FTA: Jeff Buckley - New Year’s Prayer
Feel no shame for what you are
Some years, I find the ending of one and the beginning of another as noteworthy as the transition from one day to the next at any point within the calendar year—meaning, not noteworthy at all.
In other years, when the end of December rolls around, I take stock of what I’ve accomplished and thoughtfully consider what I’d like to bring into my life for the coming year.
This year I’m feeling more of the former. I haven’t done much reflecting or projecting. It’s largely a byproduct of my anxiety, which keeps my brain busy busy busy even when I’m walking my dog or lying in bed (especially when I’m in bed).
I have no particular goals or plans for this newsletter. I’m not particularly motivated to keep to a schedule or build upon my accomplishments over the past 2.75 years and more than 175 posts and essays.
And I’m fine with that. I no longer feel the pressure (or desire) to come up with content on a weekly basis. To borrow from the great Jeff Buckley, I feel no shame for what I am.
I don’t have any profound New Year’s Eve/Day rituals that I enact, but for the past few years, I have made it a point to listen to Jeff Buckley’s two studio albums, Grace and Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, as my method of connecting to endings and beginnings.
Like countless others, I adored Jeff. His music spoke to me deeply the first time I heard it. It continued and continues to speak to me. The songs never fail to reveal something new on each listen. I’m beyond grateful that I had the opportunity to see him perform live back in 1994.
I wrote about this experience and my love for his song “New Year’s Prayer” exactly two years ago in the below piece. It’s one of the essays I’m most proud of.
Happy New Year, dear Wormheads and I hope 2025 brings us all gems and treasures, musical and otherwise.
When I walked into the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco on the evening of November 20, 1994, to see Jeff Buckley and his band perform in concert, I only partially realized I was in the presence of a rare musical talent. His legendary debut album, Grace, had been on sale to the public for less than 3 months at the time, and, although I did own it and considered myself a fan, I wasn’t sure what to make of his quite adventurous yet meandering reworkings of the songs I’d thought I was familiar with.
The Noe Valley Ministry was (and still is) a quaint church tucked away on a side street in the tony Noe Valley neighborhood of the city — an area known more for overpriced boutiques and chichi restaurants than rock ‘n’ roll concert halls.
The Ministry (what we all called it) hosted live music featuring a wide array of genres, from rock to punk to West African highlife, Cuban salsa, folk, classical and more. It was a unique community venue where the secular and the spiritual could gather and have profound religious experiences together. Leather-clad, tattooed rockers headbanging until midnight and snappily-dressed families toting their young broods to church services in the morning. Sometimes they were the same patrons.
It didn’t take long for this music-obsessed 27-year-old to become caught under Jeff Buckley’s other-worldly spell. It was a power that would ensnare millions more soon enough. The venue was general admission, and, being alone (I couldn’t find anyone to take my other ticket so I sold it to a stranger outside the venue), I started standing near the back, admiring the show from afar. But by the third song of the setlist, “So Real,” I was magically transported to the front, next to the stage, within spitting (and sweating) distance of Jeff. Jeff didn’t wander far from his mic stand and kept his guitar slung over his narrow shoulders, his greasy, shoulder-length hair hanging in front of his face as he lost himself in a trance that the rest of his 4-piece backing band seemed to have access to as well.
While searching online for the exact date of the show, I discovered that uber-fan Mercedes Beene had created an amazing website (you must check it out) dedicated to the words, art, and music of Jeff Buckley.
She’d gathered together many bootleg concert recordings and videos from Buckley’s first tour in 1994-1995. Several of the shows (most are audio only) are posted on YouTube.
If you are a Jeff Buckley fan I highly recommend checking her website out. I’ve spent many an hour lost in a JB stupor.
The Noe Valley Ministry show was indeed one of the shows recorded and archived on her site, and I — and you — can now (re)live the priceless experience for free.
I’m listening to it right now, as I type this. Tears of joy and sadness stream down my face as the band finishes their epic, “Last Goodbye.” I had no idea back then that the song would soon represent a whole lot more than the end of a romantic relationship.
