music of the week – jeff buckley
these songs are by jeff buckley.
if you want some music with soul, you want jeff buckley. if you’ve heard of jeff buckley then i’m sure you have heard the story by now: a mega-talented, one-in-a-million artist gets discovered and records a landmark debut album that is critically acclaimed by just about everyone. in the middle of recording his second album, he drowns and the world has lost a legend in the making. seriously tragic. well, luckily many live recordings of buckley exist. on of which is ‘jeff buckley live at sin-e’ which features 4 amazing songs. well, columbia released the legacy edition of ‘live at sin-e’ a couple of years ago. the legacy edition is pretty much everything they recorded during those two sessions. it includes 33 tracks on two discs and one dvd with four live songs. if you like what you hear at all here, go out and buy his first full length, ‘grace’ which you can pick up rediculously cheap. once you’ve got that down i recommend this legacy edition of ‘live at sin-e’. before he died, his second album was in the works and the bulk of the tracks were recorded. they mixed it post-mortum and released it as ‘sketches for my sweetheart the drunk’. i have to say that that album is really rough. the skeleton of the songs is in place but it’s really apparant that these songs are not the way that they were meant to be heard, so i would save this album until later on in your jeff buckley development.
i shall be released
this first song is a bob dylan cover. this song really shows the soul that he was capable of. it’s nothing like the original. he could take a great song and remake it into something totally different but equally as good, if not better.
hallelujah
if you’ve heard anything by jeff buckley, you’ve heard next song. this is a leonard cohen cover. but instead of the album version, this is the version from ‘live at sin-e’, it’s a little more meandering, but it gets you there just the same. this song is amazing. trust me.
[audio:JeffBuckley-Hallelujah.mp3]