#the 1975 piano cover

[sleepanonymous]

Information below the cut and nightmare scenario in the tags.

Interesting facts: This cover was the last video he posted to YouTube under this channel before ST formed. This was also almost a year exactly before the ST YouTube channel was created.

[bobdylan-n-jonimitchell]

Mimi Fariña covering Elton John’s “Daniel” Evanston, IL, April 6, 1975.

[evignonita]

Random headcanons: Curious-Hogleg siblings ver. 💥💥

Names:

-Jenny's full name is Jenny Mary (Smith) Curious Hogleg, common ass name for a queen, she didn't want to burn her neurons by choosing her name.

-Pascal's full name is Pascal Galileo Curious Hogleg, he chose his name himself because 🏳️‍⚧️ and I feel that Pascal loves the names of famous astronomers and scientists in general, that's why Tycho is called Tycho, for Tycho Brahe.

-Vidcund's full name is Vidcund Charles Curious Hogleg because of Charles Darwin... Glarn named him.

-Lazlo's full name is Lazlo Johannes Curious Hogleg because I don't remember why, I think I read it somewhere and I liked it. Kitty named him.

Height (cm):

Jenny is 176 cm tall; Pascal is 163 cm tall; Vidcund is 178 cm tall; Lazlo is 175 cm tall. The shorty siblings

Age (2004) and birthdays:

-Jenny is 43 years old, she was born on May 16, 1961, Twinbrook, Simnation. (*)

-Pascal is 30 years old, he was born on October 30, 1974, Strangetown, Simnation.

-Vidcund is 29 years old, he was born on November 3, 1975, Strangetown, Simnation.

-Lazlo is 23 years old, he was born on December 11, 1981, Strangetown, Simnation.

(*) I'm not entirely sure about Jenny's age.

Sexual orientation and identity:

-Jenny is a pansexual panromantic trans woman.

-Pascal is an asexual biromantic trans man.

-Vidcund is a demisexual biromantic cis man.

-Lazlo is a bisexual biromantic cis man.

Personality (MBTI and enneagram):

-Jenny: ESFJ 2w3

-Pascal: INTP 5w4

-Vidcund: ISTJ 8w7

-Lazlo: ENFP 4w3

Random data:

-Jenny loves listening to the Backstreet Boys, when she lived with her brothers she always listened to them; Pascal, Vidcund and Lazlo pretended to hate the musical group, but occasionally hummed their songs.

-Jenny distanced herself from her siblings and family in general because Glarn did not accept her relationship with Pol Smith, she never understood why (and that's why the Curious brothers and her don't have such a high relationship).

-Jenny taught Vidcund about botany.

-Pascal knows how to play piano (basic), write and draw, when he doesn't do anything, he feels stressed. He is a bit pretentious, but because he was only flattered as a child for his achievements, as he grew up he learned to be calmer and control his ego.

-Pascal was Glarn's golden child.

-Pascal wanted to study psychology, but he knew that he was going to excel more in physics.

-Pascal wears retainers for his teeth at night.

-Vidcund wore braces throughout his childhood and teen ages, he used orthodontics until adulthood, and he had to use them again because he never used his retainers and his teeth returned to how they were before.

-Vidcund bleaches his hair, eyebrows and beard, his natural hair color is black.

-Vidcund went unnoticed by his parents (the curse of the middle child).

-Lazlo loves monkeys because he and Kitty watched Animal Planet together, also because Kitty was a biologist and brought pictures with images of chimpanzees and monkeys just for Lazlo.

-Lazlo has a good relationship with Sinjin because Sinjin took care of him as a child when Glarn and Kitty asked him to (Sinjin and Jenny are the same age).

-Jenny, Pascal and Vidcund can speak Tagalog, Lazlo never learned the language and sometimes his siblings use it to their advantage.

Songs that give me vibes to them:

-Jenny: Cementerio Club - Pescado Rabioso (because of the green color of the album cover); Estación - Sui Generis; Lovesong - The Cure.

-Pascal: Lago en el Cielo - Gustavo Cerati; Mil Horas - Los abuelos de la Nada; Starman - David Bowie.

-Vidcund: Devuélveme a mi chica - Hombres G; A estos hombres tristes - Almendra; Smells like teen spirit - Nirvana; Heart of Glass - Blondie.

-Lazlo: Salir de la Melancolía - Serú Girán; Lobo hombre en París - La Unión; Blue - Eiffel 65.

I would like to add more things but😏🛌💤

[biblioklept]

Moebius's cover illustration for Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano

Cover illustration for the French translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano, 1975 by Moebius (Jean Giraud, 1938–2012)

[freddiemercurylegendabovelegends]

Today - June 18th, 1976 - Queen Story!

'You're My Best Friend' bw ''39' released in the UK

- 'You're My Best Friend'

Written by John Deacon, this song was dedicated to his wife, Veronica Tetzlaff, a former trainee teacher from Sheffield.

The second single from the 'A Night At The Opera' album released in 1975

🔸"Well, Freddie didn’t like the electric piano, so I took it home and I started to learn on the electric piano and basically that's the song that came out, you know, when I was learning to play piano. It was written on that instrument and it sounds best on that, you know, often on the instrument that you wrote the song on."

- John Deacon

Interview 24/12/1977, BBC Radio One

- '39'

Written by Brian May

Taken from album 'A Night At The Opera' released in 1975

🔸"It's something that we have... people can't believe it, they can't believe it's us. It's something Brian May wanted to do and it's very, very unlike Queen really. I think it's going to the B-side for You're My Best Friend. It's something Brian wanted to do and that's nice."

- Freddie Mercury

Interview 21/05/1976, Record Mirror

📸 Pic: Cover album - Yugoslavian Sleeves

[hooked-on-elvis]

"Mr. Songman" (1973-1975)

Recorded on December 12, 1973 at Stax Studios, Memphis · Released on January, 1975 · Album: Promised Land.

MUSICIANS Guitar: James Burton, Johnny Christopher, Charlie Hodge. Bass: Norbert Putnam. Drums: Ronnie Tutt. Piano & Organ: David Briggs, Per-Erik Hallin. Vocals: Kathy Westmoreland, Mary (Jeannie) Greene, Mary Holladay, Susan Pilkington, Voice, J.D. Sumner & The Stamps. OVERDUBS Guitar: Dennis Linde, Alan Rush. Percussion: Rob Galbraith. Piano: Bobby Ogdin. Organ: Randy Cullers. Vocals: Ginger Holladay, Mary Holladay, Mary Cain.

Elvis and Donnie Sumner. C. 1972.

RECORDING SESSION Studio Sessions for RCA December 10–16, 1973: Stax Studios, Memphis The group Voice was becoming a permanent fixture on the Elvis scene. Their deal with the singer included a publishing arrangement, and accordingly they brought songs — their own and those of their friends — to the session. Lamar Fike, watching his territory being encroached upon by the newcomers, was irked. “Who wrote this piece of shit?” Lamar gasped while Elvis was recording a Donnie Sumner tune, “Mr. Songman,” as unadventurous in its way as anything from Freddy Bienstock’s stable of English writers. But Elvis stuck with his new friends (and to the Colonel’s design to increase publishing income), even going to the length of releasing “Mr. Songman” as the B-side of a single. Excerpt: "Elvis Presley, A Life in Music: The Complete Recording Sessions" by Ernst Jorgensen. Foreword by Peter Guralnick (1998)

In late 1973, Donnie Sumner, pictured here second from the right left, along with tenor Sherill Neilson, pictured at the lower left, and Tim Baty, pictured behind Donnie Sumner, formed a new group called Voice.

"MR. SONGMAN" — RELEASES The song was released for the first time on the album Promised Land, on Elvis' birthday, January 8, 1975. In April the song was released as B-side single ("T-R-O-U-B-L-E" is the A-side track).

Elvis Presley: Promised Land (1975); Singles "T-R-O-U-B-L-E"/"Mr. Songman"

"Mr. Songman" — LYRICS Songwriter: Donnie Sumner Here's another dime for you, Mr. Songman Sing the loneliness of broken dreams away if you can Yes, it's only me and you, Mr. Songman Take away the night, sing away my hurt, Mr. Songman In your ivory covered house safe behind your walls of glass You keep staring back at me like a memory from the past Won't you sing me away to a summer night, let me hold you in my arms again I know memory's not re-living but at least it's not the end Here's another dime for you, Mr. Songman Sing the loneliness of broken dreams away if you can Yes, it's only me and you, Mr. Songman Take away the night, sing away my hurt, Mr. Songman Won't you sing me away to a summer night, let me hold her in my arms again Take away the night, sing away my hurt, Mr. Songman

Elvis arriving at the Stax Studio in Memphis, TN, for a recording session. 1973.

TAKES — "Mr. Songman" Elvis occasionally sang it on tour during 1975 and 1976, but I couldn't find any recordings unfortunately. However, here's TAKE 1 which was sung in a different way than the master, and I LOVE IT! I hope you enjoy too.

[thegreatestfilmnevermade]

The 1975 Concept Album (Detailed)

'A Sight For Sore Eyes' by The 1975

I did the 1975's job and came up with some (lots) of ideas for their sixth studio album. Coming (never) to stores December 2024!

Covers + Tracklist + Details about each song, story, genres, etc BELOW

Tracklist

The 1975

Bite The Bullet

Spilt Milk

Clíodna

Make Me Immortal

Stand Out (In A Crowd)

Please See My Lover

Crocodile Tears (Interlude)

Stop Making Sense!

FYI!

Best For Me

My Final Bow

Pistol (In My Hand)

Covers

Would be shot somewhere in London or Manchester. Think (What's The Story?) by Oasis. I sketched other versions but couldn't make it look pretty for Tumblr :(

Ideally, it would be a guy in a black coat walking through a park, this kinda shot like the image below on the left. And the back of it would have the band in a park in the middle of the night, sitting on a bench with a street lamp right next to them. Healy would be leaning against the lamp, the rest of the band would sit on the bench, with one of them lying down in their laps. They face away from the camera. The shot would like the image below on the right.

Story

This, in my deranged, delusional head, is a concept album that follows a single narrative from the perspective of a single person. 

It follows a rockstar who can't remember the day before, permanently in a state of amnesia, but felt entirely compelled to create, perform, and fall in and out of the obsession. He falls in love, obsesses over a muse, yearns to be remembered, to be immortalised. Over the course of the story, he explores his relationship to art, sex, politics, drugs, the ephemerality of life and music, and optimistic nihilism. 

The story is linear - with him finding meaning in the lack of meaning.

Track by track & inspiration

Playlist for direct reference:

Every song has specific inspirations! Most tracks have a specific inspiration from one of their (The 1975's) songs, and another one. Most are inspired by the sound not the lyrical content. Another note: Ideally, they would all transition perfectly into the next, but be able to stand well on their own as well.

The 1975

Song inspiration: The 1975 (Being Funny In A Foreign Language) by the 1975 + Thirteen by Big Star

Guitar driven, slow start. 1/2 bass/drums come in & choir. Build up, and transition perfectly into track two.

Set the scene, as usual. Re-Introduce, welcome back! We're in for a ride! Essentially a prologue.

2. Bite The Bullet (Note: This would be the single!)

Song inspiration: You First by Paramore + Sex by The 1975

Fresh, nostalgic rock sound.

Story starts...The protagonist is in a bad state. He doesn't want to perform, but thousands are waiting. He's resentful to everybody. He owes it only to himself to prove that he can do it.

NOTE: This would have a music video, in my head I picture Harris Dickinson, with like 5 minutes straight of dialogue directed by Noah Bombauch. Looks very A24. Each band member would make a cameo.

