When Jeff Buckley collaborated with Patti Smith
There are countless stories of artists popping up on other people’s tracks, providing instrumentation or vocal support when they just happened to be in the same studio. There is the case of Cher providing backing vocals for Meatloaf, Eric Clapton hopping on Beatles songs for added guitar, or, in one instance, Jeff Buckley came in to help Patti Smith make her musical return.
After her 1979 album Wave, Patti Smith all but disappeared. After years of hard work, the musician and artist went into semi-retirement, moved to the suburbs and raised her family with her guitarist husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith.
However, it’s important to note that these weren’t fallow years for Smith. During their time away, the Smiths wrote music and poetry together while enjoying a quieter life. In 1988, the musician and writer would reemerge briefly to share Dream of Life, her fifth album, made in collaboration with her husband.
But then tragedy after tragedy would arrive. Within only a few years, Smith lost the three most significant people in her life. In 1989, her long-term collaborator, ex-boyfriend, and the man she deemed her creative soulmate, Robert Mapplethorpe, passed away. Her life with the artist would become the subject of her memoir, Just Kids.
Then, in 1994, her husband tragically died of a sudden heart attack. Merely a couple of weeks later, Smith lost her brother as well. The period was one of extreme hardship and mourning for the artist who moved back to New York to recreate with the supportive community of artists. She got through it the only way she knew how: by working. Her friends, especially poet Allen Ginsberg and Michael Stipe of R.E.M, encouraged her to get back to making music and performing as a way to honour her guitarist husband, and so she did.
By 1996, Smith felt ready to return to the public arena. After spending time touring with Bob Dylan, she felt inspired to turn her grief into art. Calling upon her regular collaborators and colleagues, such as Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty, the result was Gone Again.
But one name stands out on the credits. Jeff Buckley is listed as a vocalist on two songs; ‘Beneath The Southern Cross’ and ‘Fireflies’. Perhaps tipped off that Patti Smith was recording through their mutual friend, Television’s Tom Verlaine, Buckley just happened to show up at New York’s Electric Lady Studio at the right time, as if by an act of fate.
Buckley’s contribution is minor. But listen closely during the stripped-back ode of ‘Beneath The Southern Cross’, and a familiar voice will cut through during the song’s climax. At the back of the mix, Buckley’s distinct and stunning vocals create a velvety nest for Smith’s own punky voice. There aren’t even any stories of what happened when the writer and the singer met or how the collaboration really came about. But in hindsight, Buckley’s contribution adds an extra layer of haunting beauty to this sad track.
In an interview, Lenny Kaye revealed that ‘Beneath The Southern Cross’ was the first song Smith wrote following the deaths of those closest to her. In comparison to her other pieces, the track is incredibly lyrically sparse, perfectly depicting the way grief is almost impossible to articulate. What is there to say in the wake of pain like that? Patti Smith speaks of that helplessness as she sings, “Oh / To cry / Not any cry / So mournful that / The dove just laughs.”
At its core, ‘Beneath The Southern Cross’ is a wake song, standing as a kind of eulogy for the people Smith lost. It’s made even sadder when considering that less than a year after the track’s release in 1996, Jeff Buckley would be added to the list of people being mourned in the song. In May of 1997, Buckley drowned while only 30 years old. The two Patti Smith works he contributed to were his last-ever recordings.
In the track, after Buckley adds beautiful vocals, Smith sings, “cross over, boy!” A haunting addition to a song already so heavy with grief, ‘Beneath The Southern Cross’ remains a moving moment of mourning in her live sets. Talking of the experience and her brief encounter with Buckley, Smith said simply, “It was beautiful.”
