Kyle: Today we're talking about Grace by Jeff Buckley.
Cliff: For me, this record was one of those nice swift kicks in the ass
because I don't understand why I didn't already love this record, why I didn't
care as much about the individual songs as so many people that I admire on some
of the deepest musical levels possible I have been shocked I had heard of
people like Jimmy Page mentioned Jeff Buckley before but had never heard him
gone far enough down the rabbit hole to understand what he was actually saying
about this and the words that he used.
Jimmy Page specifically is a person who's like famously kind of shits on
other people and definitely doesn't use superlatives to describe the musicality
of other people who weren't in his band at that literal moment in time.
Kyle: He has such a boomer attitude about music.
If it was made after Led Zeppelin, it sucks.
Except grace
Cliff: Yup.
And he is breathless about it.
Calls it one of his favorite albums at that time of that decade, said
that, you know, would say things like he couldn't stop listening to it.
when he and Robert plant end up making a plan to go see a particular artist,
cause they're performing nearby.
And then when you start to connect that dot, as we'll talk about,
like, this is why it made it, the whole thing just felt like a.
Kick in the pants, like understanding how they talked
about it and then understanding, Oh, this whole loop is complete.
Jeff Buckley is obsessed with them.
He's imitating them.
This is like literally the highest praise you could achieve inside of musicality for
like the modern era of blues rock music and like, Here's this just unassuming
singular record that existed from this one moment in time from a person who
didn't Exist long enough to show us what would happen after they followed up a
record like this And it just this whole process just really blew me away in a way.
I didn't expect.
Kyle: 30 short years on earth.
We got with this guy, like it'll really make you believe in cosmic messengers.
And some people were just cosmically ordained and the stardust of their
bodies to like bring the divine to us.
Um, it's.
It's hard after you learn the things we've learned, to feel like Jeff Buckley was
anything other than one of those things.
And, and he was not only a Led Zeppelin fan, like that, that
undersells it a great deal.
Physical graffiti was a gift from his stepfather, was the first record he owned
and became the blueprint for everything.
So parents listening, if this is nothing, if not a testament to
like, make sure the first album and show your kid gets are good.
Not saying they're going to turn out to be Jeff Buckley because
they unequivocally will not.
But.
They can go in pretty special directions if you give them pretty special tools.
Cliff: Yep.
Nope.
It was realizing that that example of Led Zeppelin and Jeff Buckley was
just one in a constellation of people who were falling over themselves
to talk about how good he was.
And so, I just for this episode in particular, it's cool to just come
right out and say, I didn't get it.
I still kind of don't get it.
But like I am trusting the words and the lineage of people who do get it
whose opinions I respect so deeply That I can like ride that wave on
into this record Learn a lot about it.
Enjoy it differently than I had before And certainly come to respect it on
a much deeper level than I had before I had Kind of gone in intentionally.
Kyle: So, so two things real quick and then we can dive in.
One, yes, a lot of musical heroes, uh, law this record and I know we'll
name check a bunch of them later on, but the, my entry point was in
late high school or early college.
Good looking cool girls all seem to like this record.
And I had, uh, Lover You Should Have Come Over on my iPod accordingly,
but that was kind of like it.
And, you know, the Hallelujah cover is a, is a whole, whole other ballgame.
But then also not, not only did people recognize something sort of special
and cosmic and containing multitudes in him he, I think, aspired to contain
the whole of all good music in himself.
I will lean often on the phenomenal writing of Daphne Brooks, who wrote the
33 and a third book on Grace and as a professional writer of sorts myself, I
will just say I was moved few, a few times to the point of tears reading
this book, just really dazzling, phenomenal writing and she said of him.
Uh, the many things she said of him in the book, uh, I thought this summed it
up nicely, a 30 year old white boy who stretched himself valiantly across a whole
gamut of sound from Ella Fitzgerald to Led Zeppelin from Mahalia Jackson to the
Melvins in a series of Fearlessly poetic musical boundary crossing Jeff Buckley's
scored the achingly beautiful soundtrack to an entire generation's odyssey of
difference and deliverance, diversity and discontent, a quote, mystery white boy.
He was possibility hope the manifestation of all that post
revolution turmoil entangled with itself in a sweet, bitter embrace.
All right, give us some context.
what literally was grace?
the album, not the thing.
Cliff: Favorite of Gen Xers released in August of 1994.
Uh, and part of the reason this whole thing is so fascinating
and mysterious, right?
His only actual full length studio album.
This record was not an immediate success in the traditional ways of measuring
that, uh, it has been one of those pieces of art that we've talked about
in other episodes and, and other related artists that we've discussed where,
uh, only posthumously do they really grow in accolade and praise and, um,
Almost reputation of the piece itself.
And so in that case that's really what grace has become.
We know that people were in love with it while he was alive.
So we know that it is not just an effect of him no longer being here or, you
know, projecting onto something else.
But certainly the amount of attention that people have paid to it in the time
since then, uh, has grown significantly.
Kyle: I think it was cool to see in the wiki.
Uh, they, they sort of chart like how it has climbed on
ranking list over the years.
Every time they revisit one of those big lists, grace always gets moved up,
which isn't always the case with records.
It's now 99 and Colin Larkin's all time top a thousand records.
And Colin Larkin said his music achieved a perfection that was
staggering for a debut album.
Cliff: A few things that are definitely interesting about it, though, that
I think for the lesser initiated or uninitiated will, I I think having
this key before you try to understand it for the first time will help.
Okay?
This dude's voice, he had a four octave vocal range, okay?
He was directly compared to having the same range as Pavarotti.
so, that's not just a really good artist, that is like Mariah Carey, Celine Dion
levels of vocal control, where now all of a sudden you have twice the space
to play out vocals that correspond with guitars, which is going to really
come in handy if you're a fan of someone like Robert Plant who's going
to stretch way on the upper end of it.
And if you can switch into that mode.
The pure surface area of your music.
Expands and changes at that point.
And I think going into these songs, understanding that level of not only
control, but capability that he had helped sort of unlock what it is
he's doing in some of these moments.
But then also something I'll point out.
Probably point out as we go along a number of times things really clicked into place.
The more I watch live videos, like I understood why people clamored to get
to this dude while he was performing because between the, thought and
presentation that he brought to it and the capabilities that he brought in.
improvising or creating new ways of doing particular songs or changing the
way a song would work in a given time.
He was channeling the lineage of the people that he studied and loved in music,
whether that's blues tradition or just the songwriting tradition of, you know, slowly
adding or changing verses over time.
Like, All of this swirling mass of stuff.
He found a way to channel directly into not only his live performances, but
like we said, this literally singular full length studio album from the
mid nineties, that is just people can return to it over and over again to
figure out that, yeah, they were right.
It was really good back then when they first heard it and
they still think it's good now.
Kyle: And to call it a debut is really deceptive because, to your point,
he'd been honing material or like sort of excavating stuff Soulquarian
style for two straight years.
He was playing weekly gigs at Sine Cafe.
In New York and recordings of that, thankfully are out now, but you can
see where he has taken on everything from, Van Morrison to strange fruit,
which is like a bold choice for a white dude at a coffee house and stuff would
stretch into eight, 10, 13 minutes.
Renditions and there's always searching and striving and expansiveness in it
like there's just a sense of bigness which for an intimate venue like a
coffeehouse is a strange thing to do.
A scribe.
But he was seasoned.
I mean, he'd, he'd been playing a lot, which I know you'll get
into by the time we got to Grace.
So it's like, it's a entry level position with 20 years of job experience,
like all employers seem to want.
Cliff: Yeah, so, just to pile on, especially before we go a little
further into the things that were really happening at the moment where he was,
uh, Again, putting those so called 20 years of experience into practice.
You know, I already mentioned a little bit of something that
was impactful to me personally.
Like, I, you know, I deeply connect with the music of Led
Zeppelin for a number of reasons.
But one of them is the I just, I vibe with the reverence that those people have
for music and how impossible it is for most people to achieve an appropriately
elevated level of musicality.
they kind of hate everything because nothing's good enough.
Whether they have the self awareness to know that's because they've been able
to spend their whole lives cultivating it and other people can't, who knows.
The, the way that they connect and almost judge other music has
helped me to find other places to start and expand and explore.
Because if they're willing to point at something, it's something
I'm willing to pay attention to.
And so, while they won't be the only ones I'll mention here in a second,
like, One of the quotes that really kind of blew me away was that, so Jimmy
Page and Jeff Buckley met each other.
Um, they cried.
They both cried when they met each other.
And in the most sincere moment I can imagine Jimmy Page being a part of, ever.
There was a recognition that Jimmy Page was hearing himself in Jeff,
who was a guitar player and a vocalist who was part of the band.
Really channeling a lot of what Led Zeppelin was doing.
But like, even beyond those, Bob Dylan said that Jeff Buckley was one of the
greatest songwriters of the decade.
David Bowie said that Grace was the best album ever made.
And that if he, it was his Desert Island album.
So, Even though we took one particular channel for me to start to show
how kind of blown away I was by the accolade, like that should be another
pretty solid lineup there already, uh, of people who are across the
spectrum of music, who all somehow are seeing something similar despite
having totally different approaches to how music ought to be written.
Like, I can't think of honestly three different people from a similar
time period more apart than Jimmy Page, Bob Dylan, and David Bowie.
I
Kyle: worked with Patty Smith.
He started work, uh, with Tim Verlaine of television they, they started
to work together on the very early formation of the followup to grace.
He sent Radiohead in a whole different direction because of Tom York.
There's just almost No, nowhere that this dude hasn't touched in the past 25 years.
And this, this album was released in 94 and it's so set apart from the rest of
its cultural context, you know, you think about we have Nevermind and in utero at
this point, we have Pearl Jam's 10, we have like all, all of grunge has sort of
risen up and started to, Explode outward.
I guess super unknown would have been out by this point to probably,
and then there's LA West coast rap.
Just a ton of stuff happening that is not like this.
It's a time laden with disillusionment and just Of post Reaganomics and
whatever, like, the early 90s were a strange time culturally, and here comes
this thing that is deeply, piercingly earnest and part of me wants to connect
it so badly to things of this moment that are so singular and, like, vibe
shifting, you know, I'm thinking about the Chappell Roan, Brat, whatever moment
that's happening right now, that, that was just like You wake up from the dream
within the dream within the dream to, to ascend to a different level that maybe
is also surreal, but totally different.
But it's hard to find contextual equals for, for what happened with this record.
that at once seems like it was such an underground, if you know, you know thing.
But was also like kind of a huge thing.
Like he had a, he had a concert on much music that is very much worth watching.