3. Spilt Milk (Yes, this is a reference to Milk)

Song inspiration: Antichrist by The 1975 + Scott Street by Phoebe Bridgers

Strings, drama, cinematic quality.

He can't remember who he is, he doesn't recognise anybody he loves. He awakens with no memory, and then meets her. He must create.

4. Clíodna (Reference to Celtic goddess of the sea, the Otherworld, passion and love, and deep beauty)

Song inspiration: Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied by The 1975 + Jackie and Wilson by Hozier

Gospel, bluesy, rock-funk, choir, piano.

He's confused by everything - except for her. He clings to her, he is desperate for a muse. Someone to idealise. He hates himself for it, his self-awareness getting the better of him, but not enough to stop himself from putting her on a pedestal.

5. Make Me Immortal (I don't know why this title, don't question it)

Song inspiration: All I Need To Hear by The 1975 + I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free by Nina Simone

Soul piano ballad, jazz, gospel, blues.

He must compose, he must write. He must be an artist. He starts expressing his deep seated need to be remembered, despite his own lack of memory. He wants to be heard in an endless crowd and be understood. He faces his mortality, his mighty imagination, and even considers religion. Things get really political and confusing.

6. Stand Out (In A Crowd) (Every song title from here on onward is totally random)

Song inspiration: Playing On My Mind by The 1975 + Virgin Veins by Coma Cinema + Landslide by Fleetwood Mac

Stripped back, calm, vulnerable, acoustic.

Away from the crowd, he returns to his muse. His muse doesn't recognise him anymore, but he hasn't changed - she has. He is stuck permanently, forgetting himself, the world, not quite growing up. Who is he without her? Who is he?

7. Please See My Lover

Song inspiration: Please Send Me Someone To Love by Fiona Apple + Buddy's Rendevouz by Father John Misty and Lana Del Rey

Jazz ballad, blues, strings.

She's gone. He turns to alcohol and dreams of memories that never happened. if he can't have her, he'll have materials, substance, and he will be remembered. Commentary on people's dependency on materials and lack of connections.

8. Crocodile Tears (Interlude)

Song inspiration: When I'm On My Own You Are On My Mind by Labi Siffre + Interlude: I'm Not Angry Anymore by Paramore + That Funny Feeling (Cover) by Phoebe Bridgers

Acoustic interlude, fast-paced guitar driven, end with quiet strings and real external audio (of family, friends, news, etc)

Observations of the world, questioning his place as an artist in the grand scheme of things. Does this even matter? He's trying to move on from her. He sees the hope in people, humanity, but where is it in him? Is art selfish? He doesn't know. He knows we don't know either.

9. Stop Making Sense! (In reference to The Talking Heads)

Song inspiration: Can't Behave by Courtney Jaye + Murder On The Dance Floor (triple j Cover) by Royel Otis + Spiderwebs by No Doubt + Fisrt Date by blink-182 + Me & You Together Song by The 1975

90s-2000s pop-rock, country inspired blues rock

Alright, so there's hope. But right now, he's pissed and wants to dance. No more muse, falling out with his family, friends and he hates every song he writes - the star has turned to further substance abuse to cope. It's cool, though. Doesn't this guitar riff sound sick?

10. FYI!

Song inspiration: Get It Right The First Time by Billy Joel + The Louvre by Lorde + UGH! by The 1975

Funk, synth-pop (hints of disco/electro), new wave (rock)

Drugs and alcohol are epic! Who cares he can't perform for a crowd (or in bed??) anymore! Bigger things to worry about. He feels insanely unloveable in a world of mass communication. Anyway, life sucks, but at least materials are cool. Capitalism doesn't suck all the time. The government has failed us and we've become desensitised, ignorant pricks. Next club?

11. Best For Me

Song inspirations: Real Love Baby by Father John Misty + Sincerity Is Scary by The 1975 + Tired of Being Alone by Al Green

R&B, neo-soul, gospel choir, jazz ballad.

He's wondering how she's doing. He can't remember how it all went down. He just remembers the feeling. He's starting to think adulthood is getting worse - drugs and aging are making it harder to make new friends. Was it always this hard making friends? He starts to reminisce of home, childhood friends. Do they remember him? Do they think of him when they see his name? Does he remember them?

12. My Final Bow (I hate this title so much)

Song inspiration: Movin' On Up by Primal Scream + About You by The 1975 + ARE WE SITLL FRIENDS? by Tyler, The Creator

Britpop, shoegaze, cinematic, pop-rock ballad.

On stage, vulnerable. This might be the only place he feels truly loved. No matter how much he forgets, he will never forget the feeling, the pure thrill, of performance. He pleads to the crowd to love him forever. Immortalise him. He reveals he has been hiding a new muse (he doesn't remember her), he won't make the same mistake (he doesn't know what it was).

13. Pistol (In My Hand) 

Song inspiration: Lostmyhead by The 1975 + I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes) by The 1975 + Babe I'm Gonna Leave You - Led Zeppelin

Britpop power ballad, cinematic, hard-rock, slow buiild.

He's back where he started - not wanting to perform. He's crashing from the intense substance abuse. He wants to remember. He can't remember how it feels to be hugged anymore. This time he doesn't bite the bullet, and doesn't go out. He wants to call his dad.

Ends on a voicemail to his dad because he isn’t remembered.

END OF ALBUM.

Anyway, this was all for funsies. I'm excited for whatever album they'll release next, I am really pulling and praying for a bluesy/rock album. Get religious and political, have some epic references to mythology even, you know? Whatever they do, whether it's another 80s synth party, or electro ambience, or heavy metal, I'm sure they'll smash it out of the park.

I have put way too much time into this so: Logging out!

[leofaulknerarchive]

Sex - The 1975 (Piano Cover) - Leo Faulkner Upload Date: April 16, 2015

Description: "A good friend of mine let me use his incredible grand piano to record this cover of one of my favourite songs. Enjoy!"

Download (Audio) • Download (Video)

[woundthatswallows]

film recs?

i have a lot lol! i could break things up into catergories but since this is a general ask i'm just gonna cover mostly everything! i listed a lot of movies so i'd be happy to organize them a bit more into categories if anyone wants that, i just did it off the top of my head + w a little help from lists i've made on letterboxd. :)

here r some of my all-time faves that i’d rec: possession (1981) dead ringers (1988) harold and maude (1971) l’une chante, l’autre pas (1977) the piano teacher (2001) la morte vivante (1982) ginger snaps (2000) pink flamingos (1972) the rocky horror picture show (1975) twin peaks fire walk with me (1992) crash (1996) repulsion (1965) let’s scare jessica to death (1971) nekromantik (1988) + nekromantik 2 (1991) (second one is my fave but u have to watch the first first etc) girlfriends (1978) carnival of souls (1962) blue velvet (1986) martyrs (2008) a zed & two noughts (1985) multiple maniacs (1970) wild at heart (1990) 3 women (1975) dans ma peau (2002) dazed and confused (1993) kissed (1996) videodrome (1983) female trouble (1974) malina (1991) wings of desire (1987) persona (1966) the cremator (1969) the before trilogy teorema (1968) scenes from a marriage (1974) sunset boulevard (1950) les demoiselles de rocherfort (1967) the living end (1992)

and then some movies that i love/like and think people should watch: cecil b. demented (2000) ringu (1998) excision (2012) hausu (1977) the belly of an architect (1987) moonstruck (1987) les deux orphelines vampires (1997) valley girl (1983) angela (1995) may (2002) nashville (1975) phantom thread (2017) daisies (1966) candy (2006) society (1989) nowhere (1997) velvet goldmine (1998) caché (2005) the mafu cage (1978) funny games (1997) les raisins de la mort (1978) mysterious skin (2004) true romance (1993) y tu mamá también (2001) vampyres (1974) under the skin (2013) alice sweet alice (1976) audition (1999) vagabond (1985) high life (2019) spring night summer night (1967) secret ceremony (1968) candyman (1992) belle de jour (1967) hatching (2022) brain damage (1988) happy together (1997) in the mood for love (2000) cat people (1942) cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) je tu il elle (1974) thirteen (2003) masculin féminin (1966) vivre sa vie (1962) lost highway (1997) le bonheur (1965) une femme est une femme (1961) les parapluies de cherbourg (1964) babette’s feast (1987) arsenic and old lace (1944) the daytrippers (1996) a history of violence (2005) polyester (1981) ganja & hess (1973) impetigore (2019) volver (2006) pea d’âne (1970) the addiction (1995) train to busan (2016) chungking express (1994) smooth talk (1985) death in venice (1971) the incredibly true adventures of two girls in love (1995) my beautiful launderette (1985) wild (2016) lake mungo (2008) possum (2018) jeanne dielman, 23, quai de commerce, 1080 bruxelles (1975) les cent en une nuits de simon cinéma (1995) lola (1961) the passion of joan of arc (1928) le cérémonie (1995) stoker (2014) contempt (1963) eastern promises (2007) les yeux sans visage (1960) shivers (1975) american mary (2012) serial mom (1994) pierrot le fou (1965)

[sweetdreamsjeff]

RAIDER OF THE LOST ARTS

Jeff Buckley Revisited

by Simeon FlickMarch 2023

Remember me, but oh, forget my fate. ––Henry Purcell, “Dido’s Lament”

Jeff Buckley

When Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River tributary of the Mississippi on May 29, 1997, just as his band was arriving at the Memphis airport to start helping him finally nail down the long-awaited and already agonized-over second album, music lost not only one of its most singular and revolutionary of raw talents, but also the most mythologized—even during his lifetime—since Kurt Cobain’s death just three years prior. Buckley bore the boon and bane of being the scion of an also semi-famous and ill-fated folk/jazz/soul singer named Tim, and spent his entire life and career—following a single week-long reunion just before Tim’s 1975 death from an accidental heroin overdose—futilely trying to distance himself from the wayward father he never knew apart from the music of nine mostly half-baked studio albums. That an ever-growing number of people, the majority having discovered Jeff’s music post-mortem, feel they know the son better than he or anyone else knew his father, and still feel his loss as acutely as one would a dear family member, is a testament to the unparalleled emotional conveyance and lasting legacy of Jeff’s music despite having released only one official studio album during his lifetime (1994’s hauntingly gorgeous, seamlessly diverse Grace, which has found a home on innumerable “Greatest” lists and has been declared a personal favorite by many of his idols). Jeff Buckley’s influence lives on in the burgeoning underground cult of posthumous acolytes, and in the hyper-emotive, falsetto- and vibrato-laden, multi-octave vocal histrionics of so many subsequent singers, which only seem to come off as pale and obvious allusions that smack more of imitation than assimilation, much less embodiment, and we may never see his like again.

**************

Jeff Buckley entered the world during a meteor shower on the evening of November 17, 1966, the son of an already absent father and a mother, Mary Guibert, who at 18 wasn’t much more than a child herself. Like Cobain, who would arrive only three months later, Jeff had a typical Gen X childhood, replete with divorce, paternal estrangement and maternal domination, often violently reinforced alienation from his formative peers and unstable itinerancy (Mary dragged him through virtually every backwater town in California for all too short stints before he finally put his foot down in Anaheim, where both parents had grown up, and where extended family awaited). The sole refuge, besides the brief but stabilizing presence of the occasional father figure like stepdad Ron Moorhead, was the music men like him turned Jeff onto: Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and countless others who would seemingly become part of his DNA. Music became his north star, his raison d’être, and when things went wrong, which was all too often (Jeff had to be a rock for flighty mother Mary, taking on too many of her responsibilities too young), he would escape into it for hours.

