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Jeff Buckley's first album, Grace, was finished at the start of 1993. In the four and a half years between then and Jeff's death, on May 29th, 1997, he wrote a lot and recorded often while maintaining a seemingly endless schedule of world tours. There were studio sessions, as well as hom e demos, live performance recordings, and radio shows. If the music business ran in the nineties as it did in the sixties, Jeff would have had five albums out in that amount of time. But Jeff loved searching more than arriving. As an artist, Jeff was tough to tie down. He might be cruising down one path and suddenly see a light in the distance and, bang, he was off -- following it.
As the executor of Jeff's estate, it fell to his mother, Mary Guibert, to assist Columbia in deciding what to do next. Shortly after Jeff's memorial services in New York City, Mary met with Sony execs to discuss the preservation of Jeff's musical legacy. Several things were decided at that time.
First, there would be no posthumous overdubbing. The songs would stay where Jeff left them, even if a part was missing. Second, the album would not be an overview of Jeff Buckley music. There were good outtakes from Grace and the Live at Sin-e EP. There were b-sides and pre-Columbia recordings. Some of those might come out someday, but not now. The last new Jeff Buckley album would be the songs he was working on when he died, the songs he and his band intended to record in June of 1997.
There were two major sources for recordings of those songs. Jeff and his band had done three sets of official studio demos with Tom Verlaine producing. Two in New York City and one in Memphis. There was a fourth unofficial session, with Verlaine, recorded with Jeff's longtime friend Michael Clouse acting as engineer. The results were, to judge by what we have here, pretty spectacular.
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Albums
| Year | Title | |
| 1994 | Grace | |
| 1998 | Sketches (For My Sweatheart, The Drunk) | |
| 2000 | Live album from 94-96 tours | |
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