When the song ends, Jeff tells the audience a story of how a woman at the Seattle show a couple of days prior had approached him to say that she’d taken her name off his mailing list because he ‘was a rock star now’ and was too big for his britches for her to give him the time of day.
The way he tells the story is very funny and sweet, and listening to it again reminds me of how not a rock star he was. How unassuming he seemed, yet at the same time, so completely present and embodied, both within the music he was performing and the audience he was performing for.
How present and alive he still seems.
And how fucking deep the pain of his loss still feels, almost 30 years later, remembering that he was taken from us so young.
Jeff had an innate ability to lose himself in every note of every song. It didn’t matter that the band’s sets would often include the same 8-10 tracks — no two shows would even remotely sound the same. This ability to self-reinterpret at such a high level was rare for artists with 20 years under their belt. That he could do it after a single album, was and is unheard of.
Listening to the 90-minute concert recording from the Noe Valley Ministry show I’m beyond impressed with how good the audio quality of the mix is! I’ve heard my share of bootlegs in my day, and, especially considering that this was captured more than 30 years ago (damn!), you can clearly make out Buckley’s inter-song banter without straining too much. Nothing is distorted.
The only part that surprises me is how quiet the audience is. Maybe this is because it was a soundboard mix. Though when I think back, I do recall it being a fairly reverent crowd. We weren’t sleepy or subdued — we simply were in awe.
I left the Noe Valley Ministry that night on a profound high (possibly influenced by a bit of cannabis) and could feel that same ‘what did we just see?’ euphoria emanating from the other patrons.
Listening to this concert again, I’m instantly brought back to that magical night, when I attended church with my new church-going music friends.
There are only a handful of deaths in the music world that turned me into a sobbing mess.
Prince.
D. Boon, singer and guitarist of 80s punk band The Minutemen.
Jeff Buckley.
There’s probably a couple more, but that’s who comes to mind first.
When D. Boon was killed in a car accident in 1985, I was a semi-formed eighteen-year-old who’d just seen The Minutemen perform live a couple of months prior. They were my favorite band and would shape my musical landscape for years to come. It still bums me out today, as The Minutemen were at their peak when he tragically passed. At least they were able to release more than a dozen EPs and albums before D.’s death.
I’ve tried to write about Prince’s death at least a dozen times and nothing’s come close to capturing my true feelings. It still feels too soon. Maybe I’ll try again sometime later this year.
The song “New Year’s Prayer” is the 7th track on Jeff Buckley’s posthumous 2nd album, Sketches for My Sweetheart The Drunk.
It’s the album he was in the studio recording when he went missing the night of May 29, 1997. He’d wandered off to swim in the Mississippi River and never returned. His body was found a week later.
This song was on my mind because I’d been listening to a playlist of New Year’s themed music and the song was in the mix. I hadn’t heard it in at least a decade and I marveled, once again, at how exceptional it was. Like most of Buckley’s best work, it’s imbued with a hypnotic, trance-like, ecstatic presence.
Ooh, fall in light
Fall in light, fall in light
Fall in light
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you were
As the marrow in your bones
Fall in light
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel no shame for what you are
Feel it as a waterfall
Fall in lightStand absolved behind your electric chair, dancing
Stand absolved behind your electric chair, dancing
Jeff doesn’t sing these words so much as he chants them. They’re more mantras than lyrics. I listen to this song and it’s hard to imagine it written by a man in crisis, a man overwhelmed by the pressures of his new album measuring up to his acclaimed debut, Grace. But by many accounts, this was how Jeff was feeling at the time.
The songs on the album are labeled “Sketches” because they were not finished. Adding “Sketches From” was a way of honoring Jeff, by letting people know that these sketches were just that. Rough drafts.
But the thing is, in a way, even the songs on Grace were sketches.
Maybe they were more “complete” from a studio recording perspective, but Jeff was always reworking his songs in concert, exploring their crevices, their nooks and crannies. Digging deep and finding more sonic jewels to excavate.
