Earliest Buckley Recordings Due

Five years after the death of singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, his earliest recordings are finally being released. When a twenty-four-year-old Buckley went into a New York studio with guitarist Gary Lucas to demo "Grace" in 1991, he didn't even have a record label deal. That song would become the title track of the only album Buckley released during his lifetime. But now his initial sessions with Lucas, Songs to No One: 1991-1992, are due out on the independent label Evolver Entertainment on October 15th.

"He was the best collaborator I've ever had," says Lucas, a former Captain Beefheart sideman, who co-wrote "Grace" and "Mojo Pin," both on Buckley's 1994 album Grace. Songs to No One's eleven tracks include live songs Buckley recorded with Lucas' music collective, Gods and Monsters, and demos.

At the height of Buckley's career, in 1997, the thirty-year-old singer drowned in the Wolf River in Memphis. The son of jazz-folk singer Tim Buckley, who also died young, Jeff had met Lucas at a tribute concert honoring his father.

"Jeff's voice just soared angelically, but it also had this raw rock intensity," Lucas says of those first sessions. "I knew right then that this stuff was going to shake the world. I felt like I had dynamite in my pocket."

After sitting on the demos for a decade, Lucas finally got the OK from Buckley's mother, Mary Guibert, to put them out. "I just wanted to take everything in sequence," says Guibert, who oversaw the release of Buckley's two posthumous albums on Sony. "I'll have to admit, in all honesty, that Jeff put a handwritten title over the top of the [Gods and Monsters] tape that said 'Disgusto Garbage.' For some reason he heard it later on and said, 'Oh, I wish I'd never done that.'"

Buckley, whose dramatic style has influenced the songs of artists such as Rufus Wainwright and Travis, was a prolific writer, says Lucas: "I have about eight hours of material. Hopefully there will be other CDs to come."

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As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."

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