FEATURE:
A Tear That Hangs Inside Our Soul Forever
IN THIS PHOTO: Jeff Buckley in 1994
Inside the New Documentary, It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley
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AS a massive fan…
IN THIS PHOTO: Amy Berg, Mary Guibert (Jeff Buckley’s mother) and Ben Harper/PHOTO CREDIT: Robin Marshall/REX/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival
of Jeff Buckley, any documentary that shines a light on his talent is fascinating to me. Buckley recorded one studio album, Grace, in 1994. He died age thirty in 1997. He was in the process of recording songs for a planned second studio album. To be called My Sweetheart the Drunk, it was an indication of what his next moves would sound like. A staggering talent who left us too soon, a new documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, has won acclaim and praise from fans and the media. Featuring never-before-seen footage, exclusive voice messages, and accounts from Jeff Buckley's inner circle (including his mother), it got its premiere at Sundance on 24th January. I suspect that it will be released to a streaming site soon enough. I would urge everyone to catch this documentary when they can. Although it has not got a wider release date yet, I wanted to provide an insight into what we could expect. To do that, I have found reviews for It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley. I want to start out with Variety’s assessment of a portrait of a young artist who lived a brief life but has inspired countless artists since his death:
“In “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” Amy Berg’s rapturous documentary about Buckley’s extraordinary rise in the ’90s and his tragically cut-short life, we hear Buckley sing in every conceivable context: in clubs, in stadiums, in the recording studio, and when he’s just sitting around. And as we drink in the majesty of his voice, the film lays bare a paradox about him that isn’t nearly as apparent if you just listen to “Grace” (1994), the only album he ever released.
When you envision the quintessential Jeff Buckley sound, you tend to think of one of his slower, meditative drifting numbers — like, famously, his cover version of “Hallelujah,” which is so spellbinding in its deliberation that he seems to be weighing and burnishing every word. That’s the Buckley who first wowed small audiences at Sin-é, the East Village hole-in-the-wall venue (it sat 30 to 40 people) where he was discovered. Someone recalls that when he was performing at Sin-é, you
But Buckley was as much of a rock ‘n’ roller as he was a hipster chanteuse. In the documentary, there’s a clip where someone asks him what his influences are, and he says, “Love, anger, depression, joy…and Zeppelin.”
He wasn’t kidding. Robert Plant sang way up high because he was following in the tradition of Black blues singers who sang in women’s ranges as a form of empathy and seduction. Of course, Plant also used those keening high notes to express an appetite for destruction. With Buckley, his sound was even more layered. There was a side of him that wanted to sound like a woman — but he also wanted to sing like the ’70s metal god whose voice was a pure assertion of male power. When Buckley sang slow, he was lulling and hypnotic, but when he placed that voice atop an up-tempo rock ‘n’ roll song (like, say, the title track of “Grace”), the result was every bit as transcendent. He came up in the era of grunge, but he expressed something much different: an abandon that was lyrical.
Jeff Buckley, during the time he was alive, was thought of as a cult rocker, a kind of “musician’s musician.” In the movie, there’s a quote from David Bowie saying that he thought “Grace” was the greatest album ever made. We see photos of the time Paul and Linda McCartney went to visit him backstage. And what the documentary captures, I think, is that Buckley was on his way to becoming a staggeringly huge star. I defy you to see “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” and not fall in love with Jeff Buckley’s voice. By the time the film is over, you want to find a way to go back and rescue him to let him live the life he should have.
Buckley’s intense identification with singers like Nina Simone and Edith Piaf — and his ability, almost unheard of in a male singer, to evoke their artistry — was about the music he loved, but it also carried a psychological component. He was in thrall to what he saw as the preeminence of women. His every soaring note was an homage to their majesty. On some level, this aspect of him was formed by the father who had abandoned him. He loved women and didn’t trust men.
But what of his own male energy? He was a gorgeous icon of rock stardom, but he had a profound ambivalence about his own male spirit. He grooved on it, but he was also, while not a grunge rocker, part of the Kurt Cobain generation. Cobain, who sometimes wore dresses onstage, had a relationship with his own masculinity that was so self-critical I would argue it bordered on the masochistic.
In many ways, these young male rockers were ahead of their time. They wanted the future to be female. But as we watch the documentary, what happens to Jeff Buckley in the last part of his life is at once mysterious and patterned. He becomes subject to mood swings, and reckless behavior, to the point that the theory is floated that he may have been bipolar, or even had a psychotic break. That’s all conjecture; we’ll never know. But what the film shows us — and this is not conjecture — is that during the weeks before his death, he made a series of phone calls to many of the people he knew, and what he did in those conversations, one after another, was to apologize and seek closure; it sounded like he was saying goodbye. Mary Guibert plays us the last voice-mail message he ever left for her, and there, too, he seems to be paying tribute to his mother with an eerie finality. There’s a clip in the movie of Jeff chatting with his buddies, and when the subject comes up of where he thinks he’ll be in 10 years, he draws a weird kind of blank. He says he can’t imagine it”.
I am going to move to a review from The Guardian. Before I wrap things up, I want people to get an idea of what to expect from this documentary. If you have not heard of Jeff Buckley then you can get an impression of why he was so special. An artist who is one of the most influential and important of his generation. I have been a fan of his for many years now and cannot wait to see It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley:
“The film, executive produced by longtime fan Brad Pitt, attests to Buckley’s fanatic interest in music at an early age; Guibert, the child of Panamanian immigrants to Anaheim, California, who had Buckley at 17, recalls that she first heard him sing while he was still in a bassinet, harmonizing with the radio. His father, avant garde folk rocker Tim Buckley, left when he was six months old.
