The Immortal Words of Jeff Buckley


 "BE THE BEST
NO NEGATIVITY
NO WEAKNESS
NO AQUIESCENCE TO FEAR
OR DISASTER
NO ERRORS OF IGNORANCE
NO EVASION OF REALITY"


"I'm still not comfortable with what I do. Every time I get home after a show, I feel really strange - like when you wake up in the morning and you realize that you went out the night before, got high, and told some stranger all the most intimate details of your life. It's kind of embarrassing."

"Someday I'd like to become you, and to know what it's like to feel me inside....When I wake up in your hair, when I wake up in your arms...
I swear upon my blood I understand you.
I swear on my grave, I understand you."


"Your task is to claim responsibility for your own perfection."


"Fear is an exit sign.
Fear is just a door...either to transformation,
or enlightenment to a tragic illusion you have."


"MUSIC is my mother..and my father..
it is my work and my rest...my blood...
my compass...my love."


"It's all about supporting the voice - any real guitar player should know that. Rhythm and melody are the king and queen and it's all to support the voice - ask Keith Richards, ask Robert Johnson. Because of my interest in jazz, modality and harmonies were all things I enjoyed, but playing it on the guitar I just sounded like a complete wanker, some lounge bar guy. Then I got really into tunings and that's how I found my cornucopia. I use loads of tunings and that's where you get different and interesting tonalitites whilst still being guitar-ish, and simultaneously creating texture and drama."


"I'm convinced that the guitar must have been invented in a bar by some drunken Spaniard, some guy who'd just been kicked out of his house. I mean, you listen to it - you get it in tune in G and it's never in tune in E major, and when you get in tune E major it's not in tune in G. It's wierd. All those blues guys used to tune the G string a little bit sharper, and though that makes it out of tune, it tempers the sound in other ways. It's a beautifully chaotic instrument."


"The crucifix is a monument to what people really truly want to believe about life - the sick notion that suffering is the ultimate expression of this life.
Not dance, not making love, but sacrifice.
That's some evil shit."


"Life is total chaos."


"When I was younger I wanted to be Miles Davis. He gave me a really deep love of jazz, the stuff where the composition has a seduction to it. Fusion or jazz rock just annoys the hell out of me, especially the fact that it's still here today. All I see there is a lot of people who are afraid of what real music is. I don't see any heart, I just see a lot of chops and whizzkid bullshit, and a lot of damage being done. Miles was naked, very romantic."


"Rentless, endless joy peaking into tears, resting in calmness, a simmering beauty. If you let yourself listen with the whole of yourself, you will have the pure feeling of flight while firmly rooted to the ground. Your soul can fly outward, stringed to your ribcage like a shimmering kite in the shape of an open hand. Be still and listen to the evidence of your own holiness."


"Our suffering is peeling off and revealing a brand new skin, a new power. Love heals all wounds and not just time alone."


"I admit it, for a time I delved into the evils of what being a guitar player can bring, what I call the God of Wank syndrome. Every kid does it. When I first got a guitar I used to put my marbles on it and listen to them rolling down my guitar - that's more like what I play like now. The guitar is a mysterious instrument, but a lot of the mystery has gone or has been hidden. It's like when people have real hard, meaningless sex all the time they become insensitive - to me that's like what the guitar has become. But that doesn't mean that aspect doesn't exist - you've just got to find it."


"I like low stage volume. I want the idea and the sound of the idea to intoxicate--not the voltage. Otherwise it's mindless thrusting that brings nothing but repulsion. Once you have stacks of Marshalls, you need stacks of people to take care of them. Plus you have to jump around and get nipple piercings."


"The thing is that I also like to have lyrics that are inclusive, that give you space to be inside them, to put your experience on to them, so that they can move through other moments."


"All the metal guys have got nothing anymore. To me, it was always a bit played out but it's really on its last legs now. You got the guys in Motley Crue totally pierced and tattooed with their fake punk outfits, and the music still sounds like Troubador, Sunset Strip bullshit. These are the guys that used to yell at punks, and now they're wearing their boots. Pathetic."


"Sometimes things get my brain in a twist and reading your words of support really does my heart good. I shouldn't think so much."