This would compound once he took up the guitar. Like many children of musicians do, in order to carve out a distinct musical identity (and to maintain a healthy generation gap), Jeff—or Scotty, as he was known by his middle name then––gravitated towards Gen-X’s chosen instrument: the electric guitar, to the exclusion of his mother’s classical piano and his father’s acoustic guitar and vocalizations. Aside from the occasional lead vocal in a high school cover band, mostly for the high-ranged prog-rock and new wave classics none of his other bandmates could pull off, he considered himself just a guitar player in the ’80s. But not just any player; with Al DiMeola as one of many paragons, Jeff threw himself headlong into the world of virtuosic technique, teaching himself complicated licks by ear as he worked diligently to master not just the instrument but music itself.

This trajectory was maintained after his 1984 high school graduation with a stint at the derided Los Angeles organization, MIT (Musician’s Institute of Technology), with its many specialized subsidiaries, including GIT (Guitar Institute of Technology), where Jeff continued his musical edification. After obtaining his virtually useless professional certificate from GIT but with his gun-slinging reputation solidified a year later, he gigged in various area bands and worked as a studio rat, arranging and recording demos for other aspiring artists. But the lead vocalist in him remained as of yet dormant.

Jeff’s father, Tim Buckley.

By the late ’80s it was already soul-crushingly evident that Los Angeles was a dead-end cesspool of intolerable immersion in other people’s music, and that a drastic change was required to sweep away the bad influences and external white noise to finally get him in touch with his own muse. New York City beckoned—just as it had to Tim in the ’60s—as a locus were people could become the epitome of themselves, get as weird as they wanted, and be unconditionally accepted or ignored as merely part of the scenery, and reach their full, rewarded potential in whatever their chosen field. Jeff tested the waters for a few months in 1990, but his money and options ran out, and he reluctantly returned to Los Angeles.

It wasn’t until April 26, 1991, when he performed as part of the Hal Willner-curated Greetings from Tim Buckley tribute show at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Church that he was able to lay the groundwork for a permanent relocation, having garnered the interest of several music industry types offering tangible professional succor, not to mention his first real girlfriend. That night marked the beginning of Jeff’s mythology-building not only as an artist in his own right, but also as an inextricable extension of his father’s legacy; many of the concert’s attendees were blown away not just by Jeff’s supposedly similar voice and delivery, but also by his physical resemblance (apparently there were some eerie backlit cheekbone shadows cast against the church hall walls that heightened the drama).

That there was so much defensiveness and/or mandated avoidance in so many subsequent interviews seems very bite-the-hand-that-feeds, but everyone has to break free from their parents at some point; that it often requires the assistance of those selfsame parents is a frustratingly ironic aspect of adulthood most of us have to face and embrace. Jeff simply had the misfortune of doing it in a highly scrutinized industry with zero—or even negative—expectations or tolerance of rock star progeny. He was also not only abandoned by his father, to whose funeral he was not even invited, but also projected on by Tim-obsessed fans and former love interests expecting the son to deliver on the father’s failed promise(s).

Jeff set up shop, and with the assistance of a demo tape of original songs he had recorded while still languishing in Los Angeles (courtesy of father Tim’s old manager, Herb Cohen), and a threadbare press kit (the only news clipping being a photocopied review of the Tim memorial show), he began beating the Manhattan pavement to drum up gigs and busk on the streets.

As of yet, short on original material, he leaned on sophisticated covers that resonated with his emphatically empathic and emotive spirit as he wall-pasta’d in search of a unique artistic identity. Songs by more recently assimilated influences like Nina Simone, Edith Piaf, and Leonard Cohen stood side by side with pitch-perfect deep-cut gems by Van Morrison and the beloved Zeppelin, with all-inclusive guitar arrangements that cast his different-every-time performances in full-blown Technicolor. His self-accompaniment on electric guitar as opposed to the acoustic form usually favored by the often excessively earnest—if not outright cheesy—solo folk artists of the past (including early-phase Tim), differentiated him from obsolete traditions, and it also broadcast the implicit message that this lone performer would eventually have a band behind him.

But the comprehensive guitar skill was just a tripod for the potent weapon his voice was becoming.

It’s difficult for most laypeople to differentiate between learned technique and natural timbre. Jeff didn’t inherit his father’s vocal gift; his was high-ranged and effeminate instead, with a thick palate and some huskiness occasionally muddying up his tone production. But what he did with it despite or because of the confines of those “limitations” is absolutely astounding. Instead of self-consciously diluting his delivery, he threw the book at it, almost as a diversionary tactic, like a magician smoke-and-mirror distracting his audience from an otherwise debunkable prestige move. With his uncanny imitative abilities and concomitant penchant for self-pedagogy, he adopted a rapid vibrato in accordance with essential influences (Simone, Piaf, Garland, and even father Tim, as was his undeniable birthright), nicked tricky classical and R&B trills and phrasing, turned his angelic upper register into a strength by frequently, often breathily leaning into his falsetto, incorporated various operatic (chromatic glissandos) and jazz (scatting) effects, learned how to push a full chest voice into his higher register like Robert Plant (and Tim) and to raggedly scream like Cobain and others of his generation. He ran sustain drills as he traveled across the city in cabs or on foot, drawing out his notes as long as possible to hone his deftly rationed breath support (just try holding out along with the 25-second E4 at the end of Grace’s “Hallelujah”). Tim had set the bar high for the younger Buckley, and Jeff rose mightily to the challenge, developing a comprehensive technique that kept pace with his guitar mastery, which had been pared down to unassailable jazz progressions and Hendrixian blues tropes and, like Cobain, would feature downplayed––if any––solos for the duration. If Jeff’s musical continuo was a haunted house, his voice had become the ghost that lingered within it.

(There’s something more compelling about the resulting output of singer/songwriters who start out exclusively as instrumentalists; it makes for more effective and meaningful musical accompaniment and better structured songs, and they tend to work more diligently and eruditely at mastering vocal technique. Tim leaned almost exclusively on his phenomenal voice, and insufficient thought was given to structure and harmony in his songs, and the lyrics were by turns predominantly unremarkable or unwieldy, the main drawback of being able to sing the phonebook. The resulting chord changes and accompaniment were more limited, derivative, yet ironically more obtrusive. Jeff had harnessed hooks, vivid and compelling lyrical imagery, and upper harmony into underlying works that left room for everything important, but especially the vocals. Thus, Jeff managed to achieve with one album what Tim failed to do in nine; he produced a timeless classic.)

Jeff’s most crucial influence––his self-declared Elvis––was the Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Qawwali singing introduced Jeff not only to its mystical eastern harmony, which was a subtle but unmistakable undercurrent in his guitar parts and his music in general, but also to a highly freeing ilk of vocal improvisation he would use to sparing but profound effect in his live performances, most notably in his wordless vocal warm-ups for things like “Mojo Pin” and “Dream Brother,” and in the way he would subtly tweak the songs’ melodies from show to show.

With all of this gelling within and beginning to burst out of him, Jeff flogged his wares at many a Manhattan venue, but he would find his symbiotic Shangri La at Sin-é, a hole-in-the-wall café run by a fellow man of Irish descent, ex-pat Shane Doyle. Jeff crystalized into the self-accompanying male diva he had been striving to become there at Sin-é and found a home away from home not only on the small stage, where he reveled in an unparalleled, as-of-yet anonymous freedom within the material, but also behind the counter, where he could often be found washing dishes.

This is where Jeff’s buzz began to build, thanks to his Monday night residency, the impression he had made on the industry folk at Tim’s memorial concert (including several Columbia employees who started showing up on the regular), and the steadily growing crowds comprised predominantly of young women. As word of mouth spread and audiences began to overflow onto the sidewalk, the higher-ups at several major labels started circling to investigate the fresh blood in the water. A hilarious bidding war ensued, with record company execs actually trying to make table reservations at the tiny walk-in café, and the street’s curbs clogging with limousines. Jeff would end up signing with Columbia, a Sony subsidiary that was home to many of his heroes, and that made all the right overtures and promises to this hot young talent who was desperately intent on accomplishing the impossible feat of using and defeating the music industry from the inside, as opposed to being consumed by it like his father had been.

**************

Jeff’s “million dollar” deal––consisting of a $100,000 advance, a higher than normal royalty rate, and a three-album guarantee––was unusual for a solo artist of that time, considering there were scant few original songs, no band, and no official demo tape to speak of (the L.A. recordings, which Jeff in his humorously nihilistic cups had dubbed The Babylon Dungeon Sessions, technically fulfilled the applicable criteria but weren’t aurally suitable). Columbia knew they had a hot property on their hands, the Gen-X manifestation of a Dylan or Springsteen-esque heritage artist, and Jeff made sure they knew, mostly through intentional late arrivals to countless business meetings. But because his talents spanned so deep and wide, everyone was initially at a loss as to what form his recorded output should take. What the hell do you do with an artist that has the chops and versatility to go in any direction??

The logical first step was to try and capture the solo version of Jeff on tape and issue it as a soft introduction. Live At Sin-é was culled from two performances recorded during the summer of 1993 and released on November 23 as a perfunctory, slightly disappointing four-song EP consisting of two originals (“Mojo Pin,” and “Eternal Life,” both of which would get definitive, full-band versions on Grace), and two covers (a rhapsodically incendiary rendition of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do” and a transcendent reading of Edith Piaf’s “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin,” complete with a fingerpicked merry-go-round guitar waltz for the French-sung refrain).

In Columbia’s posthumous ambition to exploit remaining vault caches to continue paying down Jeff’s sizable debt to the label, the original release’s felonious dearth was rectified with 2003’s Legacy Edition, a two-disc, one DVD set that was a much more complete representation of Jeff not just as an artist during that pre-fame period, but as a person. Along with scads more songs from the same shows, the expanded set includes between-song banter that manages to do what his scant, more visceral studio work couldn’t: put his pronouncedly nerdy, madcap, sometimes salacious sense of humor on full display.

Meanwhile, Jeff had also begun working toward his only completed studio LP. Sony had brought him in to record the lion’s share of his repertoire in February of ’93 as a way to gently kick off the A&R cataloguing and selection process for the album (these were later released as part of the 2016 compilation You And I), and recording sessions were scheduled for September at Bearsville Studios, which was located near Woodstock in upstate New York. The only problem––and it was a big one––was that he didn’t have a band. Like so many other aspects of Jeff’s career, this got rectified at the last possible moment; he met and connected with bassist Mick Grondahl first, then drummer Matt Johnson less than a month out from the initial recording dates.

A tall, dark, and handsome Dane, Grondahl had an ideal combination of low-key receptiveness and musical adventurousness that allowed him to be the perfect on- and offstage wingman: he was interesting in an unobtrusive way. Johnson was a wet-eared Texan who had the ideal balance of power and precision (a slight and diminutive presence, Johnson’s physicality was bolstered by his construction day job) and the breadth of taste and experience to match the extreme dynamic variations of Jeff’s sonic palette (Johnson could crush it like Bonzo or play pindrop-soft like a seasoned jazz pro––whatever the music required).

Columbia was less than pleased that Jeff had recruited a rhythm section with virtually no stage or studio experience, but he would eventually be proven right in his selection of introverted, lump-of-clay rookies that doubled as a gang of friends who could hang with him in every sense, especially through all the spontaneous twists and turns he threw at them. This was one of many battles he would actually win for the better against Sony, though he would initially come off as the loser (it took a few months for the band to get up to speed on the Grace repertoire, because they rarely if ever played the album’s songs during rehearsals or soundchecks, preferring to fill that time with “jamming,” since they needed to build an intuitive rapport. They also knew they would be playing the same emotionally demanding songs night after night for the next year or two).

