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Jeff Buckley Quotes

Jeffrey Scott Buckley , raised as Scott Moorhead, was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. After a decade as a session guitarist in Los Angeles, Buckley amassed a following in the early 1990s by playing cover songs at venues in Manhattan's East Village such as Sin-é, gradually focusing more on his own material. After rebuffing much interest from record labels and his father's manager, Herb Cohen, he signed with Columbia, recruited a band, and recorded what would be his only studio album, Grace, in 1994.

Over the following three years, the band toured extensively to promote the album, including concerts in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Australia. In 1996, they stopped touring and made sporadic attempts to record Buckley's second album in New York City with Tom Verlaine as producer.

In 1997, Buckley moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to resume work on the album, to be titled My Sweetheart the Drunk, recording many four-track demos while also playing weekly solo shows at a local venue. On May 29, 1997, while awaiting the arrival of his band from New York, he drowned during a spontaneous evening swim, fully clothed, in the Mississippi River when he was caught in the wake of a passing boat; his body was found on June 4.Since his death, there have been many posthumous releases of his material, including a collection of four-track demos and studio recordings for his unfinished second album My Sweetheart the Drunk, expansions of Grace, and the Live at Sin-é EP. Chart success also came posthumously: with his cover of Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" he attained his first number one on Billboard's Hot Digital Songs in March 2008 and reached number 2 in the UK Singles Chart that December. Buckley and his work remain popular and are regularly featured in "greatest" lists in the music press; in 2004, Rolling Stone listed him at number 39 on their list of greatest singers of all time. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. November 1966 – 29. May 1997
Jeff Buckley photo
Jeff Buckley: 29 quotes64 likes

Famous Jeff Buckley Quotes

“I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.”

Jeff Buckley

“I love anything that haunts me… and never leaves”

Jeff Buckley

“Why do they always show Christ up there bleeding and dying on the cross? We don't remember John Lennon lying there with a bullet hole in his head. I'm against the arbitrary organization of 'God' as a concept. We should all experience it all individually and purely. I don't agree with the separation of God and the body, I don't believe that we aren't a part of 'it', I don't agree that it's a man. In most religions there's no place for women. There aren't any women in the Holy Trinity and I need that. I love women, I came from a woman.”

Jeff Buckley

B-Side Magazine, October/November 1994
From Interviews

“She's a tear that hangs inside my soul forever”

Jeff Buckley

Jeff Buckley Quotes about love

“Everything I ever projected New York to be, it was—even the stinky, ratty, vomity part of it. Everybody has to do the subway. Everybody has to smell the same smells. And people get mad all the time. When people don’t like something, like ‘Get out of my way you blah, blah, blah.’ But [in L. A. ] it’s like, ‘How ya doing? Let’s do lunch! I love you!”

Jeff Buckley

KCRW – Man In The Moon (January 4, 1994)
From Interviews

“Interviewer: "So Jeff, what are your main musical influences?" Jeff (after a long pause): "Love, anger, depression, joy and dreams…. And Zeppelin. Totally."”

Jeff Buckley

From Grace EPK (Electronic Press Kit)

“I just love his spirit and his whole energy, and I also love when men use their voice so unselfconsciously, and just really…feminine, masculine, all over the place. And he just, um…he was and is my favorite.”

Jeff Buckley

w:Alanis Morissette - from MTV 120 Minutes, 1999.

Jeff Buckley Quotes

“I once took a ride to the beach in L. A., and all along the shore there were all these so-called jazz places. And I saw these college guys and session players playing this fusion Muzak stuff. It was just a lot of notes, and the more notes they played, the more it kept them from expressing anything. So I came back home and got out my Zeppelin albums.”

Jeff Buckley

О музыке

“Too young to hold on and too old to just break free and run”

Jeff Buckley

“I want to be ripped apart by music. I want it to be something that feeds and replenishes, or that totally sucks the life out of you. I want to be dashed against the rocks.”

Jeff Buckley

“Words are beautiful but restricted. They're very masculine, with a compact frame. But voice is over the dark, the place where there's nothing to hang on: it comes from a part of yourself that simply knows, expresses itself, and is.”