"There's a way of writing where you just include all the streets around your house and all the people you meet. You actually name them autobiographically in the song. Well, that song is very hard to travel through time. It may not last in its meaning. It may not touch every time because those people and events fade away and they may mean something to your life and your understanding of that life. I like things to be more universal. It's a balance between...Obviously it's got to grab some skin from me."


"I like the way that songs sort of have light, and sort of travel around despite you. It's good. It helps to have songs that you love, that you can be inside. It's good. It's part of the invention."


"On the outside of that you can say that I find great joy in the things that are sad. That's the way emotions are in people. They fall down on you and there's no way to get out, except to go through it. There's no way you can control it, there's no essay you can write to answer yourself out of it. It just soaks you like the rain. There's nothing you can do. Then it's gone and then another comes around. But tears are not all I deal with. I'll leave that to the next album."


"If I wasn't able to do this," says Buckley, "I think I would really lay down and die. Music comes from a very primal, twisted place. When a person sings, their body, their mouth, their eyes, their words, their voice says all these unspeakable things that you really can't explain but that mean something anyway. People are completely transformed when they sing; people look like that when they sing or when they make love. But it's a weird thing--at the end of the night I feel strange, because I feel I've told everybody all my secrets."


"Moving to the East Side from California was the most extreme and successful self-rescue operation I'd ever implemented. Otherwise I was going to rot from the inside. It was do or die. I've always done music, been in bands, but at the time I was staring at the walls, with no hope and no confidence."


"New York permeates every aspect of the media and art, therefore, sooner or later, it's there that you find yourself. When I was still living in California that people that fascinated me were always from New York. I was tired of being on the west coast because I felt I didn't belong; I could never be tired of New York. But here there's also a lot of fear. It's difficult for a woman in this city. Damnably difficult. It makes me angry. If women wear something that's even minutely sexy, they feel such a lot of stares that even a simple walk through the streets becomes difficult. There's a lot of anger and tension between the sexes, out on the streets. But there's also a lot of romanticism in the air. It's the city of hate, but also the city of love."


"It was after that night," Jeff says of quitting Gods & Monsters, "that I knew I needed to invoke the real essence of my voice. I didn't know what it tasted like at all. I knew I had to get down to work and that anything else would be a distraction. In that band there were conflicts. It was really crazy, a desperate situation. I just didn't need things to be desperate. I needed them to be natural."


"The first time I heard "How Soon Is Now" (by the Smiths), I can remember things changing in myself. It was 1984, in my friend's apartment in this really horrible building in Hollywood. We were there eating some sort of horrible food, with ketchup 'cos we didn't have any money, and it came on the television. The video was great,but the song completely blew everything away. At the time you've got pretty much nothing, except Prince and heavy metal hair bands and I've never heard of The Smiths before and it was like, whooosh, I went out and got Meat Is Murder. It was the first time I ever heard writing like that over music like that. It influenced me because the writing was so great, because Morrissey's lyrics were so great in such a way, I don't know, like just completely freaky, unique. Really cool and not only literate, because that's a real precious term to use for it. It was just a better world than what I'd been hearing, and clever in a real admirable way, not in an annoying way. It really felt like the steam of teapots and uniforms and public schools, some sort of distant romantic vision of what it meant to be English."


"I don't have any allegiance to an organized religion; I have an allegiance to the gifts that I find for myself in those religions... I'd rather be non-denominational, except for music. I prefer to learn everything through music. If you want divinity, the music in every human being and their love for music is pretty much it. It's the big indication of their spirituality and their ability to love and make love, or feel pain or joy, and really manifest it, really be real. But I don't believe in a big guy with a beard on a throne, telling us that we're bad; I certainly don't believe in original sin. I believe in the opposite of that: you have an Eden immediately from the time you are born, but as you are conditioned by your caretakers and your surroundings, you may lose that original thing. Your task is to get back to it, to claim responsibility for your own perfection."


"In order to live my ideal life...non-evasion and pro-confrontation ORIGINALITY�as far as conducting the total awareness life in which you plug into "now" and constantly push ahead, constantly develop and grow. The thing is that I want it all next week, right now, this millisecond...life should sparkle and rush, burn with fire hot like melting steel, like freeze-burn from a comet."


