An Interview with Jeff

"I'm weird in the head.....sometimes," says Jeff Buckley, his voice quiet and low and soft, as though he has gotten used to the fact. Even accepted it. Which he has. And with his acclaimed debut album of last year, Grace, Buckley utilised his 'weird in the head' mindworkings to make his words and music sound unlike almost anything else on radio today. But the songs of Grace, they sometimes sound familiar, not of a week ago, a month ago, but of years ago. The music is not dated, sometimes it seems almost ageless. It is hard to pin down a comparitive artist, or even accurately describe even one of his songs, not that you would even want to try. There's a beautiful mystery to Buckley's music, and even he doesn't know where a lot of it comes from. But that seem dreamy, twenty-ideas-funnelled-into-one style of songwriting also permeates his spoken words, as he speaks his mind bolts off into a dozen different directions, and Buckley sighs sometimes as he tries to find his way back to his original point, as though the turmoil of his brain despairs him, or annoys him.

Buckley ran away from LA to New York City at seventeen. The son of folk singer Tim Buckley, Jeff made his first public appearance at a Tim Buckley benefit show, apparently stunning most who saw him that night as he played some of his dad's songs. His father died when he was eight, two months after he first met him, briefly. It was in NYC that Buckley found his musical oars, playing solo in small cafes and clubs as he wrote songs and dreamed of putting together a true band in every sense of the word. After scoring a major label deal, Buckley had almost a year to work on his songs, to plan the recordings of Grace, to put together his band, to get a live show happening. That he has done now, as we will see this week when Jeff Buckley tours Australia for the first time.

If you miss out, don't despair. Buckley says he is locked in for January's Big Day Out tour (along with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave), "it'll be a gas as they say in the 'hood. I'm absolutely honoured and excited to be coming down there, twice. I don't care if they put me on the garbage truck to play."

RR: Being at the centre of such success over the past twelve months, does it feel like you're living in a dream world, that you might wake up to find it all an unfocasable memory?

Jeff: "It feels terribly real.....so real that there's a certain sensation to reality that I haven't felt before, in a lot of years, since I've been on my own, either because of my youth or the situation I was in......I think I've been building up a haze in my mind about what is real. Maybe that's just growing up, I don't know. In the last few years there's a certain sensation that comes with like feeling that you're in reality, and that all these things are real, and you are in this amazement of it all.....you wonder if you're a physical being or a mental being........I've been through that whole thing."

RR: You were thinking about such things as a kid? Where did that influence come from?

Jeff: "Living with a generation from the 1970s that got into all the metaphysical theories of God and of existence, and that the mind is the thing that matters, and that the body is the slave, or that the body is the main guy, and the mind is like the caboose of the train.......all that stuff.....you become an adult that thinks too much."

RR: You mean along the theory that the mind, the brain, memory, imagination, all that is the soul, and the body is just the vehicle that gets it places, to absorb new info and experiences?

Jeff: "I'll tell you what I found.....I can't get away from the idea that one is a direct reflection of the other, they aren't seperated, they live together in eternal marriage, as so few things do......so few entities do. The thing that really shook my world and got my mind thinking about what is true, was issues of truth. Like living in this life as a public person now, which I never, ever, ever, ever used to be. And it happens to many people, you're listening to them on the radio right now. I'm living in this place......this microcosm of the music world, and there's this really cool thing called heresay, and I love it, it's my favourite (sarcastic tone). It's an amazing alternative universe. Just the way people base their decisions and their beliefs on the things they hear about other people, but not things that they actually find out for themselves."

"That's a common human condition, it's faith that what you hear is the truth, thereby saving the person the hassle of finding out the truth for themselves.... "But then it's like you've lived you're life by proxy, constantly, and that creates a real problem in your life and in your body. You feel like you're surrounded by absolute non-trustworthy people, and life, and that can really kill you. And it did. It killed me. It got me, and it squeezed my brain till I couldn't think anymore......"

RR: What changed that for you? Why did you stop trusting so faithfully?

Jeff: "A few things happened to me that made me ask myself the question 'what is true? what is real around you? Who is real around you? Who are the ones that you love and trust?' Once I started to gather that knowledge it all came into focus. And it had never happened to me before, cause I always trusted everyone, always. I never put myself in the position to watch out for myself. If you live regular life you can pretty much coast, but in this one.......it's basically my music, and if that's not intact at the end of the day and able to grow, then I'm fucked. I have no purpose, all dressed up with no place to go, you just have the clothes.....and you're really fucked."

RR: You don't want to be a charicature of yourself onstage? Do you fear being the fool?

Jeff: "You can look like a fool and still live life....you must do it, you must be the fool, but to be the fool in vain, forever, is something I really can't take. Being the fool, playing the fool, but left with nothing to show for it, no amusement, no glorious hindsight with the rose coloured glasses, no scars, no nothing. Just a fuckin' fool. Like a fool god. I can't have that.........so I had to wake up."

"But also in order to protect yourself, don't you have to allow yourself to be cynical, a little paranoid, suspicious about the people who flock themselves around you now? "I've always been cynical. There's cynicism and then there's just blatant and unbridled hope, but neither of them are awareness. I take awareness over those two extremes. I fall into one or the other, but if I can balance then I can go forward with both of them instead of being.......ruminating in a stinky basement of cynicism, with your select group of music, and only that music and nothing else is allowed to come in, create a change. Or you can have that unbridled hope, which usually doesn't like to face reality.....(adopts high pitched, childlike voice of a true innocent) 'Oh everything's wonderful, sure. Knife in the heart? Oh sure, can I have two please? Great. Yeah, take my riches, okay, see you later, yeah sure, bye, everything's fine' (laughs)."