The trio began work on Grace at Bearsville Studios, which had been pre-rigged with several different recording environments to spontaneously capture whatever came out of Jeff and his band in any permutation and style, whether it was solo, low-key jazz combo or full-on rock group. Andy Wallace, who had dialed in the mixes for Nirvana’s Nevermind, wore the coproducing and engineering hats for these sessions, along with providing a regimented lens through which to focus and refract Jeff’s chaotic genius. Recording proceeded slowly and steadily, without too much fanfare, but then, again at the last minute there was an explosion of prodigious productivity. Among other developments, German vibraphone prodigy Karl Berger was in town, and with the assistance of a local quartet, he and Jeff co-arranged string parts for “Grace,” “Last Goodbye,” and “Eternal Life.”

The eleventh-hour burst of creativity suddenly began transforming Jeff’s modest debut into something more akin to the fully produced masterpiece that usually doesn’t happen until later in a discography. More studio time was booked for intensive overdubbing of additional layers, which pushed costs beyond the initial budget, and though Columbia held Jeff in high esteem and generally handled him with kid gloves (full artistic control was implicit), the majority of expenses went into his recoupable fund, which had to be paid down by Jeff through album sale royalties. Though Grace would eventually prove itself beyond worthy of the investment, this was one of the first major manifestations of Jeff’s Sony-sourced headache that would plague him for the duration.

Grace, which was finally released on August 23, 1994, tends to vex the neophyte at first blush. There’s so much to unpack, the resulting bottleneck can be off-putting. Only through repeated listens will it reward those who “wait in the fire,” as the title track has it. Once that rote assimilation has inured you to Jeff’s eccentric voice and anachronistically innovative affectations, and Grace has dilated your emotional receptivity wider than you ever thought possible, you will tend to listen obsessively for a while before you realize you need to take a break so your strung-out, wrung-out heart can snap back to normal. You will probably only be able to listen to it every once in a while thereafter, as the lachrymose music makes demands of your psyche that require exceptional equanimity to withstand (the irony is that while Grace might help you grieve a breakup or death, listening to its ten tracks can also exhume that grief long past the time you have worked through it). The fact that Jeff is no longer here but still sounds undeniably alive in the speakers, and that the making of this album led to insurmountable expectations for a satisfactory follow-up that added to his pre-death stress, only augments the album’s haunting intensity.

The sonic progeny of Robert Johnson, Nina Simone, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Dowland, Jeff comes off as the wide-amplitude, tragic-romantic, card-carrying Scorpio that he was, irresistibly obsessed with love and death, singing often of the moon and rain (and yet also of burning and fire), and bedroom-as-sanctuary-and-wellspring, and a melancholic, nearly heart-rending yearning for absent lovers past and present. All of this can’t help but feed into his steadily growing mythology, not to mention strike he’s-all-alone-and-vulnerable-go-save-him reverberations of longing through the heartstrings of every heterosexual female within earshot, while also getting straight men of all walks gratefully as in touch with their feminine side as he was. In the age of grunge––which force-fed emotion through intimidating volume and distortion––Grace was an anomaly, delivering a wider range of feeling through a listener’s induced surrender to its heightened peaks and valleys, with Jeff’s by turns angelic and demonic voice keeping pace, and, unlike Cobain, with absolutely no irony to lean on, hide behind, or use as disclaimer.

“Mojo Pin” is the perfect overture for an audiophile quality album with such wide yet still somehow cohesive style and dynamic oscillations, with softly looping guitar harmonics fading in, followed by a wordless melody delicately sung over a fingerpicked folk/jazz guitar pattern. The music rollercoasters from there, with dramatic stops featuring vocal melismas that proceed into straight 4/4 time, finally crescendoing in a loud, climactic buildup, and a ragged scream from Jeff that tapers seamlessly back into the jazz feel.

The first stanzas tell us so much about the author:

I’m lying in my bed, the blanket is warm This body will never be safe from harm Still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal Touch my skin to keep me whole

Oh, if only you’d come back to me If you laid at my side I wouldn’t need no mojo pin To keep me satisfied

Here we find a vividly lovelorn artist who tends to compose from the subconscious (as with many of his original songs, “Mojo Pin” was inspired by a dream he had had) has already begun confronting his mortality, equates love with addiction like so many troubadours before him (“mojo pin” is a euphemism for a shot of heroin, which, inspired in part by his father, Jeff used for a short time during the tour in support of Grace), and feels hopelessly separated from it all, with a heightened sense of longing that can’t help but garner the listener’s sympathies.

The title track picks up the thread in more ways than one; along with “Mojo Pin” it is the second of two pre-Sony songwriting collaborations with former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas—as part of his short-lived Gods and Monsters project (that’s Lucas’s guitar-noodle wizardry on both). And with lines like “Oh, drink a bit of wine––we both might go tomorrow,” it ups the mortality-as-enabler-and-aphrodisiac ante.

With its churning 6/8 groove, and with Jeff starting the song in typical fashion––toward the bottom of his discernable vocal range (D3), “Grace” culminates cathartically on a sustained, heavily vibrato’d, full-chest E5 bad-assedly blasting from his manic larynx and also marks the first of several ominous allusions to being harmed by water (“…And I feel them drown my name…”).

“Last Goodbye” was supposed to be the big first single. It even got an MTV video treatment (just look at his dour expression as he and the exhausted band take a precious day off from a European tour to do this exorbitantly expensive production of a compromised artistic concept in a despised medium), but with no real chorus to speak of, its chart success was modest at best. A Delta blues slide glides across an open-tuned electric 12-string guitar before dropping into a mid-tempo dance groove and a lyric full of bittersweet memories of a failed relationship with an older woman in L.A.

Not only was Jeff a bit shorthanded when it came to filling an entire 52-minute album with originals, but it also would have been a shame not to round out the running order with some well-chosen and interpreted covers in emulation of the intimate immediacy of Jeff’s Sin-é days. The first of these appearing on Grace is “Lilac Wine,” a torch-song standard written by James Shelton and adopted by Nina Simone. Jeff gives the distant-lover-as-intoxicant lyrics the hyper-emotive treatment, with perfectly sustained vibrato on the drawn-out notes and with his voice occasionally breaking into a heartrending sob, especially on the line, “…Isn’t that she, or am I just going crazy, dear?”

“Lilac Wine” is a significant indication of the barely fathomable depth of Jeff’s––and by extension, the band’s––versatility and their ability to do exactly right by the artist and repertoire (it’s difficult, in that sense, to listen to any of Tim’s records without taking umbrage with the musicians in the various band incarnations smothering Tim’s voice and stepping all over his 12-string guitar with their ego-fulfilling and poorly––if at all––thought-out parts).

“So Real” represents not only the successful search for a second guitarist, but also a tenacious battle fought and won against Columbia for the very soul of the album.

Michael Tighe, a mutual friend of Jeff and his ex Rebecca Moore (the one he had met and fallen in love with at the Tim tribute, and whom “Grace”s lyrics supposedly feature) joined the band on second guitar after most of the work on the album had been completed, and he brought an intriguing set of chord changes with him. When it came time to record B-sides and possible non-album singles (a cover of Big Star’s “Kangaroo”, which, to Sony’s consternation would often stretch out to 15 or 20 minutes in concert, was also laid down), Tighe’s progressions, which were inordinately sophisticated considering he hadn’t been playing guitar for very long, were dusted off, tracked with engineer Cliff Norrell, and Jeff did the lead vocal in one take after a last-minute walk to finish the lyric.

Distinguished by the verses’ seamless changes in meter (back and forth from duple to triple time), its by-now standard mélange of tragic-romantic imagery in the lyrics (“I love you / But I’m afraid to love you,” and the foreboding “And I couldn’t awake from the nightmare that sucked me in and pulled me under…”), another wildly climactic E5 at the end, and a massive chorus hook, the song fit Jeff’s MO––accessible innovation and wide-amplitude expression––perfectly.

So much so that it quickly shed its B-side status and usurped a coveted spot on the record from another, highly contested original: The excessively personal and harsh “Forget Her,” which in retrospect would have been the sole manifestation of irony on the album. Jeff was justifiably dissatisfied with this disingenuously caustic 12/8 blues-pop dirge waltz he had allegedly penned about the aforementioned, hapless Moore, upon whom the lyric displaced Jeff’s own culpability for the relationship’s dissolution. But the label was head over heels with it, as the song’s melodramatic, Michael Bolton-esque chorus made it the one and only potential crossover smash in their minds. Columbia exec Don Ienner, who was essentially Jeff’s boss, tried everything short of bribery to futilely sweet-talk Jeff into keeping it on the album, which, in itself, was a tangible reason for Jeff to dig in, though he also feared that the slightly smarmy song would be a one-way ticket to One-Hit-Wonder-ville. As it turned out, “So Real”s chorus was hookier anyway, enough to warrant its own video treatment, though its subsequent commercial impact was also negligible.

A plaintive sigh kicks off what is now widely regarded as the definitive recording of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the second cover of the album, performed solo and glued together from multiple takes into a solemn paean to the ecstatic pain of long-term relationships. Inspired by John Cale’s 1991 reading, Jeff sticks to the ultra-romantic verses that find love and suffering linked in paradox, and the guitar tone and reverb augment the song’s church hymn vibe, almost as though it was recorded at a service or funeral. If you’ve heard this recording or noticed it in myriad movies and TV shows and haven’t cried at least once, you’re not human.

“Lover, You Should Have Come Over” is a classic swinging blues adagio, perhaps the best known and most covered original on the album. Water and death are linked once again (“Looking out the door, I see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners / Parading in a wake of sad relations as their shoes fill up with water…”), and then Jeff abruptly breaks that train of thought to do right by Moore in recognizing his role in their breakup (“…Maybe I’m too young / To keep good love from going wrong”). Again, his vocal starts low and builds to another E5 at the end. In the hands of another artist, all of this would have sounded forced and over the top, but somehow Jeff was able to make it work. That’s his genius/madness; he himself was fully dilated and committed in a way that wasn’t healthy or sustainable, but damn, did it make for visceral listening.

“Corpus Christi Carol” reaches even further back than 1950’s “Lilac Wine” and completely blows the listener away with its expectation-defying display of musical depth. He becomes a bona fide classical singer here, exhibiting total immersion in the anonymous 16th-century lyric that the aptly named English composer Benjamin Britten incorporated into 1933’s Choral Variations for Mixed Voices (“A Boy Was Born”), Op. 3, finally arriving at Jeff’s adolescent ears through the version for high voice recorded by Janet Baker in 1967. Jeff completely inhabits the allegory of a bedridden, Christ-like knight endlessly bleeding, witnessed by love and the purity of his cause, with the empathic delicacy that was already his trademark. The stark arrangement for electric guitar and scant overdubs is superbly matched by the lamenting vocal, which ends on a ghostly, falsetto’d E5 that is utterly cathartic in its climactic glory.

Jeff wanted to make an album that compelled rock fans to forget about Zeppelin II, and “Eternal Life” delivers on the heavier side of that promise. Written during his time in L.A., the creepy intro stops on a dime before a bludgeoning, yet highly danceable groove drops in and a reactive lyric confronts applicable listeners to wake up and smell the mortal coffee:

Eternal life is now on my trail Got my red-glitter coffin, man––just need one last nail While all these ugly gentlemen play out their foolish games There’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names…

Racist everyman, what have you done? Man, you made a killer of your unborn son Oh, crown my fear your king at the point of a gun All I want to do is love everyone…

There’s no time for hatred––only questions What is love, where is happiness What is alive, where is peace? When will I find the strength to bring me release?

