SKETCHES for My Sweetheart The Drunk

Collected here over two cd's are the beginnings of what would have been Jeff Buckley's sophomore album. Jeff intended for this album to be more rock n' roll than Grace, and in places this is certainly noticeable. Not often though, as My Sweetheart the Drunk keeps much of the tender, touching, tremulous vocal and guitar delivery of his debut.

The album is divided in two, an unfinished recording he made with Television's Tom Verlaine at the helm on disk one, and a collection of homemade demo's on disk two.

Disk one is obviously closer to the finished article, but Jeff wasn't entirely satisfied with it, and so it was abandoned. It's hard to know why, although stories regarding the number of takes Grace took to record suggest an artist stubbornly bent on perfection. Maybe he and Verlaine just couldn't get it right in the timeframe they had?

The songs of Disc one are a natural progression, without revolution, from Grace; a plethora of styles, genres and influences: Everybody Here Wants You (released in Australia) has a real soul flavour to it, while Nightmares By The Sea and Vancouver are about driving guitar lines. Yard Of Blonde Girls has a big guitar riff and is a bit of an anthem, while Opened Once and Morning Theft are both beautiful folk songs. Perhaps most interesting is New Year's Prayer, with a qawwali influenced creeping melody.

Disk two is more difficult and perhaps more interesting. I've always seen disc two as more indicative of where Jeff was going, but obviously that's just a hunch. Stripped of production prettiness, often with only his own tapping for accompanyment, this is Jeff Buckley in his bedroom, working out ideas.

Some are more worked out than others. Murder Suicide Meteor Slave, Jewel Box and Your Flesh Is So Nice are all sketchy, totally unfinished works in progress. Nightmares By The Sea and New Years Prayer are stripped back versions of those on disk one. The standouts for me are I Know We Could Be So Happy (If We Wanted To Be), Back In N.Y.C and, particularly, Haven't You Heard and Gunshot Glitter. On these Buckley keeps the tender and heartfelt themes previously expounded, but adds venom. I simply would love to know where he was going to take these three tracks, as the sky was surely the limit.

Tagged on the end of disk two is a quite wonderful cover of Satisfied Mind, delivered in much the same way as Hallelujah on Grace. While slightly at odds with the rest of the disk, it's a wonderful inclusion.

Quite what Jeff would have made of the release of his cast-offs and sketches, no-one quite knows. What this album does show is the inner workings of a great great artist. It's so sad that this is "Sketches..." and not "My Sweetheart The Drunk".

Sketches is a 2 disc album, disc 1 is the actual album, and disc 2 is more like a bootleg with some very lo-fi and weird demo versions of unreleased songs.

Disc One (the album)

Just as it's predecessor (Grace), Sketches takes a little while to access, but is enormously rewarding once it 'clicks'. The Sky Is A Landfill is a good song, but a strange choice for the opening track, as it is potentially one of the most progressive and complicated songs on the disc. Sketches is certainly not Grace 2, it is filled with new sounds, much more electric guitar driven, more raucous and harsher, with semi-self-destructive imagery (Nightmares By The Sea, Witches' Rave, New Year's Prayer), and a few tracks of Jeff's trademark echoing beauty which do hark back to grace (Opened Once, Morning Theft).
As a whole, the album is a stunning listen, which holds together as a cohesive whole. Every track stands out both on its own and as a chapter in the 'Sketches' story.

In my opinion, this is a completed album, which would have been released one day whether Jeff wished it or not. The 'Sketches' story, is that Jeff completed his second album, which is the first disc, and then changed his mind and decided that he hated it, and wanted to scrap it. However, his producer and band were perfectly happy with it, and personally as a Jeff Buckley obsessive I have to come to the conclusion that this was Jeff's perfectionism speaking, through the filter of his bi-polar disorder (which he had recently been diagnosed with). I view this album as a completed masterpiece, despite Jeff's personal demons about the project. Listen and experience the album for yourself, and I hope you will come to agree that it truly is a work of art. I also reccomend reading on the background of the album, or watching one of the many documentaries.

