Thirteen years ago this Saturday 29th May the celebrated troubadour Jeff Buckley took a fateful swim in the Mississippi River, tragically cutting short a career in which he released only one EP and album, the untouchable Grace, as well as a number of posthumous cash-in demos and outtakes collections.
The son of celebrated cult singer songwriter Tim Buckley, he avoided growing up in his father’s shadow, renaming himself Scotty Muirhead for much of his teens and early adulthood.
It was only after almost a decade as an axe slinger for hire in New York City that he turned his attention to recording, after well received solo shows around the East Village. Self described as ‘a horrible laze-about, terribly undisciplined’ in an interview on 3RRR during his first Australian tour in 1995, Buckley only released two official recordings on Columbia, the EP Live at Sin-é recorded at the eponymous cafe in New York City, and the faultless Grace, of which three of the ten songs were covers.
For such a small official discography, Buckley’s legacy is massive, inspiring a whole generation of songwriters and opening up the infinite possibilities of song writing to many. Possessed of a voice and delivery that could quite literally manipulate human emotions and even bodies at ease, Buckley’s fateful fully clothed swim as he was on the way to the studio to begin recordings for what would have been his second album is all the more tragic.
A polite and infinitely smart musician, Buckley was also possessed of a level of intensity rare even in artists. Whether his death was accidental or a confrontation with powers greater than he could confront remains unresolved, but he left a legacy untainted and without blemish, merely the oft wondered possibility of what could have been.
Saddled with a prodigious talent still universally acclaimed by audiences, critics, and fellow musicians alike as an artist of a generation, Buckley still maintained an every man humbleness, telling Stephen ‘The Ghost’ Walker in the same 1995 interview that he just tried to remain true to those around him.
‘ Yeah, I don’t know, there’s a tremendous amount of energy that goes in to living an ordinary life,…from which all other things about your life come. Just, relationships with people you care about, or your enemies, or, you know, strangers, or people who claim to be your friends and lie, or people who… you know, all kinds of things. So, that’s enough.’