So, it, it is a little baffling to be like, what other things
happen that were like this?
Um, I, I think the more times you try to ask that question of Jeff Buckley
and have this record, the more the answer is like, It's just that it's
this it almost kind of makes sense that it was his only solo record ever.
It would be great to have 25 Jeff Buckley records.
But the fact that in a way, this is all we got.
There's a lot of bumper content around it.
So big caveat there.
But you know, the one sort of start and finish studio statement really
makes it feel like a singular moment.
And I think we got to like almost take it in as such.
Cliff: think part of probably what contributed to that odd to explain
moment in time that we can't really create very often with singular artists
like this, it's like, one of the reasons we're already talking about a
million people who aren't Jeff Buckley to contextualize Jeff Buckley is like,
this is also how he thought of himself.
And I, I think it's worth just.
Describing a little bit of the Petri dish that he sort of evolved out of
the scientific accident that we had in creating Jeff Buckley because even in
Kyle: to quote the parlance of the times.
He didn't just fall out of a coconut tree.
He is in the context of all that came before him.
He is.
Jeff Buckley is the most coconut peeled artist I can imagine at this moment.
Cliff: what a time to be alive.
But even in, so apparently he self wrote a press bio at some point, but he described
himself as quote, the warped love child of Nina Simone and all four members of
Led Zeppelin with the fertilized egg transplanted into the womb of a deep PF
out of which he is born and left on the street to be tortured by bad brains.
Kyle: why?
Bad brain's gotta do the torture it, man.
Cliff: But like, so I'm even going to use that as a little moment before
we keep talking about the album, but that's a self description, right?
He saw himself as an amalgamation of the things that he thinks about
or was chasing or was tortured by or
Kyle: It beats other things.
He workshop like Chuse with a penis was one of 'em.
. Mm-Hmm.
Cliff: this is certainly not the only reason we, you know,
Picked this record to talk about.
But one of them is that when we have an artist who is like this, it is a
rare opportunity for you to do the best version of Spotify related artists
that's ever existed because now.
Every quote, every cover, every intimation, interpolation, everything
is an arrow pointing at someone who is deeply good at music.
Kyle: Mm-Hmm.
Cliff: so just using the example of the quote I just gave about his own press bio,
a DPF is a reference for me that I was not super familiar with as a French singer,
except This is what keeps happening.
This is sometimes I get too earnestly excited about music shit and it's nice
to have an outlet for it, but like, okay.
So I started looking into who Adit Piaf is.
Well, it turns out that, in this moment in time that we're recording it not
too long before now, uh, we have the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
Celine Dion makes a comeback from a neurological disorder that's
preventing her from being able to sing.
It's this like hugely triumphant.
Moment.
And we'll probably never talk about a Selene record on a tuned egg
episode, but like, she's really good.
Like we're all on the same page about this.
What she chose to sing wasn't a deep half song called him to them more.
And that was what she chose as her comeback performance for the first time
years after not being able to perform.
Literally standing on the Eiffel Tower in front of the world, like every little
dot that you chase is some other just deeply good, fascinating aspect of
music that just flowed out of this human being who seemed to be like the human
equivalent of a crate of vinyl, like.
Everything was all together somehow for him and he was channeling different
aspects of things all the time.
And so like that was just one example like that took me in
a whole different direction.
That I definitely never would have chased myself, much less
had the algorithm present to me.
Um, if I hadn't chased it at all.
Kyle: It was said of him, by the biographer, David Brown, that he could
hear a song once, instantly memorize it, and then play it straight through.
So, He said he was voraciously curious about music and culture, about the rich
and remarkable world in which he lived.
A teenage Jeff Buckley found solace and release in both intellectually
sardonic humor and scalding rock excess.
George Carlin and Led Zeppelin, 1980s ironic David Letterman
humor, and Rush and Kiss.
All of that cultural mayhem was swirling around in Jeff's head and
with the equivalent of a photographic memory in relation to music, he
could, hear a song once, instantly memorize and play it straight through.
That's rad.
it brings to mind, you know, Lester Bang's said of Van Morrison that he
could compress a ton of information, emotional information into a song.
And I, I think that's what, Buckley was always doing was, was just, he saw it
all as information to enrich the sort of textures and shades of a feeling.
It was all in service of feeling.
This is a big feels record and he was a big feels guy.
So if that's what you're going for is like maximum feeling, I, You know, can't
imagine more than that, but I like that idea of like compressing, compressing
a creative records until like one, one densest matter of the universe
unit of emotional information and then given it to you in a coffee house.
Cliff: a great way of thinking about it.
The way that he packed information into music was incredible.
Because saying that, even if you just took one example and said that he,
channeled blues or channeled emotion into whether it's his own covers
or his original songs or whatever, it doesn't quite go far enough.
Because he understood things at a deep enough level to pack in
context without being historically irreverent, if that makes enough sense.
That's a really hard thing to do, to bring forward old things while
actively and verbally talking about exactly aping, in a lot of cases.
And be able to, you know, Then still create something original and interesting
enough that people want to be a part of it And that makes some of those same
musicians want to learn more about it It's just incredible, once in a lifetime
type stuff and things that I, you know, frankly, just experienced jealousy, uh,
that this person existed and he had that.
Kyle: You know, it occurs to me.
One of the things is we get.
into the dozens and dozens and approaching hundreds of episodes of the show.
One of the things that I find us saying more and more often is like,
I hear what we learned about other records and this record, right?
It seems like the really great records connect us to the feelings and ideas
and context of other records, right?
Because that's what music is trying to do is trying to connect us to the
great Cosmic tapestry between us all.
And I specifically appreciate about this record that other people recognize
it immediately in Jeff Buckley.
Like it, it has been an afterthought as you and I digest records most
of the time that that was hopefully part of the intent, certainly
its intent that we ascribe to.
Great records.
You know, the, the Alice Coltrane's the Lauren Hills, the D'Angelo's, the
records that I keep talking about over and over and over again, but Steve
Berkowitz was an A and R and a producer who went and saw him at the Sinead cafe.
And.
So that he had never met anybody like Jeff Buckley.
And he said, from the first time he saw him, he leaned over to the guy he came
with and said, Hal, it's all in there.
Isn't it?
It's just all in there.
And I put it in the notes and I hadn't really thought about it.
Why that sentence struck me, but like, that's what.
That, that, that's the common thread between the episodes of this season.
I think in the ones that were inadvertently picking month over
month from the calendar is the, I use the men in black outer
space ball on the cat's necklace.
thing in one of the last two episodes, but the, like, it's all in there.
Like that is the kind of music that I, I find you and me reaching for to
your point, whether it is something you go off and listen to all the time
I think you're going to be a little bit altered forever by Jeff Buckley.
Just because you have approached the sensation that it's all in there.
Like you've, you've touched a thing that has opened a third eye a little bit.
Like it's hard not to talk about really great densely emotionally
packed records without getting a little Rick and Morty about it.
Like, Oh shit.
I went into the Jerry simulator and lived, lived a hundred year life.
And then I pull back and realize that I'm at Dave and busters.
Yeah.
How did he get 250,
Cliff: I think The reason that what we've talked about so far doesn't end
up amounting to an academic exercise from a music student effectively
is partially because of the actual backstory of how he came to become
the artist that got discovered.
And I think that that's pretty critical because again, in the short span of
time that he sort of existed as an artist that people could experience.
A lot of this all happened in a pretty short period of time that then
resulted in this full length record.
That's, you know, the only version of this sort of thing that we have from him.
Kyle: 000 highway miles in 30 years, so to speak?
Cliff: so he's the, he was the son of singer Tim Buckley, which you would sort
of naturally think is the sort of musical nepotism thing you see on a fairly regular
basis where even if they're not literally connected as a parent and child, there's
a sort of gravity that pulls people along by their last name, uh, or something.
Yeah.
Kyle: Yeah.
Yeah.
And let it be known, Tim Buckley had his own cult following for
sure in the, in the folk circle.
Cliff: But in Jeff Buckley's case, he was.
estranged from that father, so while I don't think there's really any
reason for us to just spend a ton of time trying to either diagnose
or even comment on, uh, what was
Kyle: Don't want to do it any more than I wanted to do it with Marvin Gaye.
Not a licensed therapist.
Cliff: Nope.
At the same time, what you can definitely see and hear in interviews
with Jeff Buckley and then in stories written about him and all
this, like he had a really complex relationship to this concept, right?
And, but then there was a, I mean, the level of poetic justice that this guy
must have experienced on Earth must have made him feel like he was in a
video game or something like that.
Cause like, everything that was equally seemingly terrible and weird
also had a counterpoint that sort of propelled Jeff Buckley forward.
And so in this case, Jeff Buckley effectively gets discovered at a
tribute concert for his estranged father, where he is blowing people
away and they are in real time realizing, Oh shit, this is his kid.
that's such a scene from a show.
That's, It's so hard to believe that
Kyle: like East Village Succession a little bit, yeah.
Kent Kindle goes away to rehab and grows up without Logan.
And here we are!
Cliff: like we would keep hearing from people who have talked about
him for his entire performing career, they were Literally blown away.
It w it's all there.
People were having that same experience over and over again, because he was
a phenomenally good live musician who you can, you can clearly tell was
comfortable, not just performing, but really owning and improvising sort of
moment to moment, how everything was going to come across what he was going
to play, how he was going to flourish.
Everything was a little bit different.
I mean, even that oversimplifies some of the lead up, uh, of, you know,
of, of him hitting that curve and going up towards becoming the person
that, that people would recognize as the inimitable Jeff Buckley.
But even that little vignette, man, like that struck me because it's at once.
Emotionally intense in a way that makes me really uncomfortable,
is that not one of the rawest forms of bravery that I've ever heard?
it's
Kyle: you got to go a level deeper and here's another piece of great writing
like this dude is raising the vibrations of everyone he touches because here's
another instance of great writing about the moment swirls a furiously strummed
guitar and shimmering psychedelic swoops echoed across the nave as he launched
into I never asked to be your mountain.
From 1967's Hello and Goodbye.
It was one of Tim's most personal songs.
A kiss off to his wife and the infant son he was leaving behind.
Buckley sang the tune of his own abandonment.
That shit is haunting.
That's not regular, like, he got up and he sang a beautiful He got up and he did
Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, and everyone loved him, and then that was the famous
song that eventually got used in Shrek.
Like, if that doesn't feel like a lightning bolt through the middle
of your body, then like, sorry, don't turn off this episode.
Don't try to listen to this record and honestly go make sure you
still exist on this mortal coil.
Because, because there's no way to know that you're real.
If that didn't make you feel anything.
Cliff: Hard with a capital H.
I don't know how else to describe that, man.
