Jeff Buckley channels Lady Day: Strange Fruit
Lovely reader Lisa, who is like my little Jeff Buckley drug-dealer appearing randomly with small packages of goodness to slip to me, sent me along the version he did of Strange Fruit that many of you were asking about after my recent post.
Lisa says, “I believe it was Billie that inspired Jeff’s mournful, cutting, anguished version. This, in 1994, from a young ‘white boy’ from Southern California. He certainly could inhabit a song, couldn’t he?”
[expired] Strange Fruit – Jeff Buckley
KCRW Man on the Moon, Jan 1994
Also, please anticipate that I will be entering into an even larger Jeff Buckley jag than usual, as I just bought the superb Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff & Tim Buckley (by David Browne, no relation) today. I just finished the introduction and already got a bit emotional in the bookstore. So this could be messy, but beautiful. Such is life.
Name: Heather Browne
Dream Brother is an excellent book. I found it hard to put down. It’s interesting to see the parallels between the lives of Jeff and Tim.
Lauren — March 29, 2006 @ 10:38 pm
This book will tear your heart out if you’re any sort of Jeff & Tim fan. It made me feel really strange as I saw Jeff play live in 94 and later played a show opening for The A.M. (two members of Jeff’s former band). I felt like I knew Jeff from reading that book and just being such a huge, huge fan but when I was in the presence of his ex-buddys it felt impossible to talk to them about him. All my feelings were from records and books and he was their real friend. I decided I could never talk to them about it as I just felt shallow. Anyway…sorry to run on…it’s a great book and you should buy all the Tim Buckley stuff you can. Equally crushing in it’s own way.
Scott — March 30, 2006 @ 7:01 pm