It was this quality, of never being satisfied, of always searching, that made him such an entrancing, dynamic presence on stage. It was this quality that left him an enigma in the hearts and minds of so many fans.
Watching old interviews of Jeff this past week (one of which is below) and listening to his early concerts reminds me that as enigmatic a figure as Jeff Buckley presented, he was also a sensitive, deep-feeling man craving connection and, perhaps, a moment or two of transcendence. I think he reached that and more in his 30 years of life.
I’ll end this piece with a couple of video clips I found last week, during my Jeff Buckley YouTube wormhole.
The first is an excerpt from a MuchMusic interview from Vancouver on November 16, 1994. Four days before I would see him in concert. Though the YouTube poster thinks it was actually filmed in Toronto on October 27. Either way, it is very close to the time of the audio recording of the show I attended.
According to the notes, this is an edited sample of a longer interview from a MuchMusic DVD of which the title is not given.
I feel like it captures Jeff in such a natural, playful, expansive, vulnerable place. Also, he looks so friggin’ young! He exudes a sort of awkward, goofy, natural wisdom that I hope he also saw in himself.
The second video is a fairly technical breakdown of Jeff’s vocal prowess, skill, and style by Elizabeth Zharoff, opera singer and host of The Charismatic Voice, where she reviews songs she is hearing for the first time.
I wrote about her in my piece all about Song Reaction YouTube Channels, which you can check out below.
Recently Zharoff started a new channel, The Singing Hole, focused on breaking down the vocals of a particular artist with exceptional or unique vocal qualities. One of her first videos focused on Jeff Buckley. I learned a lot about Jeff’s approach to singing in this video, even if I do wonder if he would call bullshit on some of her readings and interpretations of his stylistic quirks.
So that’s it! What is your experience with Jeff Buckley? Were you late to the Buckley party? Did you get into him during his small, 3-4 year window when he was alive and recording/touring?
And which musician/artist’s tragic death knocked you to the floor when you found out? Amy Winehouse? Kurt Cobain?
I’d love to hear your thoughts, feelings, and experiences in the comments!
Happy New Year! I remember you telling me you were fortunate enough to have seen Jeff Buckley live. Lucky bastard! I was late to the party, mainly due to age (and maturity), so it would have been pretty much impossible for me to see him live. Yet, I'm happy I get to experience it vicariously through you :)
I have a quite spooky story with Amy Winehouse's death essentially because I predicted it (I mean, we all saw it coming, but I predicted it, or "felt" it, the night before). It still gives me goosebumps when I think about ut. Maybe some day I'll write about it, although I have no idea how to make it fit into my Vinyl Room. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, i.e. artists dying too young, and/or this sixth sense some music lovers can have, I'd be happy to do a future collab and share the story on your site!
I really enjoyed this piece, Steve. I never saw Jeff perform; however, I do have my own JB story.
I did my master's at the State University of New York in Albany. In 1994 I returned to the US to sort things out before moving to the UK. My friend Josh, who had gone to Skidmore College, called me up and said an old college friend of his who was also a musician was in town from the city, and knowing I had a lot of records, he wanted to bring his buddy and some bottles over to my apartment. I can't remember the exact timing, but it was cold, so it must have been sometime between Jan-April 1994, as by May ‘94 I was gone.
Anyway, they showed up, and Josh introduced me to his friend, Mick. We chatted, and Mick told me he had just finished recording and mixing an album, and he had the tape with him. I asked him what his band was, and he said it was with “Jeff Buckley,” and he was his bassist. I said to him I had never heard of him, and Mick said, "You will!" He then pulled the tape out of his jacket pocket and gave it to me, and we had a private listening session of ‘Grace’ months before the LP was released. I remember by Autumn 1994, Jeff's name was everywhere in the NME and Melody Maker.
The guy was right, and that guy was Mick Grøndahl!
Happy New Year to you from way north on the I-5 in Vancouver, BC, where my wife and I are seeing in the New Year!