Kyle: As that old, uh, that old noise rock record or whatever goes
heavier than a death in the family.
Quite, quite literally.
Cliff: Yup.
we'll talk more for sure about individual songs, aspects of that
kind of stuff that, Stood out to us as we can easily do with this record.
we sort of have started talking about now in episodes, since we have tried to
focus on more of listening and absorbing music as a practice, we always ask like
a few specific questions as we go along.
And so one of them is trying to take this in fresh, even if you
are aware of the album, right?
Trying to experience it with something like a beginner's mind so that
you can listen to the things that.
Catch your attention without having to apply too much energy or take
it too seriously all at once.
I'd like to prompt myself, if you don't mind,
Kyle: Yeah, I went hard on this with Botch.
I would really, I was saying, I wanted to say that I would like
to hear from you on it first.
Cliff: I do not think too highly of myself, I want to be clear, okay, I,
I'm no professional at music, I am no history teacher and whatever, but we've
been doing this for a while, we take it pretty seriously, we're pretty good.
At listening to music, we're pretty good at like finding the things that are
interesting about it and figuring out why people like it and how it hits people.
And like, a lot of things click into place pretty quickly at this point,
especially when you practice listening to music and trying to understand it.
For me, what surprised me is that I still can't get myself to want to
listen to this record very often.
And I.
Was struck by it this time because it's a thing that I remembered about this
record and its general existence and It was sort of you know Filed in my
brain alongside that fascinating photo that they chose for the album artwork
uh for this particular record, Well, frankly, makes me laugh a little bit.
Kyle: Somebody, somebody said that people thought it made him look like Adam Ant.
Cliff: Yeah.
Yeah.
It was a little, a mild version of cathartic to learn that most everybody at
the record label and other people working on the record were like, The fuck is this?
When they saw that picture.
Like,
Kyle: I do want to come back to the cover later because it's got some
cool stories associated with it.
But
yeah, it, it, uh, it's a, it's a thing.
Cliff: We should.
But the point in it is It's hard for me to get into and this is coming from
a person who listens to a lot of stuff That is canonically difficult to get
into and here's a record that has almost universal appeal to like brilliant
musicians and I just I it doesn't hit the same way to me every time and
so What has surprised me about it in listening to it so much and listening
to other people talk about it Is finding a new muscle In my musicality, I guess.
I found a new way to click into this music without having it match my vibe in the way
that I would normally expect things to.
And that has given me a way to appreciate what was going on here, and as I'm
sure we'll talk about some more as well gave me some things to tune into.
That might have been different, uh, than I would have picked if I
just like found this really easy to sort of sink my teeth into,
Kyle: Okay, but I want to, I want to give you some reassurance
coming from the other side of this.
I think it's probably well documented on this page.
Podcast now, at least through Context Clues, I'm always looking
for, how does this make me feel?
What's the vibe or energy of this thing before I pick up anything
technical or musical about it?
And there's something to be said for the fact that I knew that I also knew this
record was great, but for a long time, just had the one song on my iPod and, and
sort of like unconsciously resisted it.
And I think it's something to do with yeah, it's feel, but it's It's
like, if you're going to get into it, you get all the way into it and
it's not like it's bright or noisy or whatever, or it's sad, you know,
unidirectionally emotional or whatever.
It's just truly everything everywhere all at once.
Like you're the two rocks on the side of the cliff or whatever.
It makes you sort of feel the whole universe when you touch it.
That's No matter what, you're striped.
That's hard.
And eventually I realized I'm getting more into listening to it because of
the stuff that it is opening up in me.
It's like opening a new sort of emotional chapter in my life or accompanying one.
It's like hitting at a time and place where that is appropriate and necessary.
there's work required with this record, right?
it's not casual.
Cliff: That's a good way to put it.
It's not
Kyle: it's not casual at all.
And that doesn't make it like, Burdensome?
There's so much joy in this record.
Like, I feel explosions of joy listening to his voice and the musicality.
But like, you gotta get after it when you're listening to this thing.
Like, the joy of music does not come without a price on grace.
Cliff: So then definitely the things that stood the farthest
out to me in that context.
One is, like, Let's just call out the easy one.
Hit the center of the bingo card.
Corpus Christi Carol is a wild thing to include on this album.
I
Kyle: What's the movie where Will Ferrell, uh, stands up at the Irish, in the other
guys, Will Ferrell stands up at the Irish pub and does the old funeral songs?
That's what this felt like.
You're having a conversation with him, you're Mark Wahlberg, and you're having
a conversation with him, and then he stands up and faces in the other
direction, does Corpus Christi Carol, and you're like, what the fuck, man?
First of all, how do you, that's from the early 16th century.
How do you know that?
Second, wha, wha, why now?
Cliff: what's cool is I don't have an answer at all, that's what I'm saying,
none of this like, makes any sense to
Kyle: Truly weird flex, but okay.
Cliff: just, yeah, there's a piece of chocolate in the middle of your
peanut butter sandwich, just be prepared, I can't, like, I'm fine
with it, I just like kind of wish I knew it was coming, know, so,
Because if I don't chew this right, I'm gonna choke.
Why, like, why is it not the last track?
Kyle: It's a, it's a skit on a rap album.
Cliff: yeah, they went into left field, to come from left field, and then
like, built another stadium a few miles out that way, and went to that left
field, and then came back in with it.
I fundamentally love when people are weird and unexpected in music.
So even though that makes no sense to me, I have a tremendous amount
of love and appreciation for the fact that it happened at all.
Cause like light antagonism is my love language when it comes to art.
So I love that.
on a much like simpler vibe to catch, uh, yeah, we'll kind of bring up the
same things we've talked about before, but like there is a very specific
way that a love for someone like.
Led Zeppelin can play out.
And this is like, it's fun to have create opportunities that we have in
this podcast to talk about shit that no one would ever ask us about, but that
we can otherwise eloquently explain.
And you really should ask me about sometime.
So what does it mean when you
Kyle: You hit, you hit play bro.
You sat down at our booth at the bar.
Cliff: You put in a quarter.
You got to let me finish
Kyle: You, you put in a quarter, you're someone who cares.
Cliff: Oh no, that's a very good backup title for my memoir, the
ability to use your voice to imitate and or interact with guitar lead lines
is like an extremely specific move.
And as part of the reason Led Zeppelin was good at all, like It was a move
that the guitarist and the vocalist understood because they were both
phenomenally good at what they were doing.
And like the tone and range of what you're doing on the guitar and on
the voice, you have to understand the boundaries of that range in order to
connect them together in a meaningful way.
Like it's both academic and then it becomes really intuitive, but it's
like, It's not something you hear very commonly, like if you go to a
show and a blues artist does that move and sings with their riff, I've never
been in a show where that happened, where people didn't clap immediately.
Kyle: Every time I see somebody do that, I'm like.
How the hell do you do that?
Cliff: it is like, yeah,
Kyle: How do you even get your brain I know how hard it is to sing
anything while you play guitar.
How do you make them do the same thing?
I Yeah, it's physics defying for me.
Cliff: yeah, it is truly wild.
But like, that is a way to describe some of the things that he's doing,
not only throughout several songs, but then specifically my third eye got
tapped a few times during this record.
Right.
And one of them was on eternal life and like the moves that he
is doing there vocally immediately draw yes, Robert plant, right?
So like.
Yeah.
So examples of what we've talked about so far, you know, whole lot of love,
Achilles last stand, like the vocal moves in creating something that interacts with
the guitar lines was, you know, a really common thing, but, you know, it kind of
brought those songs to mind, but the other person that it brought to mind for me was
a contemporary, which was Chris Cornell.
And it reminded me not only of how Chris Cornell sang then, but then
again, now I'm just kind of looking for doorways to push people into that,
that sends them down a trash chute that lands at Jeff Buckley's grace.
So, so one of those little doors is is that first audio slave record.
And when Chris Cornell did,
Kyle: That shit's better than it's got any business to be in, man.
That
Cliff: percent, a hundred percent.
Yeah.
And it's.
One thing that really twisted my noodle in a fun way was understanding that that
record, that first Audioslave record, came out only eight years after Grace.
Kyle: Mm.
Heh
Cliff: but, point being, songs from that record that especially folks
would probably recognize right now, like, Like a Stone the way Go
back now and listen to that song.
If you're at all peaked, uh, in your interest by what we're talking about
here, because what you can do is go back and listen to Chris Cornell singing.
Not only, that song rips like his, the whole thing rips.
It's a very, very good song and he's an incredible singer, but the
flourishes that he'll do with his voice match things Tom Morello does
in the solo later on, which is itself.
a really cool move and a neat example because like I truly
don't mean this disrespectfully.
Tom Morello is not a very good guitar player so like being able to find a way to
Kyle: he has a masterclass.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Have
Cliff: he's really good at effects so
Kyle: you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?
Cliff: I'm not saying I'm better than he is I'm just saying if you
listen to the like functional like musicality of what he's playing it's
not especially complex most of the time.
And that worked well for rage against the machine and all that.
But point being like that song, like, like a stone or even I am the highway,
other songs where Chris Cornell is truly taking the lead of melody.
If you listen for it, you'll hear another extremely talented vocalist.
Like intuiting how the song is going to eventually sound or what little
lines and hooks will come out of the guitar parts later and introducing them.
And one offs throughout the verses and things like that.
So I think it's just like a really cool thing to not only
notice for the first time.
But then as we'll talk some more about, it's something that you can sort
of apply your focus in and draw out some different parts of this record
that you might not otherwise hear.
Kyle: Eternal Life is my favorite song on the record.
And it's probably weird to be like the one heavy song is my
favorite song on the record.
But I thought immediately like this could have been a later Soundgarden song.
I also appreciate the Audioslave connection because, you know, Rage being
so into funk there's a very, like, funky, skronky thing to the way that they play.
Like, the bass is almost almost less Clay Pooley a little bit.
and one piece of trivia that I just like cannot get out of my mind is in
the late 80s, one of the many hard rock heavy metal bands that, that
Jeff Buckley played with in LA had Danny Carey, a future Tool fame in it.
So like he was.
Light years apart from that world and I think actively tried to distance
himself from the the machismo of all of that stuff Happening, but he still
had an interesting intersection points with it and you can see it in eternal
life I'd like to me eternal life.
I'd know this was not his intent at all But it's it's a like I could
have done that kind of music and been successful but y'all can't do You
Lover, you should have come over.
He did.
He did say.
this is an angry song.
Like he, he did a lot of introductions of his songs and stuff.
He's, he's a pretty good stage talker, which I think is the thing you and I have
talked about, maybe not on the podcast, but just like at shows, especially
since the pandemic, people don't really do stage banter much at all anymore.
