or name in the English language, Grace overpowers karma. Grace does not make sense. It rewards where rewards are not justified. It covers where no cover is expected. It is the highest human state. Jeff Buckley's voice reminds me of the first line of the old Salvation Army hymn "Amazing Grace how sweet the sound." Grace as a signature. Grace personified in one man's vibrato − a delicate, tremulous voice which rightfully betrays its Middle Eastern tutelage. Jeff was trained in Sufi singing. His ululating voice reminds me how few singers there are in Rock and Roll."

"Interviewer: You kind of do a farewell, I guess, to Jeff Buckley at the end of some of your recent shows. I know you guys recorded the same song, at one time ― and we're going to play Hallelujah in just a minute ― but you could talk a little bit about him? Who wants to talk about Jeff Buckley? The Edge: He was just an incredible singer. We're big fans of his album, and it's a very special record, and ran into him a couple of times in New York, saw him perform in Sin-é, in New York... Bono: You know Sin-é; have you heard of that place? Interviewer: No. The Edge: It's a small, little club. Bono: It's an Irish-run coffee shop. What are you laughing at? He always laughs when I say the word, 'poetry.' It was a great venue for lots of people; The Pogues, Jeff Buckley, Gavin Friday, and that's what you're talking about, isn't it? The Edge: Yeah, it's a great, little place to somebody in the raw, and he was playing just with acoustic guitar; anyway, just really sad because I think he had an incredible talent, and I was looking forward to his next record, as I'm sure a lot of people were. [Interview pauses as they play Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah] Interviewer: We have U2 here in the studio on 106.7 KROQ, and actually, Bono, you were sort of pointing out something you really admired about Jeff Buckley as a singer, during that last song. Could you share that with our audience, please? Bono: I was just envious; just raw envy. It was just that last coda on that last tune. It's a Leonard Cohen song. Interviewer: Extended note, about 22 seconds. Bono: He lasts, yeah, just 22 seconds of singing without a new breath. It's not important to the outside world, but for me, you know, it's very humbling. Interviewer: Well, the reason I thought it was important is because it was meaningful to you (Bono: "yeah."), and if there's anybody listening to the Jeff Buckley song and appreciative of the comments we made just before that, they can know that Bono was sitting here admiring the very same thing. Bono: Yeah, I was; I was."

"Jeff is one of my favorite musicians and singers of all time. Never have I seen such infinite musical potential in anyone. It's just gone. It's chilling how much it hurts."

"I hope that people who liked him resist the temptation to turn his life and death into some dumb romantic fantasy; he was so much better than that. Not everyone can get up and sing something they take a liking to and make it their own, sing true to their heart, and be curious about all different strains of music. Corpus Christi Carol was a completely conceived interpretation. I'd never heard the piece before, and when I heard the original, I realised what Jeff had done was even more amazing. He'd taken it into his own world. That's something my favorite classical musicians can do, be themselves but use all that expertise to make the music more beautiful. Jeff did that naturally. Only a handful of people are capable of that. I was amazed when he did Meltdown. I asked him what he wanted to sing and he said he'd like to do one of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder in the original German! Absolutely fucking fearless. He was convinced he could sing it without rehearsal, just because he liked it. In the end he did a Purcell song, Dido's Lament, which is in danger of sounding incredibly poignant in retrospect: 'Remember me but forget my fate'. But he also sang Boy With the Thorn In His Side because he liked it, and Grace to show something of himself. When he started singing Dido's Lament at the rehearsal, there were all these classical musicians who could not believe it. Here's a guy, shuffling up on-stage, and singing a piece of music normally thought to be the property of certain types of specifically developed voice, and he's just singing, not doing it like a party piece, but doing something with it. My last memory of him was at the little party in the green room afterwards. There were all these people sitting round Jeff who'd never met before - Fretwork, the viol group, a classical pianist, and some jazz player ― all talking and laughing about music. He'd charmed everybody. I'd much rather remember that than anything."

"Everything I ever projected to be, it was—even the stinky, ratty, vomity part of it. Everybody has to do the subway. Everybody has to smell the same smells. And people get mad all the time. When people don’t like something, like ‘Get out of my way you blah, blah, blah.’ But [in L.A.] it’s like, ‘How ya doing? Let’s do lunch! I love you!’"

"RR: Whenever I've seen you play here in New York at or Fez, people sit there mesmerized. JB: People weren't into it at first. I had to fight to be heard. Then I had to stop fighting. Whole months would go by where people would just be talking. I even got a headache from a performance one time. RR: What changed? JB: I learned how to use everything in the room as the music. A tune has to resonate with whatever is happening around it. So if people are talking, I let them talk. That just means they're part of the music. I even had to learn the noise the dishwasher makes at this little cafe; I had to play in B-flat, or it wouldn't sound right. RR: I want to talk about another Michael. I read a review that compared your recent EP, , with Michael Bolton's new record. JB: Oh, my God! Oh, shit, that's really disgusting! RR: It gets worse. They said he has succeeded in taking from the tradition of African American soul and blues singers in a way that you have miserably failed. JB: Really? But the thing is, I'm not taking from that tradition. I don't want to be black. Michael Bolton desperately wants to be black, black, black. He also sucks."

"AV: You grew up in , what was that like? JB: From womb to tomb, it's thug country. I'm amazed that I had any friends at all. People grow up repressed from the spirit, day by day by day. Cable TV, it's fucked. It's misogyny, it's birth, death, work, it's misery, it's power. It's fuckin' hicks. And that's what I grew up with. I was rootless trailer trash. Now I prefer the to any place on the planet. I can be who I am here. I couldn't do it anyplace I lived as a child. I never fit in , even though my roots are there."

"Why do they always show up there bleeding and dying on the cross? We don't remember lying there with a bullet hole in his head. I'm against the arbitrary organization of as a concept. We should all experience it all individually and purely. I don't agree with the separation of God and the body, I don't believe that we aren't a part of 'it', I don't agree that it's a man. In most religions there's no place for women. There aren't any women in the and I need that. I love women, I came from a woman."