With distorted bass as well as guitar alongside complementary strings and a killer groove featuring a highly effective, accelerating hi-hat pattern from Johnson on the verses, the song successfully proselytizes for universally incontestable causes, and reinforces Jeff’s projected mythology as a doomed soul whose seemingly relished fate awaits him sooner rather than later.

“Dream Brother” may be the last song on the album, but it was the very first idea Jeff and the band had worked up together. At the risk of overusing the word, and just like the album as a whole, it is haunting from start to finish, with a droney, string-cranking intro giving way to an eastern-inflected guitar motif. Jeff’s more static but no less sublime vocal melody goes beyond complementary; it builds tension by hanging on or around the fifth for most of the verse stanzas before resolving to the tonic on the last note of the phrase. Grondahl’s bass line, as with all his work on the album, is a sublime treat; here we find him working his way through the exotic Phrygian mode, recasting the guitar parts into a harmonically complex, emotionally compelling accompaniment that perfectly underpins the vocal.

The song features another penned-and-sung-at-the-last-possible-minute lyric, the chorus of which admonishes dear L.A. friend Chris Dowd (of Fishbone) not to abandon his new family like Tim had Jeff and Mary: “Don’t be like the one who made me so old / Don’t be like the one who left behind his name / ‘Cause they’re waiting for you like I waited for mine / And nobody ever came.” Grace’s only allusion to Jeff’s father builds in intensity to an instrumental bridge with wordless Qawwali wailings that are utterly bone chilling in their echoing-into-eternity saturation. The album’s final line puts an ominous capstone on the pyramid of the untimely-death-by-water preoccupation: “Asleep in the sand, with the ocean washing over…”

PART TWO

Jeff Buckley

From ’94 to ’96, both solo and with the band, Jeff Buckley toured the world and elsewhere. Those two years were highly transformative; he met and/or was lauded by so many of his personal heroes (including Zeppelin’s Page and Plant, Paul and Linda McCartney, U2’s Bono and The Edge, David Bowie, and he had a brief affair with Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, who had covered Tim’s “Song to the Siren” [for aural proof of the romance, go to YouTube and check out their unfinished, embarrassingly smitten PDA duet on “All Flowers in Time”]), picked up an all but unshakeable smoking habit as a late-blooming extension of delayed formative-year rebellion and as a temporary, self-harming relief from the stresses of touring and just-shy-of-A-list fame (he managed to make People magazine’s 50 most beautiful list in May of ’95, which mostly appalled him, and also had an eye-opening night out with Courtney Love), turned down numerous primetime opportunities—SNL, Letterman, and acting roles and commercial placements—in favor of “underground” platforms like MTV’s “120 Minutes,” and was constantly at odds with his record label.

Australia and France embraced him like a returning hero, with the latter country’s Académie Charles Cros presenting Jeff with the rarely-awarded-to-an-American Grand Prix International Du Disque in honor of Grace on April 13, 1995 (two live shows, the second representing a career peak, were recorded during a French leg of the tour and later released as 1995’s Live at the Bataclan EP and 2001’s Live à l’Olympia).

The tank ran dry on March 1, 1996, which marked not only the final date of a hastily booked Australian/New Zealand tour to capitalize on Jeff’s surging popularity there and subsequently the last in official support of Grace, but also the final show with percussionist Matt Johnson, who had reached his hard limit with the band leader’s exacerbated lifestyle excesses and reckless behavior, not to mention Jeff’s escalating hazing of him.

Drummerless and exhausted, a different Jeff Buckley returned to a different New York. Though it suited his dysfunctionally nomadic, reactively noncommittal spirit, touring is not conducive to one’s mental or physical well-being nor is any level of fame, which is unfortunately what moves the units at the cost of anonymous normalcy. As a result, Jeff could no longer frequent any of his old haunts without being recognized and approached by strangers who thought they knew and deserved a piece of him beyond his timeless music. But then even his friends couldn’t help but feel jilted in their wanting a less ephemeral friendship with him, as he made them feel like the undeniably corroborated center of the universe when he was around, having given of himself interpersonally as completely and unadvisedly as he did in his music.

With inchoate fame now cutting him off from his usual decompression options, Jeff couldn’t recharge his psychic batteries. That coupled with the fact that Columbia and the press had been persistently hounding him regarding a follow-up to Grace piled even more pressure on the stress heap, further hampering his creative process and making The Big Apple taste more of the cyanide within the seeds than the once novel fruit of clandestine self-discovery.

There’s an industry saying: a recording artist has their entire life to make the first album and six months to make the second. Already no stranger to writer’s block under normal circumstances (he was inherently a better interpreter than a composer and understandably loath to commit to locked-in versions of anything), Jeff found himself hitting the creative wall in the midst of his increasingly stifling paradigm. The new songs were coming, albeit more slowly than everyone preferred, and in a different, more current vein than Grace. Having kept an ever-vigilant ear to the cultural ground, Jeff had met the Grifters and the Dambuilders while on tour, gaining a new love interest—Joan Wasser, to whom he related early on that he was going to die young—from the latter band and befriended Nathan Larson of Shudder to Think, and their contemporary alternative rock vibes ignited a light bulb over Jeff’s head, giving him the inspiration to pursue a rawer sound, much as Cobain had for Nevermind’s 1993 follow-up—In Utero.

It wasn’t necessarily Sony’s cup of tea. Though the label was by no means dead-set on putting out Son of Grace, they were a bit befuddled by the significant shift in musical mores away from the classic heritage artist sound toward the aural marriage of the Smiths and Soundgarden evident in the newer material. His sagacious selection of classic solo repertoire, and Grace by extension, had gotten Jeff’s foot in the door, as their sophisticated old-school values were arguably a premeditated affectation on Jeff’s part to woo the industry’s boho Boomer gatekeepers into signing and unconditionally supporting him. Now that he was more or less ensconced on the inside, and having gained more than a little leverage from all the hard work of the past year and a half, Jeff wanted to change things up to reflect more of what he’d been listening to and writing as an artist of his own generation. Though jumping high through Jeff’s hoops was by now second nature, Columbia was nevertheless befuddled.

This vexation next manifested as bewilderment over the choice of legendary Television alum Tom Verlaine (RIP) to aid and abet his alt-rock vision as the inexperienced coproducer for the second album. No one at Sony thought Verlaine was the right man for the job; they would just as soon have gone with Andy Wallace again rather than someone who, as with Grondahl, Johnson, and Tighe, didn’t have a track record to speak of. Whether or not Jeff’s choice was ill informed was irrelevant; it became his new crusade against the label, a pyrrhic war waged solely on the principle of getting his way even if it ended up biting him in the ass.

Columbia green-lit some bet-hedging recording with Verlaine to humor Jeff, but also to surreptitiously gather leverage as a failed, debt-enlarging investment, as the odds were slim that he could pull another rabbit out of his hat within the limited, impossible-for-Jeff parameters. Two brief as they were dissatisfying sessions occurred at various New York studios in 1996 and then a third at Memphis’s Easley McCain studios with Johnson’s permanent replacement, Parker Kindred, in early 1997. Jeff had become interested in recording at Easley through Grifters guitarist and Memphis resident Dave Shouse, and in relocating to that hallowed town for its legendary status in the history of blues and rock ‘n roll, and yet also as an escape from the lost anonymity, label pressure, and detrimental distractions of New York.

Jeff began striving for—and was at least able to temporarily reclaim—some semblance of a normal life in Memphis; he settled in at 91 Rembert Street, where he could often be found lying in the overgrown grass of his front yard, staked out all the good local restaurants, got a Sin-é-reminiscent Monday night residency at a downtown venue called Barrister’s, proposed marriage to Joan Wasser, and spent time with local friends who didn’t treat him like a rock star. At the time of his death, and as this evidence indicates, Jeff was trying to settle down, but he also felt ready to finally nail the landing on the second album, which he earnestly hoped would not only eclipse Grace but would frighten people as well. He was also noticeably uneasy.

The iteration of what was going to be called My Sweetheart the Drunk that came out almost too soon in May of 1998, not the barely attainable one Jeff would have overworked himself to complete had he lived, is the version the label should have agreed to put out had he been willing and able to play the long game. Though disc 2, with the exception of “Haven’t You Heard” and the cover of “Satisfied Mind,” is mainly for diehards (it contains sloppily recorded and produced home recordings that only hint at greatness, as well as superfluous original mixes of select disc 1 material), the ten Verlaine tracks are nothing to scoff at. In fact, the minimally but still excellently arranged and produced songs not only sound surprisingly finished, but would have also found Jeff paving the way for the future of alternative rock/pop in a manner that was more in touch with the times but still rang true to Jeff’s old-school tragic-romantic sophistication. Hindsight finds these recordings nothing to be ashamed of, the natural, expectation-managing and yet still promise-fulfilling continuation of Jeff’s artistic journey, though he didn’t—and wouldn’t—agree with that assessment (the tracks probably could have used just a little more tightening up… At the very least, and as it stands, disc 1 of My Sweetheart the Drunk could have been a highly respectable and acceptable “sophomore flop”). Jeff would have had to ease up on the malignant perfectionism had he lived, and in that light it both does and doesn’t seem strange that he continued massaging these recordings—with additional overdubs and polishing occurring at Easley after the band’s return to New York—despite his clearly declared intention to abandon what he had already recorded, concede defeat regarding Verlaine (who urged Jeff to erase the tapes), and start from scratch with Andy Wallace.

Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk has plenty of wide-amplitude thrills (“Vancouver,” which started life as an instrumental break on the Grace tour, now featured a soaring vocal that found him suddenly clued in to the detriments of giving too much of himself: “I need to be alone / To heal this bleeding stone…”), lots of tragic-romantic flair (the beautiful, minimally orchestrated ballads “Morning Theft” and “Opened Once,” the swinging caveat “Witches Rave,” and the macabre, “Come as You Are”-ish “Nightmares by the Sea” are by turns self-castigating and wary), more struggle over suitable repertoire (Jeff harbored hypocritical paranoia that the set-apart, slinky R&B slow-jam, “Everybody Here Wants You” would be chosen as a single against his wishes [it was], even though the song is an instant classic, and the album could have done without the cover of the Nymphs’ “Yard of Blonde Girls,” though he didn’t trust Columbia to agree), two Qawwali nods (the mantra jam “New Year’s Prayer”, and the utterly harrowing “You And I”), and plenty of fodder for precognition-of-untimely-death speculators (“Stay with me under these waves tonight / Be free for once in your life tonight…” from “Nightmares By The Sea”, and “Ah, the calm below that poisoned river wild…” from the goosebump-evincing “You And I”).

**************

Recording contracts have always been a Faustian bargain for the artist, especially at the onset, when it is weighted heavily in the card-holding label’s favor. Art and commerce often meet in the cultural-industrial ring as irreconcilable spouses who stay together for the kids, with the artist wanting to make a unique, challenging, and hopefully timeless statement for theirs and successive generations, and the label needing to make a profit, not lose their shirt, or just break even. The latter often requires innocuous music that has been dumbed down or otherwise compromised for mass consumption, usually the antithesis of the former. The artist, though, according to the standard contract they signed, is legally beholden to the label, which owns the master recordings and the right to exploit them until such a time, often years or even decades down the road, when the artist has gained enough cachet through account-balancing sales and accumulated cultural pertinence to renegotiate the contract into a more equitable form that befits their too-hard-earned stature. As with life in general, and back when labels were still labels, one had to play a patient, penitent, somewhat circumspect long game, with eyes intent on the future prize in order to succeed as a recording and touring artist, and to eventually win out over the label.

Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, now in or on the cusp of their 80s respectively, managed to successfully undergo and even control their fame-reconciling heritage artist transformations and break through to the other side. Jeff Buckley, who realized too late and too far out to sea that he had given up essential access to a normal life, and whose DNA and hardship-forged personality was geared for fleeting, heightened moments of impulsive escape and unrealistic levels of emotional outpouring during which there was no tomorrow, did not. After an itinerant childhood in a chaotic, single-parent household, neither of which allowed him any bonded, bolstering long-term friendships or gave him the necessary emotional support to instill enough confidence to enable him to pace, self-nurture, and recharge as an adult, Jeff was predestined for burnout. Add to this the looming legacy of his father’s similarly self-inflicted and untimely doom, the demoralizing fiscal and creative debt to—and incongruent association with—a major label, and pervasive generational nihilism, and you have the recipe for a death by misadventure.

The world generally eats pure-heart-on-sleeve empaths like Jeff Buckley for breakfast, and just like house-always-wins Vegas casinos, record labels are particularly good at exploiting, devouring, and then remorselessly shitting out their charges no matter how vigilant the artist may have been to the contrary. In Jeff and Columbia’s case, it’s difficult to pick a winner; dying got him out of both having to deliver on a second album and pay off his way-in-the-red recoupable, but his absence-generated popularity and Sony’s dogged determination to monetize ample vault caches in the aftermath may have balanced the ledger by now anyway. Either way you slice it, and for what it’s worth, the artist is gone, and Columbia is a tawdry shadow of its former self, but Jeff’s timeless music remains.

Trying to imagine how Jeff would have navigated the post-5/29/97 waters is not challenging, considering the comprehensive changes already in motion that would herald not only the end of his generation’s all-too-brief moment in the sun, but also the beginning of the end of the record industry as he had known it. Jeff probably would have seen Sony’s support slowly dwindle, becoming even more isolated until his contract came up for renewal and he was then most likely dropped from the label, as its various employee archetypes, which were industry-wide revolving doors, would have inevitably jumped ship for higher positions elsewhere. This exodus would have severed nurtured—and nurturing—connections, leaving Jeff in the hands of green, bottom-line-focused reps that had had nothing to do with scouting or signing him and were subsequently less inclined to offer the kind of largesse and preferential treatment to which he had been accustomed.

A new generation was also coming of age, one that sought shallower, more effervescent thrills to match their innate, well-nurtured ebullience. Soundgarden, Jeff’s now fellow-in-untimely-death friend Chris Cornell’s band, which was the first of the Seattle grunge era to sign to a major label, broke up almost on cue that year. Groups like Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, Hanson, and solo artists like Brittney Spears, Ricky Martin, and Christina Aguilera were prepared to replace grunge’s locked-up engine in the zeitgeist car, with already emergent, transitionally mellower sounds from the likes of Dave Matthews Band, Blues Traveler, Phish, Spin Doctors, and Hootie and the Blowfish having paved the way. Autotune was introduced that year, with computer-based digital recording having begun its ascendant journey to becoming the analog-supplanting, music-devaluing standard.

Within a decade, for better and worse, the industry as Jeff knew it would no longer exist, nor would the focus on organically profound music on which he had been brought up and of which he had become a part. With no plan B (he endearingly applied for what would have been a meagerly if at all remunerated position at the Memphis zoo’s butterfly exhibit), Jeff would have been hard-pressed to maintain a subsistent income—let alone pay down his debt to Columbia—inside or outside the new, less tolerant manifestation of the industry, which would have scoffed derisively and dismissively at his to-date album sales. And he probably would have recoiled from the rising popularity of bubblegum pop and nü-metal buffoonery in disgust.

Kurt Cobain once said he wished he had paced himself better, played more of a long game by holding back some of Nevermind’s material for subsequent albums, and a general feeling persists that Jeff had similarly neglected any thought of the future by putting everything he had into Grace, and there wasn’t enough left to create something new to match its grandeur, at least not within his unsustainable paradigm. It seems as though he was done, that his music’s true moment in the sun could only begin after he had disappeared somehow. Amassing cachet would have to rely on his premature-demise-as-career-move absence, the removal of his chronic perfectionism that allowed Sony to put out whatever was in the vaults without his opposition (albeit in full, duly diligent cooperation with next-of-kin trustee, supposed legacy preserver / promoter, and posthumous stage mother Mary), and amassing fin de siècle malaise that would find solace in Grace. But Jeff’s death feels wrong as well, redolent of the same sense of tragedy as JFK’s assassination, as if we had truly lost one of the good ones, and the subsequent sensation of all hope for a fair and just future having been annihilated in a flash, regardless of whether or not either of them actually deserved that idolization.

The grief-sourced application of culpability gets complicated when someone who has deeply affected strangers and loved ones alike is directly responsible for their own death, but it can’t exactly be called a suicide. And though we have plenty of lyrical and anecdotal evidence that could easily be construed as self-fulfilling prophecy (like Cobain, Jeff had consistently and insistently telegraphed his denouement), it is otherwise difficult to substantiate rumors that Jeff had been dreaming of his demise just weeks—if not longer—beforehand. But as with the cinematic portrayal of Mozart obsessively composing what would become his own requiem in Amadeus, if someone persistently gives thought and voice to fatal intent, walks that fine line long enough, the border between this world and the next will begin to blur and smudge until it finally wears thin enough for one to cross over without even noticing. Freud may have said it best: “Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”

Unlike influencee Rufus Wainwright, whose songs are also emotive but restrained in comparison, Jeff never developed the necessary filters to mitigate the harmful aspects of his heightened sensitivity and permeability, preferring instead to empty his emotional ballast onstage night after night to the adulation of interchangeable, undemanding strangers (though some of them often clamored annoyingly for renditions of Tim’s songs), as if each show were his last (which he had hypocritically accused Tim of in a 1993 interview). In all of Jeff’s 30 years, he had never learned the kind of self-love that would awaken and bolster the basic long-term survival instincts to enable him to throw off the chains of his deeply ingrained fatalism. With his pallid, fey appearance, alluring gender-balanced charisma, heart-rending empathy, unregulated outflow of emotional energy, and foolhardily unshielded vulnerability, he seemed to many as though he was marked for an early end no matter what evasive action he might’ve taken.

Though Jeff had been exhibiting unstable, borderline bipolar behavior in the weeks prior to his drowning, he didn’t consciously intend to die that night (a nearby witness apparently heard a single cry for help), but his willful ignorance of the dangers of his impulsive and fatalistic nature and the whimsical flouting of the perils of his immediate surroundings would be the co-conspirators of his mortal undoing.

Fully clothed at twilight, Jeff waded backward into a notoriously dangerous river despite a lifetime aversion to water—and in denial of all the overt signals his subconscious and conscious had sent him. Doing the recently learned backstroke to the braggadocio boom-box strains of Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” in a roiling river all but universally avoided for its severe, passing-boat-generated undercurrents was supposed to be a spontaneous trip to and from the edge to take his mind off of life’s untenable pressures for a short while. But instead, and to his torch-carrying fans’, friends’, and family’s ongoing bereavement, it lasted forever.

**************

England’s annual Meltdown Festival consists of a series of concerts given over several days by contemporary artists and is curated by a celebrity participant with an ear toward the high-minded performance of unconventional repertoire. Jeff was invited by 1995’s chosen Master of Ceremonies—Elvis Costello—to take part on July 1, which serendipitously coincided with that year’s European tour in support of Grace, though it was inconveniently sandwiched between concert dates across the channel.

Along with collaborations in mixed ensembles comprised of co-billed artists, Jeff did a four-song solo set that featured the apropos “Corpus Christi Carol” (the song that had originally piqued Costello’s interest), Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman,” and “Grace.”

He began with an absolutely devastating rendition of “Dido’s Lament,” which Costello had personally requested from the setting of Dido and Aeneas by 16th century British composer Henry Purcell. Jeff was indistinguishable from a fully trained, operatic countertenor as he delivered the moribund lines with innate familiarity:

Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me On thy bosom let me rest More I would, but Death invades me Death is now a welcome guest

When I am laid in earth May my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast Remember me, but oh, forget my fate

Costello came out after the last of the four songs and accompanying ovation had died down and following some gracious comments recognizing the young artist’s overflowing docket, he essentially summed up Jeff’s contribution—and the debt of gratitude music owes him—with his closing salutation that now stands as a fitting epitaph:

“He gave everything. Thanks, Jeff.”

[roisheep]

Lost Steely Dan Saturday

I've decided that I'm going to start a weekly thing where I post about various cut & obscure Steely Dan songs. My intention is mainly to post about an album's worth of outtakes, demos, and other oddities per installment. This list will be non-exhaustive, as the list of Steely Dan and Steely Dan adjacent outtakes is enormous. I'll be sharing links to what songs I can, and I'll be prioritizing unadulterated demos (though I will be recommending fan remasters when applicable.) Starting chronologically, we'll be looking at their first album, Can't Buy a Thrill, and a little bit of what came before it. Heads up, this will be a long post.

Dallas (Single)

This single is Steely Dan's first release, it and its b-side were only ever released officially on a 1978 japan only compilation

One of the first things you might notice with this one is that Donald Fagen is not singing lead vocals, instead being performed by drummer Jim Hodder. Hodder also performs lead vocals for "Midnite Cruiser" on can't buy a thrill. Personally, I'm pretty keen on this one. Despite Becker & Fagen later describing it as "stinko," I think it holds up pretty well. The use of steel guitar makes it mesh really well into the sound of Can't Buy a Thrill, and I'd definitely recommend giving it a listen. JiveMiguel1980 has an excellent remaster which you can find on YouTube, and the band Poco covered this song in 1975.

Sail the Waterway

I'm not going to have too much to say about a lot of these songs, and this is definitely one of those. It's nice enough. The instrumentation once again feels very in line with the sound of CBAT, and this song features a pretty nice guitar solo, as well as some nice backing vocals. Sail the Waterway also has another great remaster by JiveMiguel1980 on YouTube that is worth checking out if you enjoy the song.

Can't Buy a Thrill Demos and Outtakes

Moving now from songs released before Can't Buy a Thrill and on to the Demos and Outtakes of the albums themselves. Steely Dan fans have been compiling this into their own little bootlegs since before the internet, so I'll be able to share most of them with one link, and we'll briefly run down through the songs in order as they appear:

Gullywater: This one's just plain fun! The lyrics are very of their time but I find the song's heavy reliance on just kind of stating metaphors to be endearing. The guitar on this one is also just killer. Check out the JiveMiguel1980 remaster, and It's at this point that I'd also like to note that yes, I am going to recommend JiveMiguel1980 remasters a lot, they make a lot of them and they're very good

Sakka Joweda: This one is probably my favorite CBAT outtake, it's really catchy and very high energy for Steely Dan. The chorus on this one gets stuck in my head for the rest of the day every time I hear it, and the closing organ bit is very distinct for them. Check out the JiveMiguel1980 remaster if you like this one as always. I'd have to agree with the studio chatter at the end of this one, Sakka Joweda is "real good."

Any World (That I'm Welcome To): You might recognize this one from their 1975 album "Katie Lied," Any World is one of a couple of Steely Dan demos to find new life on subsequent albums. This version of it is very good on its own, having the sparser piano and drum sound of a lot of Steely Dan demos, but it doesn't quite hold up as well when compared to its later officially released iteration (you just can't compete with Michael McDonald.)