And when they do, they don't do it well.
Uh, go to Toastmasters, bands, singers, please let's, let's bring back the
art of, of stage talking and not the hardcore, here's 30 minutes on PETA or
Cliff: Yeah.
No, no, no.
Kyle: yeah,
Cliff: you're tuning.
Thank
Kyle: yeah, yeah, yeah, not a let's bow our heads in prayer thing for
20 minutes before the last song.
Cliff: Yeah, this isn't Wolves in the Throne Room.
Let's keep
Kyle: Yeah.
Uh, he said of eternal life this is an angry song.
Life's too short and too complicated for people behind desk and people
behind mask to be ruining other people's lives, initiating force against other
people's lives on the basis of their income, their color, their class, their
religious beliefs, their whatever.
And this was a 93, 94, he was saying stuff like this and then launching into here's
Soundgarden Zeppelini sounding song.
Eternal life and like really ripping.
Like I, I I have a playlist, you know, that is almost a thousand songs large now.
That is my version of a Tony Hawks pro skater game soundtrack that I
just keep adding to and expanding to.
So like what stuff that feels good for kicking and pushing
out there in the world.
And in the process of spinning up preparations for this episode, I
put Eternal life on that playlist,
Cliff: Incredible.
Kyle: I would not do for any of the other songs on this
Cliff: I was Yep, that's exactly where my brain had started to go, was
Kyle: it's, unless it's skateboarding to a girl's
Cliff: Yep.
To get myself in the mood.
Yeah, sure.
as always, I love our earnestness about how this record hits us, but
give me an idea of a context or two where this one works for you.
Like, when do, when do you want to put it on now as a non
skateboarding, non teenage adult
Kyle: In the fucking real world, in, in the, in being a
spirit in the material world.
We, we were texting about this, but like my new deeply held belief is that this
record is an antidote to to use another.
Parlor parlance that's becoming more common in 2024 quickly weird,
like everything's weird and online and disconnected and not physical.
And I think a lot of our angst comes from just not being aware of that.
With people and in love with people and the physicality and the, and the
tactileness of being alive and smashing against senses in the real world,
being at a bar, seeing faces, hugging necks, drinking cold beer, like just
do doing things out in the world.
As they say online, touching grass, proverbially.
So if you.
If you are in a place in your life where you are trying to touch more grass or you
are depressed and you need an inspiration to go out in the world and feel more
things and fall in love with being alive again like touching grass is great.
But if you're in a place where you can't really necessarily do that yet
Cliff, I thought you put it beautifully.
You said this feels like the quintessential aimless driving record.
And I think there's a connection to Qawwali music, which we'll get into
in a second and like meditation and the practice of existing more deeply.
but like, I can't encourage enough to use this as maybe a vessel, a springboard
to like, get out there and live.
Go drive to this record, but just go, go like have the next.
Six months of your life be the best.
We're sensing a vibe shift in, in the country and in the world right now.
And maybe you haven't gotten it personally to trickle down into your own life.
And hopefully this can be like a jolt of a moment.
I could never in good conscience.
Get on the internet and tell anyone to like, exercise or drink more
water or do healthy habits or whatever to turn their life around.
But I can point you to a fucking record that will maybe lead you to some of
those other good and beautiful things.
Like if, if you want to try to make some memories and get to being the person out
there in the real world with people that you love, loving you back, maybe this
is a small first step to get you there.
Cliff: That makes me want to just say out loud.
Maybe it's a good soundtrack for your next quote, stupid little mental
health walk that you may be taking to get yourself out of your head.
I love that people started referring to it as that and hearing you
sort of describe it that way.
Makes me want to put it in the context of, well, you got to start as early
as you can in the day to catch moments of beauty and optimism before they
get ruined by the experiences that you'll inevitably have after that.
So this is kind of making me want to like, I wonder if this could be like a wake up
type, a deal for me or one that's like.
Just really early on before things have sort of settled in or you've
had to get started on something.
As someone who's currently healing myself through literally going
outside and looking at a mountain this is uh, this is giving me some
even better ways to think about it.
Maybe
Kyle: I am more of a purge at the end of the day, put on this
record and come alive at night.
Like, you know, like your second day, your real life starts at dusk.
But either of those work just depending on who you are physiologically and
what your life rhythms look like.
Cliff: So I think talking just a little bit about how Jeff Buckley thought about
his own work at this point in time would be helpful and it'll, it's nice because
it's, Well, we're well past the point together where, uh, we fully understand
that one another finds the topic of death just a little bit funny, honestly.
So I kind of keep laughing about like, it's cool to be able to talk
about this because there's not too much information because, you know.
But,
Kyle: It's the only universal language.
Cliff: that's right.
But one of the reasons that that's not just darkly funny to me is the way
that he expressed his intent in this moment is itself really beautiful.
In in, you know, he, like you mentioned, he was pretty comfortable talking
off the cuff and giving interviewers interesting answers and all that.
But in one of them where he was talking about this concept of grace, like kind
of what is this album conceptually?
He instead sort of described What grace as a concept meant to him in a little bit
more of an abstract sense, which I guess the musicality is supposed to express.
Um, but he said, quote, the best art comes from artists who have an unending life
or death urgency to speak their heart.
And as those artists grow older, there's a real serenity to that
art and a great relaxation and an ease that's beautiful to watch.
And that's what I want.
That's what I call grace.
And, on, on top of the.
Eerie ness of him speaking of himself in a future that he would never
come to inhabit, unfortunately.
At the same time, like, he gives us the gift of pointing out pretty
immediately that he feels that he has a tremendous amount of urgency
to speak from his own heart, and that what he's expressing here on Grace
is an encapsulation of that urgency.
Kyle: He also called himself a fleeting memory, which to me speaks to a bit
of prescience around the whole thing.
Yeah he also described himself as an imperceptible fleeting
memory, which I think speaks to
Cliff: Oh my god.
Really?
Seriously, he said that about himself?
Kyle: Um, pretty prescient.
I don't want to be like this guy knew he was going to die because
I don't think that's true at all.
But it's, that's just a very cool way to describe your artistic intent.
He said, do you ever have one of those memories where you think you remember a
taste or a feel of something, maybe an object, but the feeling is so bizarre
and imperceptible that you can't.
You just can't quite get a hold of it.
It drives you crazy.
That's my musical aesthetic.
Just this imperceptible fleeting memory.
The beauty of it now is that I can record it onto a disc or play it live.
It's entirely surreal.
It's like, there's a guard at the gate of your memory and you're not supposed
to remember certain things because you can only obtain the full experience
by completely going under its power.
You can be destroyed or scarred.
You don't know.
It's like dying.
So maybe we like Jeff Buckley.
Maybe it just boils down to the fact that we all, uh, like thinking about death
in, in like a healthy memento mori way
Cliff: That is a much, uh, more mature way of saying what, yes,
I was trying to point out too.
Like, he, he's unafraid to talk about it.
And he's unafraid to
Kyle: or, or
to do
Cliff: Yeah,
we assume so.
but everything is a little, both interesting and has a comic relief
nature to it, which is part of why it all feels like it's intertwined with
this concept of death in general.
Cause that's, that's the point.
It always feels like two sides of a thing, a deathly serious thing and a
deathly funny thing happening at once.
And so to that end, Jeff Buckley, the immense talent that we've talked
about so far, and have tried to heap as much praise as humanly possible on
it, Still taken by bad relationships, like still obsessed with, particular
relationships, not working out, writing love songs, sad songs, emotionally whiny
things, uh, about their relationship and producing that into an album that
somehow once again connects with, you know, an entire generation of people.
Despite being about this ostensibly base topic, that really captured me again
here, because speaking of things that are well documented in this podcast
is my disdain for lyrics in general.
If I could get rid of vocals in like 90 percent of music, I would.
So for me to come to a record like this and be like, so.
Okay, but if everyone could do it to the degree that he was
doing it, maybe I'd be more okay
Kyle: Totally.
Totally.
I made the note, stop me.
If you've heard this before, it's not unfair to say this record was hugely
inspired by a woman like a specific woman, but also the divine feminine more broadly
and It just, once again, reinforces things this beautiful and powerful do not happen
without women, like not to be too Helen of Troy about it, but men simply cannot
conceive of things like this on their own.
So, shout out to women.
Thanks once again for everything, like, like literally everything,
including the fact that we're here
Cliff: So it's always back and forth in the seesaw of like,
it's simple, it's complicated.
So yeah, all those things are true.
And he came to this one with an extreme sense of urgency, and yet he's telling
a classic story, and yet he's doing so in a new and unexpected way, with an
incredible level of artistry and detail, and yet at the same time, it's still
mostly a set of recognizably 90s songs.
But yet, all of those things were true, and on top of it, The urgency
was channeled through into the literal logistics of recording the record, um,
because he assembled this band weeks before they started recording this record
Kyle: said they had played together like 10 times.
Total, before they went into the studio, which is like insane, insane,
Cliff: and certainly that was helped along by Apparently Jeff Buckley
coming with, you know, one of those folks who comes with 1 million ideas,
uh, and can just sit down and let things kind of flow out of them.
Uh, and so, uh, I'm sure that that guided other people along, but I also
found it really fascinating to listen to, uh, like I caught an interview
with the drummer from the record, just listening to him sort of talk about
the way that they were able to just.
Feel comfortable with Jeff Buckley in that moment and kind of absorb some of that
unafraid energy to what they were writing and how they use that to introduce,
you know, very simple, simple isn't even the right word, deceptively simple
complexity into the rhythm, into little flourishes as the songs would go along.
Like it drove people to be creative, but in a way that never somehow.
Took them too far away from the emotional center that everyone connected back into.
And that itself is just a mind blowing piece of music to come out of the group
of people who don't have enough experience to do something this emotionally
Kyle: So another plug for the 33 and a third book detailed in that
book is the studio set up Andy Wallace at the boards for this one
incredible discography on that guy.
Most of which looks nothing like this.
If you like chocolate starfish and the hotdog flavored water and Lincoln Park's
hybrid theory, um, but also Nirvana's nevermind probably his most famous
credit, like Andy Wallace is the king of the nineties sound, I guess, so to
speak as of May, 2021, over 120 million album units have been sold worldwide
that contain a credit to Wallace.
So, uh, dude has his stamp on all the big sounding records of, of
a 10 or 15 year period and still very, very much going strong.
So there were three.
Three spaces set up at the studio in Woodstock, New York.
There was one for loud music, I swear to God, one for loud music,
one for quiet music, and then a cafe emulating setup that was just Buckley
with a close mic and a guitar plugin.