Jeff Buckley

“The only goal is in the process. The process is the thing…with little flashes of light here and there. Those are the gigs, those are the live shows. But it’s the life in between—that’s all I got.”

Jeff Buckley

From Grace EPK (Electronic Press Kit)

“That’s what I wanted to do. You know, 2 hours. It’s like long-distance running or playing in a football game when you totally run out of steam and the moves you make after you run out of steam, because you’re totally unselfconscious, you’re not even thinking about the mechanics anymore. The moves you make then are incredible.”

Jeff Buckley

From Grace EPK (Electronic Press Kit)

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

Jeff Buckley

Sebastian Bach – Skid Row from Skid Row's Forever Wild DVD, before covering Eternal Life

“And what do I want people to get from the music? Whatever they want. Whatever you like. Somebody asked me what I wanted to do. I just said I wanted to…just to give back to it what it’s given me. And to meet all the other people that are doing it…just to be in the world, really.”

Jeff Buckley

From Grace EPK (Electronic Press Kit)

“I wanted to fuse together my favorite elements of rock and soul singers into something I could call my own. The inflections of Stevie Wonder with the soaring qualities of someone like Buckley. It was his emotional intensity that inspired me more than anything. Also, Jeff came along at a time most singers weren’t using their upper register. His approach helped me embrace the fact that I was a tenor. I owe that guy a lot.”

Jeff Buckley

Myles Kennedy - Alter Bridge Frontman from an online Jamie Vendera interview (http://www.jaimevendera.com/myleskennedyi.html)

“It was the kind of collaboration I dream about actually. His voice sounded, you know, like an angel. Like a gift from God.”

Jeff Buckley

Gary Lucas – Guitarist from NBC Edgewise Tribute on MSNBC from 1997.

“This beautiful-looking guy with a fur coat and mad, curly hair walked in. He went to the bar and got a pint of Guinness, then plugged in his Fender and began to sing. Everybody was completely blown away. Who was it? It was Jeff Buckley.”

Jeff Buckley

Douglas Payne of Travis from Dream Brother (the book) written by David Browne.

“His voice is an incredible instrument, angelic and powerful and mean at the same time. Tortured. He has been a huge inspiration and influence to me over the last two years. This tune is just unreal.”

Jeff Buckley

Jonny Lang – Blues artist, from Rolling Stone Magazine, issues #820, September 2, 1999

“Jeff Buckley is one of the greatest vocalists that I’ve ever heard. Listening to him is inspiring, moving, spiritual. What a gift. He’s inspired many admirers and imitators but no one can duplicate him.”

Jeff Buckley

John Legend from the liner notes of So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley

“Jeff Buckley was a pure drop in an ocean of noise.”

Jeff Buckley

Bono of U2 from Mojo Magazine, August 1997

“People my age all flocked to see Jeff, you know. Because we were so, just to hear that voice again. He would have been so pissed off with it by now. All these old toothless hags hanging around the stage door you know. He was just shit hot, I gotta say.”

Jeff Buckley

Chrissie Hynde from the BBC Documentary "Everybody Here Wants You"

“On the subject of dedication to a craft in addition talent, I was and especially the singing, were so original, so powerful, and so accomplished, that the tragedy of his loss, after making only the one record (though a flood of demos and live recordings was released in his wake), seemed ever more poignant. It was clear to me that Jeff Buckley had been one of the few Great Ones, a one-in-a-billion talent, a true voice of his generation, and at thirty, he had hardly begun. Whatever is left behind in the passing of a rare talent, so much is always lost.”

Jeff Buckley

Neil Peart drummer from Rush from the book, Traveling Music: Play Back the Soundtrack to My Life and Times.

“He quite clearly had his feet on the ground and his head and his imagination was flying way, way out there, beyond, beyond.”

Jeff Buckley

Jimmy Page – Guitarist from Led Zeppelin/The Yardbirds/solo from the BBC Documentary "Everybody Here Wants You"

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