Running Child: This one to me is another solid-but-not-exceptional demo, which is probably why infamous perfectionist Donald Fagen prevented it from being included on the album. This one also has a JiveMiguel1980 remaster if it sticks out to you.

Megashine City: This song is alright, like Sakka Joweda I think its strongest part is its chorus. This one has a very 60s country-ish americana sound that I don't personally care for, and I think wouldn't sound out of place with a lot of other bands of the era, but it still has enough of that Dan feel going for it that I'll listen to it on occasion.

Stay There: This is just studio chatter and instrument futzing I think. If you're listening to Can't Buy a Thrill Demos and Outtakes as though it were a real album, it's a fun little transitional piece.

Midnite Cruiser (Alternate Mix): This is an alternate mix of Midnite Cruiser, the track from Can't Buy a Thrill. Not too too much is different, but it is pretty neat.

This was my first Lost Steely Dan Saturday, I've been wanting to blog about this stuff for a little bit, and finally settled on this as the format. Next week I'll most likely be covering Katy Lied & The Royal Scam, as Countdown to Ecstasy and Pretzel Logic outtakes either don't exist or remain lost media at present. Not sure how this style of post is going to perform, but I am mostly just making these for my own enjoyment. However, if anyone has questions or notes they can feel free to reach out to me about them.

[cryley]

Petrichor - Part 1

matty healy x reader (fluff) word count: 2.4k A/N: (moved from @cryley-fics where it was originally posted) ♡ Helloooo, it's Ry. This is actually the first fic I've posted on tumblr and also the first fic I've written in 7ish years. I've recently been yanked back into my 1975 obsession and literally can't stop thinking about Matty, so I decided to write again. Please please please be kind since I am v rusty with my writing ♡ ▹ masterlist ▹ part 1 ▹ part 2 ▹ part 3 ▹ part 4 ▹ part 5

I quickly brushed my hands off onto my apron before walking to the back room. Glancing at my watch, I groaned. It was too early to be awake. Well, I didn’t feel awake, but I tried my hardest to appear coherent. My eyes scanned the shelf full of metallic-looking bags until I found the one I needed. 

“Didn’t expect to see you here this early.”

“Good morning to you too, Atlas.” Grabbing the full bag of espresso beans, I chuckled. “I requested this afternoon off.”

Pushing my way back through the swinging door, I plopped the bag on the counter. The cafe was really quiet in the mornings before we opened. It was nice to see it this way before the rush of equally tired people waiting to get their dose of beans.

“Well if you ever want to switch permanently to mornings, I can maybe convince Lansen.” Atlas stood at the end of the counter tying his apron around his waist. 

I liked working the afternoon shifts, but it is nice working morning shifts when you end your shift at noon. Yeah, waking up at 3 am to get ready for work is the least fun thing to do in the world, but it beats retail. 

I shrugged and continued filling the machine with the beans, “When you’re done clocking in, can you finish setting up while I count in the back?”

Looking over to Atlas, he nodded. He didn’t mind staying out front all morning if I’d let him. Paperwork was his enemy. 

We were both some of the only shift leaders at this cafe. Most employees were either underage, newer hires, or simply just didn’t want the responsibility. Atlas was a very charismatic people-person who is perfect for customer interaction while I was…well let’s just say I liked doing back-of-house paperwork. 

Walking over to my side, he bumped my shoulder to give me the queue that he will take over. Before pushing past the door, I switched on the speakers and put on the “manager-approved playlist” which mostly just consisted of repetitive weird piano and smooth jazz.

I placed the register drawers on the desk and got to counting. My head bobbed to the awkward sound of cups clanging and off tempo trumpet. Checking the clock on the office wall, I stood up and sighed.

Jamming the drawers back into the registers, I heard Atlas humming to the speaker’s music. He always seemed too happy in the mornings. I watched him lightly dance around behind the bar as he made iced tea.

“Going to the restroom quickly before we open in 10.”

I untied my already somewhat messy apron and placed it behind the counter before walking off. The bathroom was well-lit and clean. Thankfully the closers did their job yesterday without me around. 

My tired reflection stared back at me in the mirror. In a rush, I could only manage to throw a beanie over my blonde hair and had to skip the contacts today. I pulled off my round wire-framed glasses to give them one last clean before inevitably becoming covered in splashes of coffee during my shift. I already couldn’t wait to go home and shower.

“Got any plans this weekend?” Atlas questioned as I placed my apron carefully back around my waist. 

I grabbed the keys to unlock the front door, “Going to that show I told you about last week.”

“Oh yeah! I forgot that was today. Makes sense now why you are working a morning shift.” He ran his fingers through his messy brown hair while looking at his reflection on a spoon. 

I rolled my eyes and settled into my usual spot behind the espresso machine. Atlas didn’t mind handling the register. More people to make conversation with.

A couple groups of customers came in over the next couple of hours. Most of them left with coffee to go, but some of the regular visitors made themselves comfortable at their usual tables. Atlas and I would sometimes switch positions with me at the register, but he would often chuckle at my fake chipper small talk, so I would make him switch back with me. 

“Hey Y/N! Hey Atlas!”

I finished my last cappuccino for the small crowd of customers and peered over my shoulder.

“Morning Lindsay.” I smiled, grabbing a rag to clean the counters, “Can you take over the bar for me so Atlas can take his break?”

She nodded as I stood behind the register. Atlas lazily saluted to me before disappearing to the back room. 

Lindsay started to clean and organize the drink area while I emptied the old pot of dark roast, so I could brew a fresh batch. It was nice to breathe for a second after the morning rush of customers subsided. 

“I’m going to go get some more beans from the back. Did you need anything?” Lindsay skipped over to the door while her ponytail twirled behind her. 

My finger tapped BREW, “No, I don’t think so. Thank you though Lin.”

I turned back to the register to check the time, 10 am. Only two hours left and I can leave for the week. I decided to use my time off this week after the concert because I never seem to have a reason to take vacations throughout the year otherwise. At least this week I might be able to take a trip somewhere after I recover from the show. 

The cafe seemed to quiet down until the sound of the door closed. I looked out at the now pouring down rain I didn’t realize started during my shift. A man shook off his dark umbrella before walking up to the counter. He had his head down, putting the umbrella away in his bag. He was a bit taller than me and dressed in a long black coat. It was open just enough to see his forest green distressed sweater over top of a white shirt. 

“Good morning.” The man mumbled in an unfamiliar voice.

It almost sounded like he spoke in an accent, but you couldn’t put your finger on it since it was so low and mumbled. 

“Good morning. What can I get for you?” I fidgeted my fingers, tracing over the tattoos on my arm. 

“Uh, a dark roast please.”

He was definitely British. 

I looked up from my hand tracing over the ink on my skin, “I actually just started brewing a fresh pot of dark roast. If you grab a seat at a table, I can bring it to you when it’s finished if you’d like?”

My eyes finally met his. Oh god. I know this man.

His brown eyes stared back at me. The sides of his mouth curled up to form a slight smile.

“Yeah, I’ll be here for a bit. I have some work to do, so it probably won’t be my last cup either.” His hand raised to his curly brown hair to push it out of his face. 

I finally broke eye contact to turn towards the pot of brewing coffee, “It’ll probably be about 5 minutes. Would you like anything to eat? It’s on the house.”

The dark-haired man cocked his head to the side raising his eyebrows, “Well I would love a scone.”

“I’ll bring it to you.”

He pulled out his phone and tapped it to the reader to pay for the coffee, “Thanks.” 

I definitely knew who this man was. I didn’t think I’d be seeing him before tonight. 

I grabbed the scone from the bakery case and placed it onto a plate using some tongs while the man found a seat at the table closest to the front window. I watched him as he took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. He just started to settle down into his spot when I placed the plate on his table.

He cheekily smiled up at me with a wink, “Thank you, love.”

I flirtily winked back at him before heading to check on the brew. I could feel his eyes on me as I walked behind the counter. 

Atlas emerged from the back and placed his apron back on. I checked the clock and replaced the now empty apron hook with my own apron.

“Let me make myself a drink quickly and deliver this man his dark roast before I go on my break.”

Atlas nodded and began to take a couple of lingering orders at the till. 

As I finished pouring myself a hot tea, the dark roast was finally finished. I smiled back at the man at the corner table and realized his eyes never left me. A cup in each hand, I made my way back to the familiar face. 

“Here’s your dark roast.” I placed the cup gently on the table as I glanced down at his tattoos, “Did you need any cream or sugar?”

He caught me glancing and rolled up his sleeves to show off the art, “No thank you, love. I prefer it as is.”

“Nice meeting you, Matty. Enjoy your coffee.”

The man took a break from sipping his drink to look back in my direction. His eyes met mine once more as I blushed through a smile. 

I turned and made my way over to my usual couch in the opposite corner in front of the cafe. I usually took my breaks out on the floor since the back office didn’t get service at all. I could use the hour to catch up on emails. At least I would try to start catching up on emails until I undoubtingly get distracted from my crush sitting opposite me. Placing my tea on the coffee table to save my spot, I rushed to the back to grab my phone and headphones.

“Do you know that guy or something?” Lindsay followed me into the back.

A giggle escaped my mouth, “Not exactly. Just indirectly, I guess.”

She side-eyed me with a cheeky look before grabbing a refill of vanilla sweetener and heading back through the door. 

I could feel the heat rising to my face. Shoving my headphones in my ears, I decided to check the mirror in the office before returning to my tea. Man, I looked terrible. When I had dreamed of meeting Matty before, I didn’t look like I had been run over by a van. Managing to straighten my hair out as much as possible, I took a deep breath and made my way back out to the cafe. Pulling out my phone, I navigated to my music.

“On break” I mumbled over to the others while still staring down at my phone. 

My feet carried me over to the familiar maroon couch until an unfamiliar sight was sat in my spot. Matty. 

“Sorry,” He smirked, “were you going to sit here?”

Speechless, I picked up my tea, “It’s okay. I can sit somewhere e-”

“I’m joking!” He scooted over to the other end of the couch away from the window, “Come sit with me. I could use the company.”

“Didn’t you have work you wanted to get done?”

“It can wait.” He took another sip of his coffee. 

Without much hesitation, I shuffled my way into my seat realizing it was a lot closer to him than it had seemed. I blushed and picked up my tea, eager to take a sip. 

“So you obviously know who I am. Will you tell me about you?” He nudged my shoulder with his own. 

I tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, “My name is Y/N.”

“Lovely name.”

I smiled, “And after work today, I’ll be getting ready to go to your show.”

“Oh, are you not one of those people who wait outside for hours and hours?” He takes a long sip of his drink, still not breaking eye contact. 

I’m the one to break it first as I look down at my hands and chuckle, “unfortunately I could only get stadium seating. GA was impossible to snag.”

“Oh yeah?”

“And expensive as fuck.” I rolled my eyes at him. 

“Okay, well that isn’t exactly our fault.”

I gave him an accusing look and shrugged. 

“Hey! I promise it isn’t our fault!” He laughed while leaning into my side, “Anyway, you shouldn’t accuse someone of lying when they could get you a side-stage view of your favorite band.”

His body leaning into mine felt like fire flowing through me. He was just a normal person like everyone else. I usually didn’t feel nervous when meeting famous people before. I used to meet loads of my favorite artists back when I went to shows more frequently. Maybe because I was just caught off guard in “the wild”?

“You’re telling me that you could get me side-stage tickets to Phoebe Bridgers?”

He matched my smirk, “Hah Hah. Very funny. I meant my band.”