And my, everything stayed mic'd the whole time and they just sort of
cycled between spaces as they got inspiration and wanted to work on a vibe.
So it stayed very live and focused on the emotion because, Andy
Wallace helped design it that way.
So a bit of studio genius to draw the most out of the spontaneity of
these players playing together, like just a little, a small, but large
note on this record that I love,
Cliff: I didn't realize that, but that connects directly in my mind to when.
Folks who were participating in or attending Jeff Buckley's
weekly shows at a coffee shop.
Like, what they talked about was how he took ownership of that night and
everyone was really comfortable with it.
And what that meant was It's not just that every set was unique,
like the entire night was unique.
They'd say that sometimes he'd play a normal set.
Sometimes he'd stop in the middle and go grab a beer or a coffee.
Sometimes you just go talk to people and come back later or experiment with
something new or play something for the first time in front of people.
Like it was a real, like, I'm just going to move myself around this space and do
kind of whatever comes to me at the time.
And to be able to trust that you have an audience at that level, That early
in your career is pretty incredible to begin with, but I love that story that
you just brought about the recording process of it, because like, another
detail fills into the place of like, okay, he, like he was creating contexts
for him to do whatever thing this was that was cranking out these emotionally
intense songs and, or, you know, well that middle english hymnal in the middle
Kyle: and again, credit to Rebecca Moore on this because, she is the
daughter of a famous photographer and was like of the avant garde.
In New York City.
And, uh, I think what interested him about her was that she was key to a lot of those
scenes, one of which was called Fluxus.
And it was all about, like, performance context.
And in the audience involvement in it being as important as the
content of the performance itself.
So I think he was always thinking about context and that was really
drawn out in the Sine Cafe stuff.
You can pretend you're Miles Davis and turn your back on the audience 99 percent
of the time as much as you want, but Like without context of the place and the thing
it's, you're a tree falling in the forest.
Like what does any of your art matter?
If it doesn't bump up against the world, it's expressing
something about in some way.
And he himself was quoted as saying, music is so many things.
It's not just the performer.
It's the audience and the architecture of the song and each builds off the other.
And I think.
The Sinead and the moments in the studio were really about building, destroying,
rebuilding, uh, and just, just scaffolding musical ideas in as many different ways
as possible, which is that's what I love.
about music and just creative arts in general is, uh, you're just,
you're just figuring like living is just about the process of living.
You know what I mean?
You're just trying to build a new, a new way to go about your day.
Cause otherwise you're just doing TPS reports all day.
Cliff: So actually, okay.
So us talking about putting himself in the context that is the right
feeling energy, whatever to do this.
So let's add that to what you were also mentioning earlier about the
way that he pipes information into things for lack of a better term.
So I think it'd be good to just mention the covers themselves on
the album, because those like.
More so than nearly any other artists that we have or will talk about, the covers,
the act of covering is meaningful here.
Um, much more in the vein of the blues tradition.
I am not saying that they are the same, but I am saying that he is channeling
that Lineage in the same way that once again, bands like Led Zeppelin were like
channeling that exact lineage, right?
It's not that it's not sacred and so therefore I can iterate on it,
it's that I'm iterating because it is sacred and so is my iteration.
So we already mentioned Corpus Christi Carol, which is a Benjamin
Britten adapted middle English hymnal.
I think maybe enough is said about that one because the other two
are worth discussing a little bit more specifically, in my opinion.
So first, Lilac Wine is effectively a jazz standard that was made famous
by Eartha Kitt, but the interpolation that we see here from Jeff Buckley
is based on the interpolation from Nina Simone and her rendition of it.
And he, he even said, quote, I've only heard Nina Simone's and that
is the only one that matters, which is a strong statement.
But, you know, he mentioned like, there's one by Eartha Kitt.
There's one by Elkie Brooks, which he's never, ever heard.
Uh, and there's another one and they've done it, but he said, Nina does it best.
That's the end all of it.
That's the be all end all version.
She is the king.
Like, okay.
All right.
Kyle: cause the Elkie Brooks version is the one that
charted in popular music, but.
I mean, yeah.
Nobody's beating Nina Simone.
Cliff: And it's hard to express unless you consider yourself to be a fellow true
musical like dork at this moment in time but like The confidence that it takes
to say not only am I covering the song but I'm doing a really specific version
of it based on Nina Simone is a level of self confidence and assurance that I have
cumulatively never experienced in my life.
Kyle: I'm not doing the Star-Spangled Banner.
I'm , or I, I'm doing the version that Whitney Houston did at the Super Bowl.
Cliff: Huh.
Kyle: You
gotta love it.
Cliff: yes.
And you can love it not only because that's an energy worth appreciating,
but also because it's also good.
Kyle: Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
Cliff: okay.
Um, And then secondly, I don't know that we haven't, we, we purposely not talked
about it, but the popular star of the show on this record, especially in the time
since then is the cover of Hallelujah.
And yes, It is important not to overly focus on that one particular song
in order to try to gain the context of this otherwise very good record
in addition to all of that, but it's unironically a really good example
of what he had the capacity to do.
Because this song is, I mean, first of all, if you haven't heard the Leonard
Cohen version, of Hallelujah, you need to hear it so that you understand the
contrast that exists between it and then what happened for Jeff Buckley.
Cause it's not just like, Oh, he was more emotional about it.
He like, he inverts an entire feeling from the Leonard Cohen version, which
In my opinion, I described that first one as like, there's much more of
a reserved nihilism, like a sort of
Kyle: it, it is cold and broken.
Hallelujah is way, way more literal.
Cliff: yeah, and so not only is he, yes, injecting it with emotion, but he is, once
again, in the same way that he did it.
Lilac Wine in the style of what Nina Simone did.
What he's actually doing is based on John Cale's version of this song.
John Cale, the co founder of the Velvet Underground.
Again, like another one of those moments where it's just like, as soon as you start
checking into a detail, it's unbelievable.
So John Cale did a version on the piano.
You know?
As a tribute to Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley heard that version of it.
And I think, I think also hearing John Cale's version helps plot the
path to how Jeff Buckley got to where he got and why it's so good because
he builds on what John Cale does simply by using the piano instead.
Kyle: Yeah.
Cliff: simply by becoming a pianist and then doing that song that way, it
has an entirely different feel to it.
And building on that level of emotional intensity and the way that certain
things get really focused in on and become more kind of yearning.
That's the thing that he builds on in his version that makes it so Unbelievably
impactful, like I, I'm going to say a thing I'm embarrassed about now, but the
first time I can remember crying to Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah was during
an episode of House MD, where they played this song and I was just like, what?
What is happening to me?
It hit perfectly in that moment at a way that was like,
almost comically inappropriate.
Like, how did this show just become fundamentally serious when
this is otherwise a show about people who don't have lupus?
I'm blown away by it.
And I can, but I remember where I was sitting.
I remember I was like, around my family.
Like, I It was such a concrete moment in time, and I'm nearly embarrassed by
how emotionally intense and memorable it was to hear it, but it speaks to how
not only well done it is as a song, but aligning that song or some of these songs
to the right feeling and moment in time is it opens up an order of magnitude
different experience to the whole thing.
Kyle: Yeah, you can, you can kind of hear in the core of the song how, you
know, in love, we take all our feelings about the world and we put them into
all our feelings about one person.
We're constantly projecting things onto other things.
And his version of hallelujah is stunningly intimate.
It is.
It's scary, intimate.
It's just like too much laser pointed at one person.
And usually the person that's yourself.
So it, when we talk about it being like almost too much to take, I think it's the
song mostly at the core of the record.
It's also the most indicative of the Sinead cafe experience.
Cause it's, it's mostly just him and the telecaster.
And when you listen to the live at Sinead recordings of that song and other stuff
that's really a lot of what you get.
And it's powerful.
And you can, if you like that, you should go listen to him
do other cover songs live.
Cause it's, it's There's so many wow, so many wow moments with
him doing the American songbook.
And like we've heard so many bad covers now that it almost cheapens it.
But I think about a Ray Charles, you know, he loved Ray Charles
as well and was chasing some of what Ray Charles was after.
And the Ray Charles, modern sounds and country music to, to Sturgill,
metamodern sounds and country music and, uh, when in Rome.
The promise cover on that and just how they were like inverting
feelings to use your phrase to get to maximum emotional effect.
He does covers in a Ray Charles y way where he's, he's cutting
to the core of them emotionally and also like, like Ray Charles.
This is one of just 650 recordings in the library of Congress's national library.
music library.
Uh, the Library of Congress selects 25 recordings annually, and in its
short history has only initiated 650 total recordings in the history
of American music that are deemed culturally, historically, or
aesthetically significant and or inform or reflect life in the United States.
So as much as the song itself stuns me, thinking about it belongs in the very
exclusive company of 649 or so other recordings is like, I'm what, what more
do you need to know, dude, you wouldn't be listening to this if we were, if you
needed a case mounted for why you need to, like, you could have stopped at Jimmy
page and Robert plant cried when they heard this guy play, but, but there,
there's yet another exhibit on our thesis.
Cliff: I love everything you just said.
Just to add one extra level.
I know every now and then we do like a little, Me and you, Kyle, do our
little Deadpool thing where we break the fourth wall and we do a laser beam
directly at Unevolved White Dudes, so I just want to do one here, okay, like
you don't have to be afraid that this emotionally intense thing will make
you emotional when you listen to it.
This is not the equivalent of turning into a softie who likes stupid music
about stupid trivial things all the time, or is constantly preoccupied
by the minutiae of Stupid life.
This is someone channeling the level of energy that we are always trying to
describe in words that we have no words for, and this is another example of it.
And if you are a person who recoils at the idea, Of emotional
vulnerability through art.
This is a very good opportunity for you to go practice alone by yourself.
So you can grow up and join the rest of us like this.
It's good practice to cry to one of these songs or to otherwise be like
shocked by how intense it is and how it's not normally the thing that
you'd want to do, or you wouldn't want to tell everybody this is your
favorite record or your favorite artist And like, to me, they're just.
There are not too many good examples of like a nearly foolproof way to gut
check yourself and make sure you're still available enough to be touched
by things as this can be, to me.
Kyle: If Shane Gillis can cry, you can cry too, bro.
because you reminded me of a story.
I was thinking as you were talking, like, who needs to hear this?
It's mostly people that will never listen to this podcast because they
also don't read books, but, um, I'm thinking of, uh, one of my best friends
in high school, who you also know his girlfriend broke up with him, and
the next morning we got to school, uh, And he was already in the parking
lot and his windows were fogged up.
It was a cold day and I opened the door and it smelled like beer.
Cause he'd been drinking all night and he was blasting, I think Hank Williams.