It’s Never Over evinces Buckley’s fraught relationship with his famous father, with whom he shared a striking resemblance and a four-octave, dextrous voice, yet barely knew. Buckley spent just a few days with him before Tim died at age 28 from a heroin overdose; the young musician was not mentioned in Tim’s many obituaries, yet first gained attention for his talent at a starry 1991 tribute concert in New York.
The comparisons to Tim – which, given his early death, continue to the persist, though multiple close friends remind that Buckley was not an addict and only had one beer in his system when he drowned – irked the singer throughout his career. Asked by an interviewer what he inherited from his father, Buckley visibly bristles before answering: “People who remember my father. Next question.”
As the film illustrates, Buckley’s musical influences were ardent and varied, from Judy Garland to Led Zeppelin, Nina Simone to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Soundgarden to Bill Evans and Shostakovich. Moore, his first girlfriend in New York, and others recall how Buckley’s eclectic taste melded with the eccentric and experimental East Village art scene in the 1990s, leading to a residency at a small cafe, Sin-é, where Buckley would riff and mostly play covers. Word spread quickly, especially once he began performing original music; a record label bidding war ensued. He signed with Columbia, the same label that signed another downtown upstart, Bob Dylan, three decades prior.
It’s Never Over surveys the making of Grace, now widely acclaimed though it performed moderately in the US at the time, as well as his continual discomfort with fame, which impeded his creative process – “Without ordinary life, there is no art,” he says in archival voiceover. Even with commercial success, “that really insecure person was always there”, says Moore.
The pressure to produce a second album was intense, both from himself and from his record label. Several film participants say the stress contributed to his self-diagnosed manic-depressive disorder, which worsened during his late 20s and influenced his move to Memphis.
While numerous loved ones attest to Buckley’s dark moments, they also recall a lighthearted, witty, fun-loving and open soul. His sensitivity, recalls Wasser, “wasn’t crushed like some other men’s had been”.
His death at age 30, just as recording on his second album was set to begin in earnest, left behind a trove of unfinished recordings, a substantial debt to his record company and a few poignant voicemails to loved ones that are played in the film, leading to much sniffling in the Utah crowd. It also left behind the question of how to handle a posthumous career, incalculable broken hearts and an open-ended legacy still in flux. Since his death, eight live albums and multiple compilation albums have been released; Buckley’s transcendent cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah reached No 1 on the Billboard charts in 2008. New listeners born after his death are now discovering Grace on TikTok, ensuring Buckley’s virtuosic singing and poetic vision carry on.
With the film, “I was trying to understand and articulate why I love him so much”, said Berg. But as she noted: “There just aren’t words to explain Jeff Buckley”.
I am finishing off with a review from The Wrap. Everyone who has seen It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley has attested to its power and impact. Although the documentary is fairly straightforward, it does provide plenty of depth into a musician that was among the most captivating of all time:
“Director Amy Berg’s “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” reveals itself as a straightforward documentary, complete with interviews from Columbia music executives, Jeff Buckley’s mom, his ex-girlfriends, friends, contemporaries, and those who knew him best. The film includes archival footage of Alanis Morissette disclosing her appreciation for Buckley’s music and pull quotes from actor Brad Pitt and fellow icon David Bowie sharing that “Grace” is the best album in music history. These interviews and musings are touchstones that provide color to Buckley’s life and influence on other artists, but it’s footage of the man himself that lets the audience in on what makes a man like him tick.
As friend and fellow singer Aimee Mann says at one point in the film, “He has a boundaryless, liquid quality.”
Berg’s fascination with Buckley’s octave range and tumultuous past makes for an electric documentary that harkens back to an era of opposition in the face of pop music. Raised by a teenaged single mother, Buckley’s estranged father, Tim, was a moderately successful singer in his own right but died of a drug overdose early in life. Rather than looking up to his father in a musical sense, the younger Buckley was instead heavily influenced by other artists with seemingly no connection to one another: Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Edith Piaf, the Smiths, Led Zeppelin and Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
But fate has a tricky way of catching up with a burgeoning artist, especially one who repeatedly foretold his future demise to his ex-girlfriend, Rebecca (also another major influence in his songwriting). Berg captures Buckley’s fraught relationship with his own mortality, as the singer became irritated with those he admired in the music industry who suddenly admired him back. The idea that the influences in his life were influenced by his work was too much for Buckley to take in, and Berg does a remarkable job of demonstrating the psychological break the musician had toward the tail end of his life as a result.
“It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” doesn’t reinvent the documentary genre, but it does offer a unique perspective on the varying music of the 1990s, an experimental time where lonely artists like Buckley could buck the system and create a new brand of music under the guise of major labels like Columbia.
Sometimes, when a person flies too close to the sun of fame, it’s possible they fall into trouble with drugs and alcohol, a cliche to which Buckley himself was not immune. But his life and career aren’t defined by the extracurricular activities that made him difficult to work with, nor does his untimely death define it”.
I will end things there. An artist I have so much admiration for, I cannot wait to see It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley. It seems like a fitting tribute and salute to an incredible musician. It is clear that, when it comes to Jeff Buckley, we will never see…
ANYONE like him again.