“Bold of you to assume the 1975 is my favorite band.” I sipped my tea. 

“Your tattoo gave it away.” He lightly grabbed my arm in one hand and pointed with the other. 

I had a lot of tattoos on my arm, but in between some of the larger pieces I had a little box with the words “modernity has failed us” in scribbled writing. 

I immediately blushed. Not just from him noticing my 1975 tattoo, but mostly from the grasp he had on my arm. He rubbed his thumb over the scribbled words decorating my skin. 

“You have a lot of other cool ones too, but I think this is my favorite.” He winked. 

“So uh,” I tried not to stumble over my words, “what else do you want to know about me?”

“A lot actually. I have time.”

“Well, I only have 40 minutes left on my break.” I gestured with my free hand to the clock. 

He let go of my arm to rummage through his bag. I really wished he hadn’t let go. It felt cold and lonely without his warm thumb brushing over my skin. 

“That settles it then,” he handed me his phone, “can I have your number?”

My heart dropped. Is he serious right now? Even if I give him my number, it’s not like he is actually going to reach out to me. 

I take his phone and type my number into the field. I saw that he had already added my name at the top. Y/N (cute barista). 

[dollarbin]

Nickel Bin #9:

Emmylou Harris' Till I Gain Control Again

It's been a rough week.

Our former president is smirking, snorting and sneering at potential jurors for a trial he's likely to win in New York and someone stole my worthless-to-everyone-except-me bicycle out of my front yard in the middle of the day. My Dodgers are playing like they're in a Stephen Stills cover band, and Karl Wallinger, Tom Petty and Prince are still dead.

So I say that we deserve a moment of simple grace, a moment of musical perfection. Till I Gain Control Again comes compliments of Emmylou Harris and her third solo record, Elite Hotel.

The intro guitar, and the vibes that creep in around it, bounce without flash and welcome in Harris's already rich vocals with respect. Drums, bass, piano, eventual strings: "note perfect" is not a phrase I can use with any authority, but I'll use it here all the same.

Aside from Harris herself, the song's two key ingredients are so humble you may miss them the first time.

The first, steel guitar player Ben Keith, is well known to Shakey Sunday readers as one of the most vital cogs in Neil Young's career: Keith was on hand and vital for much of the timeless stuff - and some of the weirdest bits too - between Harvest and Chrome Dreams 2.

Here, he glows around Harris within the verses, providing solace and depth before backing off to let the more obvious lead electric do its melodic work.

And second there's Linda Ronstadt. Imagine Taylor Swift or Beyoncé taking time away from their mammoth new records this month to sing unassuming alto back-up for a lesser known artist. That's the deal with Linda on this song in 1975, and I can't say enough about the yearning yet controlled tone she adds under Harris on each chorus and on the shimmering, why-does-it-ever-have-to-end, fade.

Enjoy this song friends! And for god's sake, someone put the dumb jerk in jail already, and hey, Stephen Stills, give me back my bike!

[cherrylng]

100 Albums To Understand Muse - Part 8 [STYLE Series #004 - Muse (August 2010)]

MEW Frengers (2003) World debut of the Danish band, boasting melancholic melodies, the transparent high tone voice of Jonas Biele and guitars that, like Muse, grew up on The Smashing Pumpkins and the Pixies. Their latest release, 'No More Stories…….' succeeds in building a dynamic world with a more progressive experimental spirit. -S

MILES DAVIS Pangaea (1975) A masterpiece of the so-called ‘electric period’ of the 1970s. If you think it's ‘jazz’, you'll be surprised. Basically, the cool and sophisticated worldview of this album is the opposite of that of the passionate Muse, but I think there are similarities in the ‘once in a lifetime’ energy that pervades the band's live performances. -M

MONIQUE HAAS Debussy : Suite Bergamasque / Deux Arabesques / Children's Corner (1995) Debussy is a composer that all piano players have a keen interest in. The images that emerge from his poetic melodies are simple, yet they have an impressionistic intensity that leaves a strong impression on the listener's heart. He is also one of Matthew's favourite composers. Enjoy the limpid sound with no ill effects. -M

MY BLOODY VALENTINE Loveless (1991) The second album from MBV, led by roaring guitar master Kevin Shields, and a milestone in shoegaze, still influencing everything from acoustic to neo-shoegaze. Whispering vocals float gently between walls of dissonant, layered guitar noise. It will leave the listener in a trance and lead them into a dreamlike world. -I

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE The Black Parade (2006) US alternative punk band that recognises a variety of influences from Queen to punk. The band made their breakthrough in Japan with this album. Muse toured the US with this album in 2007 as a frontliner. When Muse took the stage at Wembley Stadium in the UK a few months later, they fronted the band in return. -H

NED'S ATOMIC DUSTBIN God Fodder (1991) A prime example of the ‘gleeful rock’ that dominated the UK indie scene in the early 90s. The first album, featuring snarling twin basses, blistering fuzz guitars, danceable driving beats and sweet and sour melodies, was a #4 hit in the UK. In their heyday, the three Muse members were in secondary school and Matthew's first gig was with the Neds. -I

NEW ORDER Low-Life (1985) Formed by the remaining members of Joy Division after Ian Curtis (vo) committed suicide. The band's melodious bass was a distinctive feature, and it swallowed techno, disco and later house, and used synths extensively. The killer 80s synth-pop tune 2 shines with its piercing uppercut. -I

NINA SIMONE I Put A Spell On You (1965) A classic album from the Philips era by a singer-songwriter who transcended genres such as jazz-blues and R&B. Muse covered ‘Feeling Good’, a standard that has been taken up by many different faces, but Matthew was introduced to it by Nina's version. The title track featuring Screaming Jay Hawkins is also full of atmosphere. -S

Translator's Note: [presses on a single G5 piano key in a half note]

[diceriadelluntore]

Storia Di Musica #295 - Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, 1977

Di solito un duetto tra una voce maschile e una femminile è si presente in molti dischi, ma in modo episodico. Sembra strano, ma i gruppi in cui le voci principali sono state una maschile e una femminile sono molto più rari di quello che all’apparenza potrebbe pensare. Partendo da questa osservazione, i dischi di ottobre saranno dedicati appunto a casi del genere: ho cercato di unire cose molto note e significative ad altre meno, come è nello spirito di questa rubrica. Si parte oggi, nella prima domenica di ottobre, con uno dei dischi più belli, di successo e imitati di tutti i tempi. Eppure tutta questa gloria non era né scontata né, soprattutto, immaginabile dato che il capolavoro nacque proprio quando tutto sembrava irrimediabilmente compromesso, in un periodo di tensione altissima tra i membri della band che ne fu autrice. I Fleetwood Mac nascono come gruppo brit-blues sotto l’egida di Mick Fleetwood (batteria) Peter Green (chitarra) e John McVie (basso) che lasciano i Bluesbreakers di John Mayall ed intraprendono una carriera autonoma. Si chiamano così perché Green unì il cognome del batterista al Mac di McVie. Iniziano subito a farsi notare, con alcuni pezzi molto belli come Man Of The World, Albatross e Black Magic Woman, che diverrà famosissima solo anni dopo con la cover dei Santana. In questo periodo composero almeno due grandi dischi di rock blues (l’omonimo Fleetwood Mac del 1968 e Then Play On del 1969, dalla stupenda copertina e che nel titolo cita nientemeno che La Dodicesima Notte di Shakespeare). Poi Green se ne va, iniziando una carriera solista dignitosa ma non superlativa. Dal 1970 al 1975 Fleetwood e McVie chiamano a sé molti musicisti per rimpiazzarlo, tra gli altri ricordo Danny Kirwan, Bob Welch, Bob Weston, che durano più un meno un annetto con il gruppo. Colpisce invece la cantante Christine Perfect, che nel frattempo si sposa con McVie, divenendo Christine McVie, entrando in pianta stabile nella formazione. Gli album di questo periodo sentono della poca amalgama tra i membri, finendo per essere scialbi e dimenticabili. Rimasto nel 1975 senza chitarrista, Fleetwood incontra Lindsey Buckingham, che a dispetto del nome è un ragazzo californiano, che in coppia con la sua compagna, Stevie Nicks, aveva pubblicato un disco di leggero pop dal titolo Buckingham + Nicks (che sono una scelta nella scelta, dato che univano una voce femminile e una maschile soliste). Il primo lavoro della nuova formazione è clamorosamente stupendo: Fleetwood Mac (secondo disco omonimo, già un record) nel 1975 è uno dei dischi più venduti in assoluto e trascinato dai singoli Warm Ways, Say You Love Me e la stupenda Rhiannon, diviene già un classico. L’attesa per il proseguimento è spasmodica, tanto che la prima cosa a segnare il passo è la band stessa: sia la coppia Buckingham - Nicks che quella Perfect - McVie si stavano separando, e Fleetwood scoprì sui giornali che la moglie lo tradiva con un amico. Nonostante le dicerie che la davano sul punto di sciogliersi, la band si concentra nelle registrazioni di uno dei capolavori assoluti del pop-rock di tutti i tempi e lo intitolano con notevole spirito ironico Rumours (che ricordo in inglese vuol dire brusio, ma anche chiacchiericcio e dicerie).

Con una maniacale cura che rivoluzionerà il concetto stesso di arrangiamento e produzione (anche per l’uso delle più avanzate tecnologie dell’epoca, come fecero nello stesso anno gli Steely Dan con Aja) Rumours, che esce il 4 Febbraio del 1977 è davvero perfetto: penso che chiunque abbia mai pensato di scrivere una canzone abbia voluto creare qualcosa come Go Your Own Way, trascinante e fantastica. Ma già l’apertura con Second Hand News (che richiama le dicerie di stampa del titolo) che ha echi di musica celtica fa capire che non è un album qualunque. Dreams, che da solo vendette oltre un milione di copie come singolo, è altra canzone definitiva, come Never Going Back. Songbird è piano e chitarra acustica, e diventerà uno dei momenti clou dal vivo. The Chain, che nasce come unione di idee scartate, è un country folk un po’ psichedelico, ed è uno dei pochi brani accreditati a tutti i membri della band. You Make Loving Fun, altro singolo vendutissimo, I Don't Want to Know (già nel repertorio solista di Stevie Nicks) è allegra e ritmica, Oh Daddy e la misteriosa Dust Gold Woman (che per anni si è favoleggiato fosse una canzone sulla droga, che girava molto alle feste cui partecipavano) chiudono il disco. Disco suonato, cantano (memorabili gli intrecci vocali, i salti melodici di tre voci grandiose), prodotto al massimo livello (da Fleetwood e la band con Ken Caillat e Richard Dashut) e dove le singole personalità pur mantenendo piena autonomia individuale, si completano alla perfezione. E ho sempre pensato che 40 milioni di copie vendute in tutto il mondo, con 31 settimane consecutivi al primo posto della Classifica Billboard statunitense, paese dove vendette da solo 20 milioni di copie (che lo fanno uno dei dischi di maggior successo di ogni tempo) e il Grammy del 1978 come miglior disco abbiano oscurato di fatto la bravura di un lavoro non costruito per il successo (almeno non in queste dimensioni) e che nasce dalla voglia di lasciare tutto alle spalle del personale, per mettere tutte le energie nel lavoro. Il momento magico continuerà con Tusk, altro gioiello, passato alla storia per essere costato nel 1979 oltre un milione di dollari in registrazioni. Dopo un Tusk Tour grandioso, la band si ritira in Francia, dove abbandonerà il sofisticato, colto e meraviglioso suono di questi due gioielli per un pop più leggero e senza mordente. Evidentemente forse si erano riappacificati.