I think he was listening to I'm so lonesome.
I could cry.
And he was bro.
He was sobbing seven 30 in the morning, drunk as a skunk about
to go into high school, sobbing.
And I was like, I was like, you know what?
If this guy can feel something this deeply, then there's no
excuse to play that tough.
And I haven't thought about that moment in a long time, but it
was very instructive for me.
So I won't name drop that person but it was a big white F 250.
And just the, if you can, if you can look at the person to your left at a
red light with their big lifted truck with the truck nuts with a little bit of
sympathy And, you know, maybe just maybe something in this world will, will break
them down and make them real boys again.
Cliff: Hopefully it's the sad boy from the 90s.
We'll deploy him as much as we can.
Kyle: Yeah, if If nothing else works, you can say, Hey, remember,
like Jeff Buckley got girls.
This gets girls.
You can't fake it.
You got to be genuinely sensitive, but you could just try being
sensitive for once you have you tried caring about other people?
In the world.
I
wonder why everybody's so lonely these days.
Hmm.
Cliff: Caring about other people is the top thing I both recommend and
don't recommend at the same time.
Kyle: "Caring's so gay, bro."
Yeah, it is.
Everybody's gay.
Be in love with people, you stupid bitch.
Cliff: While, uh, while we're still in the territory of, uh, things
that might surface level offend you, but, but you should get past it.
Let's just touch one more time on this album art.
Cause, I mean, this This Glamour Shot ass shit just drives me
crazy every time I look at it.
I can't, like, why is George Michael on the cover of this thing?
I cannot understand it, for the love of God.
But there's funniness behind it.
Kyle: Okay, so, so first of all, the jacket that he's wearing was from a
thrift store and his friends called it his Judy Garland jacket, which is just
Just the best thing because you know like everybody's been a teenager once
and has tried to take a fashion risk they're really excited about and their
friends are like this shit is not it But we cannot tell Kyle because
he will be devastated because he's wrapping his identity around this
thing.
Cliff: yeah, just let him, just let him wear a
monocle.
Just let him do it.
He can pull it off.
Ha ha
ha
Kyle: remember when monocle era Oh, shit.
I did jorts for a while.
I tried to make that work pretty hard.
And I'm just, it's, I don't have the build for it.
Just, just
Cliff: ha ha ha ha ha ha
Kyle: wearing more normal shorts that were designed to be shorts now.
So I appreciate the Judy Garland jacket on the thing, but the photo was taken
in the stairwell of William Baczynski's loft, who like, if you read the,
"here's the 10 fun facts about Grace you may not have known" the photographer
who took the photo called him Billy.
So there's no indication that the loft is the man who made disintegration
loops, one of the great ambient records of the past 30 years or whatever.
And apparently to get in the headspace for the brooding, deeply earnest
look on the cover, he was listening to his recording of Dream Brother,
the final song on the original, iteration of the record, on cassette.
So like, the man is listening to basically the The raga he made to close the
record and getting in the mood to brood.
And we got the photo.
I would never in a million years if I wrote an autobiography about my life,
God forbid I would never let anyone put a photo of me like this in any,
anywhere on the internet or anything, if I would immediately be like Lars
Ulrich's dad, if I saw a photo of myself like this, I'd be like, delete that.
But it's a, it's just yet another thing that he makes work.
Cliff: well, that's because he's very pretty, which is
another annoying thing about
him.
Yes.
so we've, we've had some fun with the unexpected twists and turns of it.
But so another one of our sort of exercises and focuses, we talked
a little bit about what sort of, is surprising from time to time.
But then on this one, once you started drilling in, what are some things to
focus on if you want to do like active listening or, you know, educational
listening or emotional depth, plummet, plumaging, plumaging, emotional, whatever
you want to dive into your feels.
What are some things that for you like stand out or especially interesting?
Yeah, there's
Kyle: Four technical that add up to one spiritual, and I want to hear
from you on a couple specifically and anything else you want to chime in on.
The four technical are voice, obviously, duh.
Lyrics, because holy shit.
Uh, guitar, surprising.
Maybe not surprising how incredible he is a guitar and then atmosphere.
So just real quickly on voice his own mom and one of the documentaries
said, you know, his two influences were Robert plant and Nusrat Fateh Ali
Khan, a legendary Pakistani singer.
so if Shankar, go to Jeff Buckley.
His mom, Mary Gweebert, said what Robert Plant gave him was the ability to just
take the envelope all the way open, just fling it wide open to his voice and take
it wherever his heart would take him.
And Nusrat took him to the Divine, so it was sort of a natural progression
between Robert and Nusrat, and Jeff was the bridge between the two, and when he
found that bridge, it was bliss for him.
So thinking about, like,
Eastern modes and Led Zeppelin and, you know, Led Zeppelin also
played with Eastern modes, but just sort of like East meets West
in his voice and instrumentation.
I have a note in my phone, lines I wish I'd written, and I mean, I could
probably copy and paste every lyric on this record to be in there, but there
are tons, but one of my favorites is we walked around till the moon got full
like a plate, then the wind blew an indication and I fell asleep like a gate.
on So Real.
I'll save guitar for you because you're the only one of
us who actually plays guitar.
And then Atmosphere, I think partly comes from Andy Wallace mixing minimal
instrumentation to huge effect.
Or even when it gets kind of layered, but also the Kaua'li influence.
So, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan he heard one day in his apartment,
just like in a stack of records.
He called his voice mystical and chanting, and he likened his voice to velvet fire.
And they went on to strike up a friendship and an interview magazine,
which, you know, the, the concept of interview magazine, where an
artist interviews, an artist is still very cool and well trod ground.
But there's a 96 interview between the two of them.
And it's clear, he talked about this guy, Every time he possibly could.
So I think a lot of the atmosphere and the like desire to drone and get into
the cosmic, uh, there's indications of can, there's invocations of in a
silent way, Miles Davis, there's all sorts of that sort of heady stuff, but,
but it really goes back to this guy, uh, what it taught him about voice and
what it taught him about expansiveness of an arrangement or of improvisation
or, or whatever, it's not quite jazz.
It's more Eastern stuff, Kaua'li stuff.
So that's a rabbit hole to go down in and of itself.
And then there's a handful of like, I like listening for the big
feels moments where he just like.
goes for it.
That's the spiritual thing.
So, it started, the first one that I noticed, and I don't want to rattle them
all off, but the first one I noticed is there's a big guitar strum and then
he lets out a big howl around four minutes of the first song of mojo pen.
And you're just like, Whoa, like if you, if you put it on and walked
away for a minute, that's the thing that draws you back to the speaker.
And you're like, Oh no, I need to really Actually listen and there's
about one of those a song and sometimes more what else is there for you?
Cliff: hearty endorsement to pretty much all of those.
The only thing I'll add is in the vein of Prince, here is a dude who
was extraordinarily good at guitar, but unless you were looking for that
information, and or, a very experienced musician, you may not notice that at all.
And It is even more obscured on this record than Prince tended to
obscure his, uh, in the sense that, like, Prince would note a song or
two on an album, and be like, just in case you forgot, Here's my shit.
Right.
Which he could do with a ton of instruments, right?
What we don't have here though, this is not a, in my opinion, this
is not a guitar driven record.
I know that other people would probably disagree with that classification, but
like, this is a vocal driven record in my opinion, and because of all
the things we've talked about before, Jeff Buckley deeply understood the
interplay between guitar and voice And so that came out in not only his own
songwriting, but also in how these songs got structured and recorded in general.
But if you want to focus on it or, you know, understand a little bit of what I'm
looking for, or referencing on So Real, the chords that he uses in the verse are.
An unexpected voicing of chords.
I like, I don't really know how else to say that.
Like, once you listen to it, you can probably understand what I'm kind
of pointing out about, like, there were a lot of ways to play that chord
that did not require whatever voicing that they're currently using for
it, but it creates a, almost like an unease, even though the chord isn't.
As far as notes go out of key or wrong or anything like that.
But simply the inner mix of the kind of tonal ranges and how they choose
to play that particular chord is like one example of how the emotional tenor
of this whole record can surprise you.
And that's some of the ways that it's happening is by just like subtle
unusual decisions about how the guitar.
Plays its own role in the whole kind of spectrum.
And then, yeah, you, you mentioned mojo pen, but like, that's another
good example, like just to keep it pretty simple, like several people
were like, Jeff Buckley could have very easily been a rock star.
In the very classic vein of it in the nineties, everything, like
he could have just made another version of those bands and ripped.
And I think you can see that in how he is capable of whether
it's mojo pin or eternal life.
Oh, he can just dip his toe directly into this and come right back out of it.
He's not not doing it because he can't, he's not doing it cause he
wants to do something different.
And yeah,
Kyle: he has one of the most mc5 that i've ever heard And he did that on
a pretty regular basis and it slams and he did Uh He covered Big Star's
Kangaroo or Alex Chilton's Kangaroo.
he did a pretty faithful Screamin Jay Hawkins Alligator Wine, which on
the one hand makes me wince a little, but like he really went into it with
both feet and that's super ballsy.
Um, and not in a, an appropriative way, like getting whatever demon in him
that was also in Screamin Jay Hawkins.
He covered Hank Williams lost highway.
Uh, he did parchment farm blues.
Like he, he, he was really good at open tune stuff and slide guitar, which is
we talked about on the almond brothers episode is very easily to do horribly
and extremely difficult to do well.
So the fact that not only could he rock really hard.
And shows not to a gentleman as someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't
once again but he could switch between modes not just like song genre, but
guitar style wise, which shows that he was always studying, always playing,
always practicing, always expanding.
And very much like Prince in that way.
Like you can't really appreciate Prince just by listening to Purple Rain.
You also need to hear like the Minneapolis after show, July, 1984, or whatever,
and all the stuff that was in the vault.
Like all of it, the body of work informs each little musical moment.
And again, how much information was packed into what you were getting as a
dropper of feeling right on the tongue.
Cliff: Robert plant talked about when they would.
Watch or listen to him that early on into that experience, Robert Plant himself,
again, I just want to be really clear, an extremely talented musical genius.
Uh, and I don't mind using any of those words to describe Robert Plant.
He's standing there with Jimmy Page, another extreme musical genius, and
they are trying to decipher what they are hearing in the songs because they
believed that it was in different tunings.
And we're trying to figure out how he was getting that tone back out of instruments.
And these are from, again, two people with tremendous range in their
respective instruments, who know how to take influence from other
cultures, who know how to use effects, like for all intents and purposes,
people with the most information about what could have been happening
in a given moment inside of music.
And they were stumped.
I mean, it's the shocking simplicity of mastery, which is
a common theme we talk about.
