Jeff Buckley Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk CD

SKETCHES FOR MY SWEETHEART THE DRUNK is a posthumous release of the material Jeff Buckley was working on before his death in 1997. Disc One includes the studio sessions for what would have been his second album, produced by Tom Verlaine. Disc Two includes Buckley's 4-track home recordings of works-in-progress, plus a live recording from the studio of WFMU.

The CD-Extra version of SKETCHES FOR MY SWEETHEART THE DRUNK contains all the tracks on the original album along with a collage of photos, artwork, and lyrical excerpts and clippings from Jeff's notebooks.

"Everybody Here Wants You" was nominated for the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.

The sadly short life of Jeff Buckley left many songs unfinished, and SKETCHES FOR MY SWEETHEART was compiled of material he was working on before his untimely demise.

We'll never know for sure what artistic heights Jeff Buckley might have gone on to reach, since he was taken from us so obscenely early, with only time enough to complete one album and begin work on a second. With the help of SKETCHES, though, we can make some educated guesses. This double-disc, lovingly assembled by Buckley's friends, colleagues and family, gathers together both his studio efforts and home 4-track demos for the album he was trying to complete up until his tragic drowning.

The studio sessions, produced by Tom Verlaine, find Buckley downplaying his phenomenal vocal abilities somewhat, in favor of focusing on the songs, from the Zeppelinisms of "The Sky Is A Landfill" to the undoubtedly Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-influenced "New Year's Prayer" and the beautiful, ethereal "You & I." The home demos show Buckley's more experimental, playful side, an aspect of his music presumably encouraged by his pals/heroes The Grifters, whose lo-fi masterpieces inspired Buckley to work in the same studio in Memphis. The closing "Satisfied Mind," from an earlier live radio broadcast, is a touching elegy to an artistic flame that was extinguished far too soon.

Jeff Buckley was a mess of contradictions: a perfectionist who believed in spontaneity, a man who was at once humble and vain, a musician who shunned his father's tumultuous legacy while creating one of his own. These are some of the reasons why he took his time writing and recording the material for his second album, laboring over many songs for months at a time. Given such painstaking methods, it shouldn't have been a surprise that recording was an equally fastidious process. Buckley recorded enough material for an album with producer Tom Verlaine, but deciding that the results weren't quite right, he scrapped them and moved to Memphis to record the album again. He reworked a few songs as home demos as he prepared to cut the album, but it was never made -- Buckley died in a tragic drowning accident before entering the studio. As a way to enlarge his legacy, his mother and record label rounded up the majority of the existing unreleased recordings, releasing them as the double-disc set Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk. Excepting a few awkward moments and middle-eights, it's hard to s

Japanese edition of his posthumous 1998 & second album,'Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk', with 'GunshotGlitter' & 'Thousand Fold' added as bonus tracks. 22 trackstotal. Double jewelcase. A Sony Records release.Also includes lyircs to all tracks.

This version of the album includes two extra songs.

CD contains 2 bonus tracks.

Recorded at 135 West 26th Street Studio, New York, New York on February 5, 1997; live on "The Music Faucet," WFMU East Orange, New Jersey on October 11, 1992 and in Memphis, Tennessee in 1997. Includes liner notes by Bill Flanagan.

Personnel: Jeff Buckley (vocals, guitar); Michael Tighe (guitar); Mick Grondahl (bass); Parker Kindred, Eric Eidel (drums).

Personnel: Jeff Buckley (vocals, guitar); Michael Tighe (guitar); Eric Eidel, Parker Kindred (drums).

Audio Mixers: Michael J. Clouse; Mary Guibert; Andy Wallace; Thom Cadley; Tom VerlaineEntertainment Weekly (5/29/98, p.74) - "...As with GRACE, SKETCHES is a testament to Buckley's role as lifelong student of rock history....[it's full of] the adventurousness and life-affirming qualities of Buckley's music, which is as much a part of his legacy as this incomplete, yet affecting, farewell." - Rating: A-