On Life :: "The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It's worth being bashed against. It's worth getting scarred by. It's worth pouring yourself over every one of it's hot coals."


On Music Videos :: "It's more like, it's definately a promotional device. Like there's you, there's Eddie Vedder, there's toothpaste, there's pimple cream, there's Nirvana, there's Weezer"


On His Christmas Wish :: ..."A brand new ozone layer"


On His Notebooks :: "Before I left NY for the last time all I was obsessing about in my notebooks was that there's this...this place I want to get to. And I was remarking to myself that there's no teachers. There was nobody to show me. They weren't alive"


On His Astrological Sign :: "Beavis with Butthead Rising"


On His Family :: "My grandfather on my mother's side wooed my grandmother by singing to her from across the street.(stepfather)was seriously into really good music and he was a car mechanic.He was only my stepfather for about two years but he made a really big impression.He actually came to San Francisco to see me play for the first time ever, and it was really great.My voice has been handed down through the men in my family for generations."


On Sin-é :: "I made the audience a part of the music like they were samples on a record."


On Sensitivity :: "Sensitivity isn't about being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom"


On The Music Business :: "The music business is the most childish business in the world."


On People :: "We are spirits and the whole tension isthat we don't know that we are. Yet music is able to touch this."


On No Lyrics with Grace :: "In my esteem it didn't really look all that good on paper, and I was a bit self-conscious about it. Sometimes it's better just to garner your own interpretations of the song."


On Electric Guitar :: "The electric guitar actually has a very warm sound, and there are things you can do with it that you can't do in an accoustic mode."


On Music :: "The beauty of it now is that I can record it onto a disc or play it live. It's the only thing that's been really great to me all the time.


On Songwriting and Vocals :: "Dreams.I have notebooks everywhere I go. I'm always day dreaming. Or things that happen to me...It's just about being alive, my songs. It's about the voice carrying much more information than words do."


On Eternal Life :: "That's a pretty primitive song of mine.And I put it on the record to - prove it could, to myself and to the song just to you know, just to get on with it.Not to anybody else really."


On Dream Brother :: "Was finished right at the last minute."


On So Real :: "I wrote with Michael in about a day."


On High School :: "High school was just a joke. Not the information, but the people."


On Memories :: "Do you ever have one of those memories where you think you remember a taste or a feel of something, maybe an object, but the feeling is so bizzare and imperceptible that you just can't quite yet get a hold of it? It drives you crazy."


On Himself :: "I'm just thoroughly self - critical."


On His Childhood in California :: "I was rootless trailer trash."


On Tim Buckley :: "Robert Plant and Jimmy Page have much more influence on me than he ever did. That was the first voice I really fell in love with. Young Robert Plant back when he sounded like Janis(Joplin)."


On Symphony No.3 by Henryk Gorecki :: "It's the saddest piece of music you'll ever hear. At different times for me, it either gives me ultimate hope or just makes me want to slash my wrists with a house cat."


On the Sin-é EP :: "It's like a love letter to that place. I love Sin-é. I did like five and a half hours worth of material. It was just like a learning ground for me for some very specific things that I wanted to get in touch with. I didn't even mean to be signed. It's a preview of things to come, that's just a phase in my life."


On Nina Simone :: "I love her taste and her sorrow. But it's not just sorrow, there's a lot of irony. And when she sings upbeat tunes, she rocks."


On Rough Power - Iggy and the Stooges (Bootleg Tape) :: "It's the version of 'Raw Power' that they brought to the record executives, who ran screaming for David Bowie to remix it. The guitars are much ruder, and it's got weird backing vocals. I love it even though I know bootlegs are dastardly things."


On Shudder to Think :: "They're the anti-rock stars I've always hoped for."


On The Gemini Suite - John Lord (Deep Purple) :: "Lord, who's from Deep Purple, was commissioned by the BBC to write this orchestral piece. It's Spinal Tap made real. It's the worst piece of crap you'll ever hear, and I love it."


"You fuck! Dick! Bootleggin' our show man! You're going to study it? Let me tell you... music school friends, dead head friends, and a miracle. Alright, just roll your tapes."