Jeff Buckley is perhaps second to only T-Rex’s Marc Bolan when it comes to the indiscriminate dredging of his vaults for anything resembling a recording to package and release to the public.

The dude only had one album — a ten-song set featuring three covers — yet since his untimely death in 1997 we have seen the release of three albums, including the double-disc Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, five live albums, two best-of collections, a box set of EPs, various reissues of Grace, and the ridiculous expansion of his four song Live At Sin-e EP to a three-disc edition capturing every noise Buckley ever muttered at the cafe, including such vital between-song musings as ‘Monologue – Matt Dillon, Hollies, Classic Rock Radio (Live)’ and  ‘Monologue – False Start, Apology, Miles Davis (Live)’.

Now we will have the pleasure of leafing through his deeply personal journals… or something he wrote down once, with the release of His Own Voice. That’s the problem with the quality control of Buckley’s estate, we just don’t know what this will be. The release promises handwritten journals, notes, and lyric sheets, alongside unseen photos and artifacts from his archive. Of course, there are the moral issues of mass-producing and releasing the personal writings of a private person, too, but that’s an argument for elsewhere.

“So many times while working on [biography] Dream Brother, I wondered why Jeff, one of the most charismatic and powerful musicians to emerge in the Nineties, made certain decisions or went down certain roads,” Rolling Stone contributing editor David Browne, who is assembling the book with Buckley’s mother, said in a statement. “Now, with more of his journals available to us, we can get answers to some of those questions and learn more about his creative process and restlessly searching mind.”

Buckley’s mother Mary Guibert adds: “There have been and probably always will be those who wish to speak for my son, take credit for his success or put words in his mouth. In choosing these pages to share with the world, I’m giving him the chance to speak with his own voice, for the record … and for his fans to see what a sweet, funny, amazing human being he was.”

The book won’t be published until 2019, to co-incide with the 25th anniversary of Grace, which will no doubt be reissued in many, many formats including a ten-disc edition with bonus colouring book, map of Jeff’s childhood neighbourhood, and his middle school assignment on Abraham Lincoln.

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