Cause when we pick up these albums, we always want you to know when
you're listening to something and you go, why is it that good?
And it's like, cause they're that good.
Uh, and they've been channeling it into a million tiny moments.
But even that was just another killer example of.
How his understanding of musical instruments.
And again, that like really a spectrum, not just a range, but a spectrum of
tonality in a song can be like filled in and painted in different ways to
really draw out a particular aspect of a song or a word or a lyric or a melody.
Kyle: And he didn't just play the guitar.
He played bass, he played dobro, he played the mandolin, uh, the intro
to Lover You Should Have Come Over has harmonium, he played the organ,
he played the dulcimer for the Dream Brother intro, the tabla the harmonica.
He could get after it.
He, um, he, he was raw on vocals like Robert Plant.
He, Could rip and rock on the guitar like Jimmy Page and take arrangements
a million different directions and he could play anything like John Paul Jones.
Cliff: Yeah.
I was going to say he played all the instruments John Paul Jones played.
Yeah.
Kyle: but, but could he blast through with his bare hands
a drum kit like John Bonham?
The world will never know, but he was, he was certainly the rest of, uh, he was
the rest of what's up on all in one body.
Cliff: So let's take a fun final sweep, because this has all certainly
been leading towards the possibly, literally, endless amount of options
you have for where to go from here, if anything just connected with you.
Because we have, I mean we have already probably name dropped the entire game.
Non topical artists as much or more than we usually try to do in episodes
So we're not just constantly throwing a million people out in your general
direction, but even with that said everyone that we've mentioned so
far it goes further especially when you think about Who was inspired?
By this singular record and jeff buckley in general And then further
and further downstream how that further impacted music that Might not even
be considered part of this genre.
Otherwise like the leap between Jeff Buckley and Celine Dion that we did at
the beginning is not as weird of a move as it seems like it would be because
it pops up a lot across the board.
Kyle: mean, you could envision them on a bill together after you watch him live.
You know, Jeff Buckley opens for Celine Dion and both camps being
like, wow, that was something new.
Cliff: Wow, I'm thinking about that a lot now.
Okay, that'll, I'll have to put a pin in
Kyle: Jeff Buckley
Cliff: that's, uh,
Kyle: Dion at the Fox.
Cliff: And Bjerk, uh, yeah, just all three.
Let's get them together and figure
Kyle: You'll never hear music the same again.
Cliff: this could be an easy ramp up, meaning that this is probably the
simplest and in a sense, like dumbest thing we can point out here, but
it's also surprisingly consequential.
He, Jeff Buckley convinced people that they could sing in falsetto.
Which is understandable as you know, I don't do it as much
these days, but I've had vocal training and experience in my life.
Falsetto is a scary thing to jump into.
You have to, it's a, pretty sincere muscle.
You have to practice being able to, especially switching between them and
songs, switching to falsetto and back is not only scary because of what, like
what you're having to do physically with your body, but it's But it's, it's a
real big risk of going atonal real fast.
And this is another one of those places where, as we've mentioned, the
album will show you, yes, but then every live performance you can catch
of this dude past this will really cement the whole thing into place.
He had zero trouble going to any level of the range that he wanted to get on demand.
And so.
On top of that being just generally fascinating, I think to a lot of people,
including musicians who mentioned it.
Like Tom York from Radiohead was a direct, verbally stated descendant
of the inspiration of Jeff Buckley relative to being able to sing falsetto
and literally at the moment, I'm forgetting exactly what the song was.
Um, but the story as it
Kyle: Fake plastic trees.
Cliff: Thank you.
I mean, he, he did the move where one artist went to another
artist's show and went, Oh, fuck.
I gotta go home and work on this now.
And then went and wrote a song that tried to capture what it
is that he got excited about.
And so to me, even though this is, A bit of a extrapolation from that, right?
Like I think examples of where that has played out in popular music.
I, one of my regular touchstones, yes.
For guitar music, John Mayer has a lot of falsetto esque stuff that he also does
specifically in the context of what he's playing on guitar, which is an interesting
move that has a, Pretty direct lineage from Jeff Buckley and from this album.
But also bands like think about Muse, the band, even if you don't like them very
much, like their approach to falsetto behind a driving song is a lot of what
Jeff Buckley was doing when he was letting people know he could be in a
grunge band, but he didn't want to be.
And then even other, you know, kind of more recent examples, closer to, to my
world, I guess, like, even though this isn't technically falsetto, Anthony
Green and like Circus Survive and some of the bands that began to utilize much
higher pitched vocalizations and the way that guitar players and I could
talk about this all day, but won't, but the way that like a good guitar player
can find a way to change the way that they play to fill in the space that's
now not occupied by a voice, like all of those things are, while not.
100 percent Jeff Buckley's fault or, and we're not saying they wouldn't
have evolved in this direction, his singularity and the ability for
people to hear how good he was at this literally inspired new ways of singing.
Kyle: I, I would also put and apologies if this is over
ascribing, but I would also put.
Jonesy from Seeker Rose, and, and Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age
Cliff: yeah, great examples,
Kyle: well.
Cliff: great examples.
So then, uh, on a slightly, maybe deeper level, depending on how you
feel, um, although this will be a nice dip into pop, uh, if anyone was, so if
anyone stuck around for an hour and a half, but was scared off by the other
things we mentioned, here's a few more.
When it comes to like lyrical depth.
Depths, uh, in, in the sort of emotional angle, I guess that Jeff Buckley
came with a few folks really stood out as, as being like verbalizing
their direct inspiration from that.
So one of those is Adele.
Uh, and again, like, regardless of whether you like listening to Adele
or not, I think we can probably agree she's written or performed some very
moving songs and is an extremely good
vocalist.
And so Adele said, quote, I try to listen to music that might uplift me,
but I don't really connect with it.
So mainly, Jeff Buckley.
And that's been my entire life that I've done that.
I remember falling out with my best friend when I was 7 years old and listening to
Jeff Buckley because my mom was a huge fan and Grace has always been around for
me.
Another example, Phoebe Bridgers.
maybe in the same echelon, but, you know, probably now attracting a
totally different column of people who turned the volume up on this podcast.
Um, but the live at Sinead.
EP that we were, that we've been talking about.
That was the, the precursor to the actual full length studio record.
That was the first record that Phoebe Bridger said she ever fell in love with.
Uh, and in a moment that will immediately date everyone, she said,
quote, I had it on my iPod shuffle and I listened to it when I was supposed
to be asleep every night for years.
So, shout out to iPod models for always placing us at a
very particular moment in time.
Kyle: out of that quote.
Cliff: Yep.
You know that.
A significant number of people just pictured a square iPod and nothing else.
And then everyone else went, why do you think of that when you think of an iPod?
So yeah but he, she also mentioned that she loved how you can hear in real time
from that EP the audience reaction to what Jeff Buckley was doing, which is,
you know, if you haven't heard it said plainly in everything we've said so far,
it was connective when people saw him live and it was participative participatory.
Yeah.
And you can imagine that like, not only can you literally hear the responses,
yes, but in a very similar way that we've talked in the past about singular
vocalists and how they would have these moments that like, it felt like all the
lights got turned down everywhere else.
And there was one spotlight on planet earth on this human being
who is performing a vocal that.
What just echoed and reverberated seemingly throughout everyone's heart.
Like these are the types of moments that he was able to capture.
At a time that's, honestly, 20, 30 years past when those types of musical
moments were a lot more prevalent because of how people were listening to them.
So it's, it's that much more impressive that those things were
happening, uh, in the nineties.
One last thing that we can mention, which is super easy and fun, uh, which
we didn't know about until well, right before we started recording actually,
but as the crow flies, not long from when this episode is released.
So the, the following
Kyle: If you're listening to this on day one, it is the 30th anniversary
of the release of this record.
And then I guess three weeks after the release of this
episode will be this thing.
Cliff: Yeah.
So BBC is doing a 30 years of grace type documentary or interview type deal.
But several of the people that we mentioned are in there,
including, uh, Phoebe Bridgers Lana Del Rey is in there as well.
Like if you, if you can't draw the line between this dude and Lana Del Rey,
like I, you might need to start over.
Um, like it's almost too on the nose, uh, regardless of kind of how
you feel about her style of music.
without trying to oversimplify it, I mean, you could, you could almost
see Lana Del Rey's more effeminate or traditionally feminine versions
of what Jeff Buckley was doing here.
And they're Descendants for sure.
But other people who are a part of this 30 years of grace thing
on BBC, Guy Pearce, Nick Cave, Tom York, Alanis Morissette, right?
Like a solid list of people that you probably know as songwriters
like songwriters with a capital S, um, are sort of lining up to praise
this dude and his moment in time.
And so there is just a, there is a long tail of.
People and artists and art that was inspired by this really singular
record, which is really cool.
Kyle: So I'm not going to say if this record makes you feel
something, because I don't know.
That hopefully goes without saying, but the matter of what to do with
what you feel our final exercise, our, our closing thought is always
what to listen to or what to do next.
If the piece of music we've talked about moves you.
So the first thing is exactly what you just said is.
Visit more of the capital S songwriters who pack emotional information densely in
into a little piece of proverbial acetate.
So who are some of those folks for you?
Cliff: I started having to bucket them because of how, kind of went
through loops of realizing again.
The level of impact that this record has had and then just trying to
go back and reorganize the entire constellation of people that come to mind.
But so hopefully these kinds of categories will make sense.
But so one category, the generally speaking, men who wear stupid fucking
hats, but are really good at songwriting.
uh, so Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Mark Lennigan, Nick
Cave, Townes Van Zandt, like.
The men who are on top of their willingness and ability to be emotionally
stark and write extremely just like bare feeling, almost literalist type of
Phrasing and writing and storytelling.
I think that there's a, there's a deep lineage there.
Uh, and I know that you added people like Mark Lannigan.
So I'd be curious if that connects with you as well.
Kyle: Yeah, I mean, Lanigan for my money, like I don't really think I like singer
songwriter stuff too much or when it gets overly lyrical, but Mark Lanigan is,
is probably one of my favorite artists.
Certainly one of my favorite writers of all time.
He's been my friend when I've been in the darkest of the darkness.
But what I like about this list of guys that you've put together is I think they
also represent the kind of career arc.
That Jeff would have had if he'd stayed around a long time where all of these guys
were extremely nonlinear and went where the inspiration took them and then went
20 percent farther from thing to thing.
Bob Dylan is, is one of the greatest living examples of that,
where everything is so different as almost to cause whiplash.
And right when you think they're going to zig, they zag.
Like same also definitely goes for Nick Cave.
