Jeff Buckley’s legacy and music live on, long past his death in 1997 at just 30 years old.
In the 1990s, he was known for his hypnotic voice and boundary-pushing artistry. Buckley is best known by many for his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and Rolling Stone put his debut album “Grace” on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
All of those feats and more are catalogued in the new documentary “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.” Director Amy Berg said that combing through hours of archival footage of Buckley performing and giving interviews was a labor of love.
Berg said that when she was growing up in the 1990s, most of the music she saw at shows was loud and punk-inspired. But once she discovered Buckey’s “Grace,” she said it changed her life.
“ It just grounded me, so it kind of pulled me out of a very intense scene,” Berg said. “And Jeff Buckley has this way of making you feel real.”
Did you ever get to see Buckley perform?
“Just once. He was mesmerizing, and the challenge I had as a filmmaker is that I wanted this film to feel like it felt to see him or hear his album. And so I kind of chose to use his perspective to pull us in so that I could try to convey what that felt like live because it was so intimate and you were so close. But most of the footage that exists is more like the larger stadium performances, which were different.”
Buckley is best known for his “Hallelujah” cover, but he was a songwriter too, right?
“ One of the other important themes and stories in the film is about his relationship with his father. He was the son of a [1960s] and ‘70s folk music icon, Tim Buckley, and in his early journals, you see that he really wants to be a songwriter. He wants to write songs. He’s kind of avoiding the singing lane because I think there’s too much association with his father.
“Songwriting was so important to him, and it was what he wanted to be remembered for. Yet he got signed at a time where he didn’t play a lot of original songs. He was mostly singing cover songs, and that was a big risk, maybe, for some of the labels because they weren’t sure if he was going to write songs that would translate, but obviously, he had so much in him.”
Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, was featured in the film, but she initially didn’t want to be. How did you convince her?
“ I spent about 10 years trying to convince her. In the beginning, she gave me a soft no. But she left the door cracked open, and I just, every time I finished a film, I would reach out to her, and I got a lot of nos. But eventually in 2019, she said yes, and I’ve been working on it ever since.”
His mother said he has been singing his whole life, practically since he was a baby, right?
“ He was just able to pick things up just instantly, just based on what he would hear. He would hear a song once and know how to play the guitar parts to it, and his voice was its own instrument. It’s such a unique voice because it just opens up so wide. And some of the singers that we interviewed in the film talked about how there was like no masculine or feminine. It was just everything.”
How did Buckley draw inspiration from Bob Dylan, Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin?
“ I mean, he also reflected machines like the cappuccino maker and sounds in the room. He just had this ability to hear any little tone or note and interpret it in his own way.
“But specifically about Led Zeppelin, that was his band. And growing up, he used to just blast it into his body. He just loved the intricacies and the massive sonic delivery of Led Zeppelin, and at a time in music where it was very stripped down and loud and grungy, Jeff actually brought in a composer to do strings on his first studio album, and it was something that felt very Led Zeppelin in theme.”
After “Grace,” Buckley toured for years. He was also under pressure to release a follow-up album. What was that period of his life like?
“ The pressure that he felt at that time to write an amazing song takes an incredible amount of patience and inspiration, and I think Jeff’s first album was a compilation of pretty much everything that happened to him in his life.
“He was a sponge for feelings and things that he learned along the way and experiences, so he couldn’t force that, but he had to deliver another album. So I think that was really a conflict for him, and I think that is what caused him to kind of unravel a bit when he moved down to Memphis because he had so much to sit still with and take on after touring for three years and becoming famous. I think he just unraveled and needed some time to soak it up before jumping right in to record. But he did have an amount of pressure that he put on himself that was high.”
When he drowned in a swimming accident, many speculated that drugs were involved. But your film says they weren’t. Why do you think he got into that river that day?
“ I think he was just an impulsive guy, and he hadn’t slept for a couple day,s and his band was on their way to Memphis to record an album that he was feeling excited about.
“So I think that he made a decision based on what he saw right in front of him, which was a beautiful river that on a hot night in May in Memphis, people in that part of the country can totally understand probably. It was a spontaneous move that didn’t, unfortunately, have a good ending So it was a tragic moment, but he was in his joy.”
How do you describe Buckley’s legacy?
“ Just make great art. I think that that’s what he would want to say. I feel like his whole life was about being true to yourself and expressing it in the way that he did, and I think everyone’s got something like that in them. And I hope that this film inspires creativity.”
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Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this segment for broadcast. Caleb Green mixed the segment. Grace Griffin produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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