I'll Be Your Muse

Merri Cyr

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 was the purity that the music industry needed in the early 90's . He was raw, emotional, talented and vulnerable. For those lucky ones to have seen him perform at Sin-e, it must have been magic. He was a perfectionist - keeping so many recordings to himself only to be found after his untimely passing 17 years ago . All of those recordings remastered by others - would they have been good enough for him?

Jeff was becoming a star - much probably to his dismay. His desire was to be an artist. However, this artist was being talked about by those he called inspirations - Paul McCartney, Robert Plant, and Jimmy Page.

Where would he be today? With the world in such disarray - misconstrued values and the state of music in an odd place - would he be at the forefront of the few who have their own ideas and visions of sound?

Yes - Jeff haunted me in my dreams - and he is welcome back at any time - for Jeff has a place in my life. Albeit, this time you don't have to live under my bed. When I listen to his music, I am taken back to the shores of Australia. I can taste the bitter heartbreak of a naive love, smell the eucalyptus in the early morning, and feel the hot sun on those salty ocean days. He transports me to a memory and a time when YouTube didn't exist and visions are captured only in my mind.

On May 29, 1997 the Mississippi took the soul of a musician and offered his body to the shore at Beale Street - as a last testament to the musician he had become maybe. When I walk past St. Anne's in the morning, I imagine Jeff singing at the memorial for his father all those years ago. Jeff was a Wished for Song.

You're song

A Wished for Song

Go through the ear to the center

where sky is, where wind, where silent knowing.

Put seeds and cover them.

Blades will sprout

where you do your work.

~Jelaluddin Rumi

 

 

Just Like The Ocean Always In Love With The Moon Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk at 20

Kurt was fairly quiet and introverted most of the time. Jeff was the opposite. He was very much full of life and had a lot to say. He was somebody in love with experiencing everything. Within a very short time, he had all these famous old rock stars coming to his shows. Which put a a lot of pressure on him. People talked about his concerts the way they used to talk about Hendrix: they'd sit there, wide-eyed, telling you stories about him. He definitely had an aura. It's impossible to say what it is exactly a guy like that has, that is so attractive to other people. But he had more of it than anyone I had ever met. 

~Chris Cornell, Jeff's friend and music director of Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk.

Sketches is anything except what you'd expect for the follow up to Jeff's debut album, Grace. Jeff would be proud of that. He began writing songs for the album he wanted to call My Sweetheart the Drunk and was recording many of these songs when he swam infamously into the Wolf River on May 29, 1997. He left behind many unfinished songs and recordings that had to be interpreted and assumed finished in the way Jeff would have wanted. Helping in that, at the request of his mother, was friend Chris Cornell.

Sketches is two discs of ups and downs. There is a lot of scorn, the powerful, heartbreak, isolation, and acceptance. His lyrics show growth, chance, and not Grace part II, a leap Sony would not have been happy with for sure. 

Who knows what would have become of Jeff. The truth that music was his home - and that the music he wanted to create and enjoy. When you start to perform under fake names just to enjoy playing a small show for the sake of music...who knows how long Jeff would have survived the industry. Easier said then done now as opposed to the big label 1990's.


Twenty years since we heard what was going on in Jeff's mind and heart. There was change going on within Jeff. The sounds he used to record Grace at Bearsville Studio differs greatly from the raw sound of the songs he recorded in Memphis and in New York City for Sketches. There is one eerie similarity between the two albums: Jeff's references to river, water, and drowning. 

Below, some lyrics from each track. 

Disc 1

The Sky Is A Landfill
The storm has ripped the shelter
Of illusion from our brow
This power is no mystery to us now.
Leave your spirit genocide
The cancer you won't remove
We cast our funeral rose inside
And bury the need to prove
Our mutilation is to gain from the system  

Everybody Here Wants You
I know the tears we cried
Have dried on yesterday
The sea of fools has parted for us
There's nothing in our way
My love 
 
Opened Once
Just like the ocean
Always in love with the moon
It's overflowing now

Nightmares By The Sea
I've loved so many times and I've drowned them all
From their coral graves, they rise up when darkness falls
With their bones they'll scratch the window, I hear them call
"Don't know what you asked for." 