RR: Is it simply finding a comfortable balance? Where you can draw from both cynicism and unbridled hope?

Jeff: ".....both of them.....it's slow death if you're in just one or the other. That's the same for all issues of balance, really. So you have to be awake....everything's a fight, everything.......it's good....even fighting to come.....fighting against disturbed neighbours or physical fatigue to have an orgasm with the one you want, that's a fight.....I need the fight, just like the needle needs to be on the groove, or else there's no music. That's not to stay I've got the answer.....I know that I need to know what I want."

RR: Is it like you have all these other people, these many other sides to yourself, is that what it's like?

Jeff: "People have many people inside them, many selves I feel, and I feel that they shift from one to the other sometimes in times or stress or total importance. I'm not talking about psychopaths, I'm talking about normal people. You notice the difference in your girlfriend if she becomes the mother, and she slips into the mother telling the child what they can or can't do - drawing boundaries around the child. It's a normal thing. And every side of you has a language and a feel and rhythm and a melody and a colour, and it's hard to get to it, you just have to be open and unafraid. The more uptight and conservative that I am, the more conservative the music I'm making will be."

RR: Is that a totally different self of you up onstage, from the one who walks through a garden, thinking about the world?

Jeff: "Oh yeah, (onstage) that's me with the floodgates open. A different me....I don't fear that person......that's more me, empty......like a faucet with water gushing through it. But I know who that person is. People are different when music is in them, they change physically. A child feels different when it is singing. The energy in the room is different, you stop and listen, or you laugh, whatever. When any artist is channeling through other people, they transform into this......I don't know, some people might call it the divine.....it has a special nature that is yours, even though you don't see it very often."

RR: Do you drift away onstage? Do you hear this person singing and playing, but feel unmoored to him?

Jeff: "I don't loose myself onstage, I loose my concerns for yesterday, or what's gonna happen tommorow. People having been forced, or getting into situations, where they compelled to act in the present, totally changes a human being. And makes them......you're an instrument of the present when you are fighting in a war, or saying your vows for a Christian marriage....or making love.....your arse is on the line somehow, or your heart is on the line and it's life or death.....or it's brilliance or a needless dull pall over your heart, something you really need to be yourself in. Like death......facing death....."

RR: Have you got your head around that yet?

Jeff: "These two friends of mine were robbed. These thieves broke in and tied them up and pointed guns in their faces.......my friends were talking about the numbness that came with the acceptance that they were going to die......and the calmness, almost a ridiculous calm. Like missing a bus, 'oh well, I'll just wait for another one'. It must be the fear that hits you and it stops the mind from panicking, you just freeze and think 'okay, here I am'. I think that's the sensation that hits the rabbit before the truck plummets into it, they freeze.....I've frozen many times.....there's no life without death......it's very simple.."

RR: What was it about music that first grabbed you? That sparked an interest to make music of your own instead of just listening to it?

Jeff: "As a child it was just the pure.....spectacle of rock. It just looked cool and sounded so cool, but for me cool had a certan musicality attached to it, and a certain abandon, which is the reason why I grew up liking Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. I knew what was going on, so do most kids. At the beginning it was the things on the radio, all that mellow post Dylan rock, including Dylan actually.....he could weave these deep dark magic spells, he had a quality even to a small child that he carried in his heydey. But as I got to be aware of what people were doing, Eagles, Barbara Striesand, Judy Garland, Led Zeppelin, the classic rock ditties, American Woman, and Crosby Stills And Nash. Tonnes of Joni Mitchell, tonnes of Stevie Wonder, when I was a kid, and Sesame Street."

"It's amazing how many people forget that Sesame Street is where children first hear a whole lot of different music, over and over, and learn lyrics, even if it is 'C is for Cookie and Cookie starts with C. "I remember.....lots of stuff from Sesame Street.....James Taylor was on there singing one of Oscar The Grouch's songs.....and there's this Stevie Wonder song from that show.....it was one of the baddest, funkiest things I'd ever heard (Buckley breaks into a disturbingly accurate Stevie Wonder voice singing the alphabet)."

RR: You used to play around with home recordings as a kid, stringing together different records of your mum's with stuff that you liked, slowing records down, speeding them up?

Jeff: "Yeah, that was just playing around, trying different things.....I used to scare the shit out of myself playing Beatles albums backwards.....I'd heard those stupid things like when you played it backwards you could hear Satan......I wanted to hear Satan, so I'd play the albums backwards. So then I started playing Funny Girl backwards, and I was totally terrified. Playing anything backwards will terrify you as a kid......"

RR: Did you get obsessed with one album or one artist as a kid?

Jeff: That thing where you get addicted to playing the same album over and over and over? Where it's almost like you are inside the album? "Yeah, anybody who I thought was brilliant I totally pounced on and they became my every waking thought.....their worlds were so appealing I couldn't help but get sucked in......Nina Simone's world, the Sex Pistols world, Dylan's world.....I think my father was pretty good....." When did you first listen back to the records he had made? ".....I was having nightmares when I was eighteen.....so I decided to listen to his records.......he had that too, in songs like Blue Afternoon, that thing where the song becomes its own world, and I could go and visit those places.....But< his songs never really became a favourite.....it's just not my kind of thing."