Jeff Buckley 3: Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk

In the last week of May 1997, the entertainment world was reacting to the news that Bob Dylan had been hospitalized with a potentially fatal heart condition. Our relief at his full recovery turned out to be a distraction, for while we were gazing furtively in Bob’s direction, Jeff Buckley was reported missing, and then dead, having drowned during a moonlight swim in the Mississippi River. He was 30 years old.

He had gone to Memphis on a quest to jumpstart ideas for his second album; in fact, his band had arrived that night to rehearse some of his new material. Unfortunately, nothing was ever recorded past the demos he’d made in his rented Memphis house, and the aborted sessions from the previous fall, produced by Television’s Tom Verlaine, which, again, had been deemed sub-par by the artiste.

It was inevitable, but not a given, that his last recordings would be distributed, and both estate and record label were wise to make it happen before bootleggers did. They also made sure not to make it anything it wasn’t, such as finished. Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk presents two discs worth of those studio tracks and home demos of the songs attempted for the album he never completed.

The album is, in the end, something of a disappointment; how could it not be otherwise? The studio sessions sound pretty complete to these ears, though one can see that he might have found them not quite worthy of release; after all, he had set the bar pretty high with Grace. “The Sky Is A Landfill” makes an excellent opener, musically gripping if a bit thick on lyrics. The slow and sultry “Everybody Here Wants You” was pushed as a single, with the hope it would become a slow jam classic. “Opened Once” is even quieter, and more effective. The edgy “Nightmares By The Sea” has an infectious pulse, while “Yard Of Blonde Girls” (a cover) is nice and trashy.

“Witches’ Rave” doesn’t quite catch fire despite a pretty opening melody, but leads well into “New Year’s Prayer”, something of a chant. “Morning Theft” fills the “Hallelujah” role here, a softly sung ballad with lightly strummed electric guitar until some keyboards add atmosphere. “Vancouver” had been played instrumentally by the band at a few gigs already; here the sinister 12-string riff gets a set of lyrics. “You & I”, a long, vocal-only meditation, closes the first disc.

The second disc is a little more, well, sketchy. Alternate mixes of “Nightmares By The Sea” and “New Year’s Prayer” set up a final band recording, “Haven’t You Heard”, which shows some potential. From there, the bulk of the disc is devoted to the demos he was hoping to flesh out with the band. Most teeter between dissonance and polish, and it’s difficult to imagine how the band might have changed them. A one-man-band recreation of “Back In N.Y.C.” by Genesis is fascinating if only for his reproductive ability. A 1992 radio performance of “Satisfied Mind” ends the program. (Two other demos appeared on various international versions of the album; “Thousand Fold”, which the Japanese got, is better than everything on disc two. These are now included on the streaming version of the album.)

Every death is sad, no matter how long the person was alive. In this age of hyperbole and mangled language, it’s common to put labels where they don’t belong, like referring to all movie stars as actors. The loss of Jeff Buckley, however, when he was teeming with creativity, was and remains a tragedy.

Jeff Buckley Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk (1998)—3