Product Description
Brand New — Sealed! Quality 180 Gram Vinyl 3LP European Pressing Of The Final Recordings By Jeff Buckley. Includes Inner Sleeves With Detailed Biography & Insert With Lyrics. A Collection Of Studio Tracks & 4-Track Demos Recorded In The Summer Of 1996 & Early 1997.
Jeff Buckley had been working on an album to be called ‘My Sweetheart, The Drunk’, but the album had yet to be finished at the time of his death. It was released posthumously in May 1998. Given the raw and somewhat unfinished nature of the songs, the collection that was released was called ‘Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk’. The album’s original sessions were produced by Television frontman Tom Verlaine. Despite its unfinished state, the album received many positive reviews.
Side 1:
The Sky Is A Landfill
Everybody Here Wants You
Opened Once
Nightmares By The Sea
Side 2:
Yard Of Blonde Girls
Witches’ Rave
New Year’s Prayer
Side 3:
Morning Theft
Vancouver
You & I
Side 4:
Nightmares By The Sea
New Year’s Prayer
Haven’t You Heard
I Know We Could Be So Happy Baby (If We Wanted To Be)
Side 5:
Murder Suicide Meteor Slave
Back In N.Y.C.
Gunshot Glitter
Side 6:
Demon John
Your Flesh Is So Nice
Jewel Box
Satisfied Mind
AMG –
Sketches adds several wonderful songs to his catalog, offering further proof of his immense talent. Jeff Buckley was a mess of contradictions: a perfectionist who believed in spontaneity, a man who was at once humble and vain, a musician who shunned his father's tumultuous legacy while creating one of his own. These are some of the reasons why he took his time writing and recording the material for his second album, laboring over many songs for months at a time. Given such painstaking methods, it shouldn't have been a surprise that recording was an equally fastidious process. Buckley recorded enough material for an album with producer Tom Verlaine, but deciding that the results weren't quite right, he scrapped them and moved to Memphis to record the album again. He reworked a few songs as home demos as he prepared to cut the album, but it was never made -- Buckley died in a tragic drowning accident before entering the studio. As a way to enlarge his legacy, his mother and record label rounded up the majority of the existing unreleased recordings, releasing them as the double-disc set Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk. Excepting a few awkward moments and middle-eights, it's hard to see why Buckley rejected the Verlaine productions that make up disc one. The material isn't necessarily a progression from Grace; it's more like a stripped-down, edgier take on the sweeping, jazz-tinged goth folk-rock that made the first album so distinctive. Neither the nearly finished first disc nor the homemade demos and re-recordings on the second disc offer any revelations, but that's not necessarily a disappointment. Sketches adds several wonderful songs to his catalog, offering further proof of his immense talent. And that, of course, is what makes the album as sad as it is exciting.