Disc 2 (The random stuff)

Disc 2 is not a cohesive album, it is a selection of various tracks which Jeff had been working on with the band (tracks 1-3), personally (tracks 4-10) and one live recording (track 11).
The band recordings only contain one new song (Haven't you heard) which was the strongest selection from the Sketches sessions. They are all enjoyable listens though. The 4-track demos (tracks 4-10) are the most avant-garde part of this disc (or to be honest of anything of Jeff's I have ever heard), and I personally don't listen to them often at all, they showcase Jeff as his most abrasive, aggressive and extreme. When the band flew to join Jeff in Memphis for the recording sessions, these were the songs they were going to be working on, so we can only imagine what these furious demo's would have come out sounding like with the full band working on them. I imagine they would be about as far from 'Grace' as you could get. However this section of the cd is not an easy listen, full of clanking dissonant noises, clicks, indistinguishable chords and often distorted vocals, although they are Jeff, they sound very unlike him, and are my least favourite thing he recorded.
The last track, 'satisfied mind' is one last tip of the hat back to the Sin-e/Grace era, and is a beautiful acoustic Jeff+telecaster finish to the album.

Enjoy :)

Jeff Buckley is frequently seen as a one-album wonder, having released only one full-length LP in his lifetime, but it was his tragic accidental death by drowning at 30 that curtailed the flow of more albums and not a lack of drive or talent. These unfinished sketches for his second album My Sweetheart the Drunk show what a great album it would have been, rivaling Grace's huge popularity. The versatility of style evident on his debut album is taken further here - Buckley demonstrates an astonishing musical breadth, shifting from soul funk to the dissonant sonic noise of Murder Suicide Meteor Slave, to the more middle-of-road rock numbers (on which he sometimes sounds eerily like Kurt Cobain). His vocals on these sketches are breathtaking (he featured prominently in Mojo's list of The Greatest Vocalists of All Time), especially on the pure sex soul of Everybody Here Wants You and his cover of Porter Wagoner's Satisfied Mind.

The lyrics have become more erotic, e.g. Your Flesh is So Nice, and on Jewel Box where he sings "I know you're a woman by the way you burn below" (interestingly Tim Buckley also sang euphemistically of "my lady's chamber"). In a terrible sense of foreboding, there is a fair amount of water imagery, too: oceans overflow inside a loved-one (Opened Once), "I've loved so many times and I've drowned them all... Stay with me under these waves, tonight" (Nightmares by the Sea), the "poisoned river wild" of You & I, the reservoir heart of Morning Theft and the falling down to the sea on Gunshot Glitter.

Buckley would have tinkered, reshaped and even erased some of these tracks before release, so inevitably they are not all mind-blowing and some are quite patchy. It's just my subjective opinion, but I didn't like Witches' Rave, Yard of Blonde Girls, Murder Suicide Meteor Slave and some of the other middle tracks of the second disc. Buckley was for me primarily a master of ballad-like songs of wounded romance and desire (even Leonard Cohen has said of Grace's Hallelujah, "I wrote the lyrics, but it is definitely a Buckley song"), so it's the more tender and falsetto-high songs which capture me. Some of the lyrics are stunning, with stellar expressions of loss ('I am a railroad track abandoned / With the sunset forgetting I ever happened', Opened Once), but some of them are underdeveloped and almost nonsensical (e.g. 'Hot, pink, nasty bubblegum / Coming down just like a big red coal'!). Yet Sketches is nevertheless worth listening to, for Buckley's extraordinary vocal talent, his experiments with style and to hear how he might have moved on from the multi-million selling Grace. These are, sadly, the final blueprints of an instinctively talented and sorely missed artist. (Jan 2008)

Standouts: Everybody Here Wants You, You & I, Jewel Box, Morning Theft, Opened Once, Satisfied Mind

Also recommended: David Browne's book Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley and Buckley's cover of 'We all fall in love sometimes' found on YouTube

(Review date: 6 Jan 2008)