Jeff Buckley on Music

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

"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."

"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."

"The album that I've been listening to for the last 18 months is Grace by Jeff Buckley. He is a great, great singer. He has such an emotional range, doing songs by Benjamin Britten and Leonard Cohen, as well as his own; such technique and command. When the Page/Plant tour hit Australia, we saw them and we were knocked out. It was very moving. Someone heckled him from the audience, "stop playing that heavy stuff!," but he made the perfect reply: "Music should be like making love ― sometimes you want it soft and tender, other times you want it hard and aggressive." I felt he paid us a great compliment with his music in that style."

"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."

"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."

"He could have literally been doing anything, musically, that he wanted to do. And I would think of it like I would think of it like Jimi Hendrix, where there's no real way to predict it, because he could have done anything. He had a way of playing the most beautiful songs you've ever heard and singing them, and still with the way that he sang, create a bit of an uncomfortable edge to it if he felt like it. And he did that mostly with his voice."

"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."

"Both songs are beautiful . It's my tribute to Jeff. The record he has left is very emotional, very beautiful. An intriguing work, challenging. Using only his voice, he reaches regions of unimaginable feeling. But, while recording the songs he chose for himself, I am not stealing it because they are two very different visions. I think he would approve. I have the impression that Jeff Buckley, although he had a very brief passage through life, has become something like Jimi Hendrix, whose presence remains forever."

"On this day in 1996, I saw Jeff Buckley perform in Melbourne.⁣ Jeff Buckley was something of an ethereal spirit: a musical magician whose album 'Grace' showcased a unique talent. His name was on the lips of all musos from the release of that album and for the next two years.⁣ I had heard him sing a couple of songs at a distance on the Other Stage at Glastonbury, where Page and Plant were headlining: you could feel him, it was extraordinary. I had listened intently to 'Grace' whilst I was on tour and made a point to see him at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne on this day in 1996. ⁣"

"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."

"Yeah, I was really affected by Jeff Buckley when I heard him perform; and I heard one of his last concerts in Australia ― penultimate concert ― and it was just absolutely staggering. He was absolutely, I mean, you know, he just touched every emotion in you, you know. He was really superb, and in a total class of his own, as you know, as you've heard so many singers, and you go, 'well, they got that from Jeff Buckley.' He was so, you know, he's iconic, and really just in a total class of his own, as I say, and, so I was really deeply affected by his music, and I thought he was a master. It was tragic to hear that he died, but there was a weird irony when somebody said, that I've heard that, that he was singing Whole Lotta Love. If you say it was his road manager, because I didn't know whether it was true, or there was a...yeah, he had actually sort of said, that was in Australia, that it would be really good if we had done something together. Can you imagine how I would have loved to have done that with him, but, you know, he started doing a second album, and then he called a halt, and then he started up again...yeah, yeah, it's a tragic loss. My God, was he good."