Yard Of Blonde Girls
Through the yard
Through the yard of blonde girls
Through the river and the sea
Gold sharks glittering
A tree of white
Breaks the earth
The streets where Lola played
   
Witches' Rave
You'd like to see him suffer
For you fantasy and thrill
He fell sick while we made love
He's out there, somewhere, still


New Year's Prayer
Leave your office
Run past your funeral
Leave your home, car
Leave your pulpit
Join us in the streets where we
Join us in the streets where we
Don't belong, don't belong
You and the stars
Throwing light
  Morning Theft
True self is what
Brought you here, to me
A place where we can
Accept this love
Friendship battered down by
Useless history 
Unexamined failure 

Vancouver
We're where we belong
It should end here
Until the end of time
Beyond the moment
That ends our bondage
I am your failed husband contender
I'm your loan shark of bliss.

You & I
You and I
Ah, the calm below that poisoned the river wild
You and I
Tears that dry on a rude awakened child
Where you look down
I've walked before
Burning holes
With eyes of liquid brown
If we had only known
In a way
We wouldn't reach this ground
You were my only home  

Disc 2
Nightmares By The Sea
Stay with me under these waves, tonight
Be free for once in your life tonight


New Year's Prayer
Stand absolved behind your electric chair, dancing
Past the sound within the sound
Past the voice within the voice
Haven't You Heard
Paranoia will write the world prayer
Make sure that you fit in the right holes
But when you take his offer, you're done for 

I Know We Could Be So Happy Baby (If We Wanted To Be)
We had a birthplace in common
We had separate beds and lives
I'll just sit here and glow
Break out the oldest pictures
Hand your ruined letters out to dry
We had a birthplace in common
And separate beds and lives
And lives, and lives 


Murder Suicide Meteor Slave
Welcome down to paradise rock
There is no single entrance
With the stars to revolve around
There is no real underground

Back In N.Y.C.
You're sitting in your comfort you don't believe I'm real,
You cannot buy protection from the way that I feel.
Your progressive hypocrites hand out their trash,
But it was mine in the first place, so I'll burn it to ash.
And I've tasted all the strongest meats,
And laid them down in colored sheets.
Laid them down in colored sheets.
Who needs illusion of love and affection
When you're out walking in the streets with your mainline connection? 


Demon John
Today or tonight
Better get yourself together
And transcend it, a burst of light
Blaze stars into me
While the love breaks through here and now 

Your Flesh Is So Nice
  Jewel Box
Diamonds from the pavement
Where a broken glass had been
Just like these troubles that I'm leaving to the wind
Like sapphires in boxcars speeding towards the end
Like thieves, my bad luck grows  

Satisfied Mind (Cover)
My Friends and My Lovers, I Will Leave, There's No Doubt
But One Things For Certain, When It Comes My Time
I'll Leave This Old World With A Satisfied Mind

Gunshot Glitter [Bonus Track]
Down to the sea out of the skies
Of gold cards and casual tears
I have only come to see you shine
Feminine smiles the right side is wise, more than I.
I wanna be your lover,
Lipstick my name across your mirror.
Blood red with flaked gunshot glitter
And be one with all you disowned in your young life. You paranoia politician diva.
You paranoia politician diva. 
 
Thousand Fold [Bonus Track]
There ain't a star born that brightens
More than you, you always should have known,
I'll illuminate your question,
Long time ago I'd died and gone.
What has brought the question?
Time has brought the question.
Come and call the question,
Oh, oh, oh.
Here are the stars, same thing again

I am a railroad track abandoned
With the sunset
Forgetting
I ever happened
That I ever happened