folk-rock-singers

"I think it would be great to have a mall that looked like stores but you weren't selling things. You were just going to hang out or do things. Or if somebody bought a mall and turned it into a house that people could kind of come to and you could build rooms, and it's all orange furniture. Or you could just build environments. Reclaim a mall just in the name of aesthetics or to make something beautiful or something that has no real purpose. Wouldn't that be amazing?"

"One of the reasons I'm a musician is because music isn't divisive. It's a medium where you don't have to abide by divisions. The whole idea is anarchy and the best music just doesn't give a fuck. And too much music is just so conservative these days. So I really don't want to be careful about anything. And there's so much music that's trying to be offensive these days, trying to be aggressive and abrasive. But it's just cheap and manipulative. So if I can offend someone in a good way and challenge their belief system, then I think that's positive. I mean, I wonder what their problem with it is? I don't have a problem. Wanda Coleman doesn't have a problem with me singing like that."

"I recently saw The Last American Virgin, one of those early-'80s coming-of-age movies. And the actors, they look like kids you grew up with! Today's teen movies, I didn't know anybody who looked like that. The standards now are so unbelievably high."

"There are so many elements flying in so many different directions that you really have to go with what feels like instinctively. The nature of the universe is fairly whimsical and nonsensical. In the most somber, beatific peacefulness there's complete chaos and maniacal laughter. I think music that doesn't reflect that is boring."

"I don't need to cry so much. I think whatever you let loose with crying, I let loose with singing. I tend to be the one who wants... I'm trying to say this without sounding too touchy-feely. I'm usually the one who's better at comforting the person who's crying, you know?"

"We had one night where I wanted a bunch of percussion noises at the end of song. We went into this room with three cases of percussion. Everybody just grabbed different shakers and things and was just throwing them around. A few of the guys in the band got a little carried away and I just remember looking up and somebody was running into a wall. Another guy was leaping head first about three of four feet in the air. But other than that it was pretty sedated."

"About a year ago, I started seeing these ads in the paper for 'Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation'. First it was a little ad. The next week, it was twice as big. And after a month, it was a full page-it just took over. Something in that triggered a bunch of associations and projections. Like, what kind of activities do you have to engage in to get to the point where you need to bring a laser into the equation?"

"I remember being really shocked after Mellow Gold came out and going on tour, and all these kids were there. It totally disturbed me. Who are all these young people? I'd been playing Mississippi John Hurt covers in coffee shops to a bunch of thirty-, forty-, fifty-year olds. Then all of a sudden there were these teenagers."

"I think it's interesting being American, the expectations for an American guy, and the image that has to be projected. 'Oh, I can't wear pink,' that kind of stuff. There's none of that in Europe."

"Oh, the tragedy and the anguish. You just gotta Rage Against the Appliance, man. The toast is burning and you just gotta rip it out and free it before it fills the house with smoke. Rage Against the Toaster."

"I have a fear of heights, so falling off something very tall. But I've conquered a good amount of my fears. I guess most people would have the fear of getting up in front of a large audience of people and making a fool of themselves. I've gotten over that."

"I think I gave indications early on that mine wasn't just going to be a commercial, er, career. If that were the case, then the first record would have been 10 versions of 'Loser.' I always thought it would be interesting if there was no such thing as gold and platinum records, or record deals, and people were just making music. What would the music sound like?"

"I never really had them. I always get the eccentric kids who dress funny and sit and write poetry for three months in their bedrooms... ...I was going to see tons of shows when I was a teenager, so if I was a girl, would that have made me a groupie? If I wanted to shake Thurston Moore's hand or something?"

"You'd have to be a total idiot to say, 'I'm the slacker-generation guy. This is my generation.' I'd be laughed out of the room in an instant. I didn't even connect ['Loser'] at all to that kind of message until they were playing it on the radio and I heard it, and they said "This is the slacker anthem," and I thought, 'Oh shit, that sucks.' It's not some anguished transcendental 'cry of a generation.' It's just sitting in someone's living room eating pizza and Doritos."

"I'm not good at the protocols of dating. [laughs] I'm not really experienced in that. My girlfriend is my second or third girlfriend. I think in the past none of us really knew when we were "dating"-we were just hanging out and doing things. I didn't go to high school so I missed the prom."

"My mother was mistrustful of the education system, so it was all right with her if we didn't go to school. She was taking us to Truffaut films, and I was busy getting through a Knut Hamsun book or something, so she felt satisfied we weren't wasting our lives watching The Brady Bunch. Because of where we lived, I would've had to go to Belmont High, so the year I was supposed to start high school I tried to get into the High School for the Performing Arts, which had just opened. I sent them a tape of me playing blues guitar and some short stories I'd written, but they didn't want me."

"I try not to obsess about recording. I'm definitely the one who will leave all the mistakes-to have that balance between what's undone and done. I try to move on to the next thing. I have friends who have been working on the same song for five, six years. They just won't let the songs go."

"We played a gig in the Swiss Alps at a snowboarding convention. Red Bull-this energy sports-fuel drink-sponsored the whole thing. It has some ingredient believed to be bull-testicle extract. We went way off our tour route, had to take two planes and missed a night's sleep. We got up there and there's no snow-it's all mud. You couldn't walk. You'd step and then be up to your knee in mud. So you had several thousand disgruntled snowboarders tanked up to the max on bull-testicle extract. Of course, for some reason, these strapping brutes were made to wait out in the mid and the rain before coming into the tent for the show. When we get up to play, I see this forty-foot gap between us and the audience-they still managed to nail us with empty cans of Red Bull. After a few songs, I wasn't really playing my guitar, I was using it to bay cans back into the crowd of disgruntled sports enthusiasts. It felt like we were A Flock of Seagulls opening for Napalm Death."

"There were definitely lyrics and they were very meaningful. I think."

"Our whole culture in this country now is so conformist. I don't even meet that many freaks any more."

"But people like to say, Oh, it's in the blood. But art comes from nowhere. It comes from a vague, scary place. It's scary because you don't know when it's coming or if it will ever come again. It's this Other."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."