And we were only just seeing the, the tiniest little glimmers of that with Jeff
Buckley, but if we had gotten 25 or 30 years with him, I think we would have been
astounded by the boundaries that he broke.
So I think if you want to see spiritually where it could have
gone, that's a good list of dudes.
To.
To take out for a spin in addition to just being like really hung out
to dry emotionally after a binge of any, any one of those dudes catalogs,
Cliff: So then another sort of adjacent category which we can call
Maybe traditionally unsufferable white people, um, but, uh, uh,
a bunch of folks who, who go,
Kyle: bad grouping names for great artists.
Cliff: yeah, well, yeah, it's
Kyle: I'll take, I'll take Kick Cliff out the marketing brainstorm for 500 Alec.
Cliff: Look, I can put good things in the bucket.
Just don't let me
Kyle: That's
Cliff: the buckets.
Kyle: what I'm here for.
I'm here to
Cliff: Yeah.
Kyle: on the tape.
Yeah.
Cliff: But okay, but yeah Being a little bit silly so that we can
create a caricature kind of a what we mean so that you can visualize it.
Okay, so people that I mean by that, Joni Mitchell, Fiona Apple, uh, Sufjan
Stevens, Damian Rice like the types of people who are Transcribed Who are
choosing every word and every syllable in a very, very particular way and can get,
rhythmic with it or can be trying to do word painting equivalents using folk music
instead of hip hop or something like that.
Like, so the types of people who push really hard into almost wordiness
or at the very least cleverness.
In speak as opposed to, you know, the previous category of folks that we
talked about, like, Bob Dylan doesn't give a shit if you think he's clever.
That was never his whole thing.
Right.
Even if you consider him to be, whereas, you know, some of these
other folks that we're talking about are like, when you hear someone
and you're like, Oh, that's dense.
Like they thought a lot about that.
That's sort of a category of people.
Kyle: Yeah, like when you would read a poem in school and you'd be
like, Oh, words can do a lot more than the words themselves can do.
And it doesn't necessarily need music.
That's pure.
pure power of human being and of consciousness.
I would add to that list Chan Marshall, Cat Power, one time of Cabbage Town,
East Atlanta fame phenomenal wordsmith Bonnie Prince Billy, Will Oldham who I
just saw at Big Ears in, in Knoxville and was once again blown away by his
connection to the folk tradition and his ability to do a lot with the little.
Word wise, uh, silver Jews, I think a lot are a lot of other
artists point to him as an example.
And I don't listen to him often, but when I do, I'm like, holy shit, I need to come
back to this and like study every word.
John Prine, who's pretty recently passed, Brandi Carlile and to connect to Phoebe
Bridgers, Julian Baker I think is an up and comer in the tradition partly
because, like you, Cliff, she's from the Tennessee religious tradition and
has been using words to try to outrun that tornado for quite some time.
Cliff: a couple more categories.
Um, one, one relatively serious bucket to label, one far
less serious bucket to label.
The next one is Powerful vocalists who are creating like once in a
lifetime types of moments, but just stand out unbelievable people.
So just, that's the best label I can give to this.
Cause some of the, the people that we've thought about, right.
Nina Simone, Billie Holiday.
We mentioned Prince.
Um, I think Marvin Gaye is a good example.
And you can go back to our recent episode on that one and
hear us kind of talk about that.
But people in that, that vein of like the strange fruit type moment.
Of just like, they knew exactly what they were doing, could do it on
command, did do it on command when they wanted to in a lot of senses
had full kind of control over their capabilities and careers, um, because
of how immensely talented they were.
Kyle: Absolutely.
Probably my favorite category of these so far, I would add Ray
Charles Jeff Buckley covered.
Don't let the sun catch you crying, which is one of those beautifully
emotive power of the performance brings out the power of the words moments.
And then Stevie Wonder, if you like music at all, we don't, we don't
have to tell you about the power of early seventies Stevie in particular.
And there's just so many moments.
If you watch if you watch Atlanta, Donald Glover show on FX, uh, the Teddy Perkins
episode is bookended by Stevie Wonder.
songs and at the end plays evil and in a very small way connected somewhat
spiritually to Billy doing strange fruit in that club with the soul spotlight.
The context of that episode met with the power of Stevie's
performance of evil on that song really makes the words come to life.
So a small but instructive example there.
Cliff: So we, we sort of went in three different buckets, all of which are
honestly pretty safe musical bets for you to dip into and grab some artists.
If you weren't familiar with anyone, we mentioned the last one I'm going
to freely admit is sort of like, you can take it or leave it depending on
where you're at and how things hit you.
And that would be the.
in sincerity, the emo lineage of emotionally intense musical writing.
Okay.
There are examples I'll give of people who are very inspired and I won't necessarily
agree that all their music is great.
But I think you can also see again, an entire Potential genre of music
heavily inspired by this kind of great moment of emotion and expression.
So bands and that would be chris Carraba fronted bands.
In my opinion, he had various success over his career in translating
emotional intimacy and intensity into songwriting, but especially that
first further seems forever record.
The moon is down.
That's one that I like because it got in before I could tell myself
I shouldn't like that record.
But like the, some of the moments that give you like the words are sort of
perfect every now and then, and gives you a visceral feeling of the thing that's
being described and puts you in like a moment of time, which helps you to recall
a feeling like that sort of capability you can see play out in some of the better.
Songwriter driven emo bands.
So in addition to Further Seems Forever and potentially Dashboard Confessional,
if that's a thing you can get into other examples of that with varying
levels of success Connor Oberst, like Bright Eyes, that whole approach,
Kyle: Phoebe Bridgers approved.
Cliff: Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean, he's too much of a sad boy for me, but like, you can see
the lineage and you can feel it.
Yeah, and then in a lighter and more accessible sense, honestly, so early
Jimmy Eat World records Like Static Prevails and Clarity and all that stuff.
The band Mineral is another Like band I would kind of recommend on the
emo fringes who thought more deeply about their songwriting and even the
more recent I kind of hate it being called an emo resurgence in general.
But there are a lot of bands in that vein who exist today.
One of them is the world is a beautiful place and I'm no longer afraid to die.
And they also definitely channel this whole, like, I want to pack
feeling, emotion, word, narrative, everything I can into as many things
as I can say inside of this song.
And let the sort of nostalgia of the music support it.
That's a, like I said, that whole bucket is less serious and in my opinion, less
consequential than the other buckets that we've talked about, but it's nevertheless
like a direction that you can chase.
And if you're someone who loves some of that music, you can appreciate
where some of it came from.
Kyle: The way you just described the world as a beautiful place reminded
me of seeing when we saw the armed together in Brooklyn and like the idea
of hyper pop is sort of, it's like a metal take on Jeff Buckley in that way.
It's let me bring it all up to the front of the mix, spiritually speaking,
and, and hit you with it like a hammer.
That that's another pretty cool band.
It doesn't sound anything like Jeff Buckley, but if you like
getting your face smashed in with feelings, that's another way to go.
Cliff: so we've talked in practical terms about what you can do.
And yeah, this, this comes up pretty often.
Yes, you can always sort of chase more music from what inspired you, but just,
you know, Saying it more clearly, the reason we would even provide you with
buckets is so that you have more context and knowledge to go more meaningfully
understand and discover more music, not just sort of abstractly clicking
through artists in an app and playing singles and all that stuff, but actually
understanding what it is that you're chasing when you do it, um, I think
becomes, um, Well, I don't think it is a helpful way to understand music, discover
more artists and specifically makes you better at discovering the things that
you would not really expect yourself to jive with, understand, or appreciate.
And so, on top of letting this drive you to discover other things that were
inspired by and driven by this music.
I also think that there is in.
introspection aspect of what this project means at all.
What that album meant that you can sort of inhabit and think about, what
does it mean to for lack of a better term, Jeff Buckley, grace, some of the
things that are going on for you and how you can think about what's going on.
You know, what is oftentimes like, you know, we mentioned in, in laughed
about no matter how complex or advanced it all is, a lot of this stuff is
still just like, I'm sad about girl.
and I think to me, like that gives, that gives me some hope.
That's a reminder to me because when I wake up in life hits me and I'm like,
I'm real wound up about some dumb shit.
there's a beauty that Kyle, you specifically have helped me to see
through this record in going into those feelings, knowing that you don't have
to live there or be a permanent sad boy or collapse into nothingness because you
experienced emotion, but actually sort of willingly pushing yourself down into that.
And I think.
Thinking through what this record meant and how it was approached
gives you some ways to do that for yourself in a way that's maybe kind
that I hadn't thought about before.
Kyle: Yeah.
the kids on Tik Tok are saying to romanticize your own life and I think
to boil it down to just, I'm sad about girl or just I have big feelings.
Is only like part one Action and then reaction is go diffuse big feelings
all over the big wild world Like this dude was living in new york
doing an extremely new york thing and just the everything is alive.
Everything is breathing this of New York and constantly having more around
every, every corner to discover is what made this record so potent.
I hope that you can use this as an opportunity to romanticize your own
life and to bring out that beauty for others because, uh, the world's
fucked right now and people are lonely.
And Society has all but come to a grinding halt because we are alone together.
So like go be with people and go role model that it's okay for
like interactions to not go well.
And what, like, we have a big hump that we need to collectively
get over as a society.
Like the vibe's just going to be weird as we learn, we
relearn how to be people again.
Cause we, uh, had a big cultural reset a few years ago.
I'm like, this is.
Super top of mind for me all the time.
That we all, we all quite obviously need to touch grass and touch each
other consensually and remember, you know, remember once again,
that life and the other people in it can in fact be beautiful.
And.
Buckley talked about how he liked the small cafes, the small gigs,
because it was quote, where people come to drink and be with friends to
get laid and fall in love, or maybe to forget and even get depressed.
It's an emotional kind of place.
So just like go be in the world with emotions and give your world grace.
And I think the last thing that I'll say is to once again, give credit
to Daphne Brooks, who put it so beautifully in the epilogue of her book.
Perhaps grace is.
Such a thing of beauty because it's a musical work that like the artist
himself on the cover is so aware.
To say grace before a meal is to give thanks and be mindful, present,
aware of, and grateful for not only the nourishment before you, but for
the long line of rituals, activities, and people who made it possible for
this food to arrive at your table.
Grace is a work of beauty because it's unafraid to stretch itself
out in full gratitude to all that has come before it, for all that
has made this work of art possible, and for all that it might inspire.
Or as Jeff Buckley himself said, grace is what matters in anything,
especially life, especially growth, tragedy, pain, love, death.
It's a quality that I admire very greatly.
It keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly.
It keeps you from destroying things too foolishly.
In short, grace keeps you alive.