Listen to Jeff Buckley’s sultry isolated vocals for ‘Morning Theft’
At once intimate and impossibly elastic, Jeff Buckley’s vocal performances on tracks like ‘Grace’, ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘So Real’ have cemented him as the voice of the 1990s. So many years later, still nobody has surpassed him. In this isolated recording of ‘Morning Theft’, one of the highlights of the posthumous compilation album Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, Buckley’s astonishing vocal dexterity is placed centre frame.
It says a lot that Buckley’s tiny concert at the Glasgow School of Arts in March 1994, where only around 40 people were present, inspired some of the most important British groups of the 1990s and early 2000s. Dougie Payne of Travis was lucky enough to be present: “I saw him on that tour, in the Vic Bar, on a stage that was just six inches high in the corner of the room,” he recalled. “It was unbelievable. It is still the most intense live show I have ever seen. His voice was just remarkable. You were just open-mouthed. It’s funny because there was about 40 or 50 people there. And it was [Travis], two out of Franz Ferdinand, one out of Mogwai, three out of Belle and Sebastien. Everybody was there.”
That same year Jeff Buckley released his debut album, Grace. It won him widespread critical acclaim, but he remained focused on the task at hand, recording pieces for his second release, My Sweetheart the Drunk, with Tom Verlaine of Television as producer. Buckley was unsatisfied with the result of these early sessions, parking the recordings with the intention of travelling to Memphis to start from scratch with his band. It was here, on May 29th, 1997, that he accidentally drowned while out swimming in the Mississippi River.
The unfinished recordings Buckley left behind were collected into a double album, with the Verlaine-produced tracks on one side and Buckley’s later demos on the other. Released a year after his death, ‘Morning Theft’ appears on the A-side of Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk and sits alongside tracks like ‘Everybody Here Wants You’ and the far heavier ‘Yard of Blonde Girls’.
You can check out Buckley’s astonishing isolated vocals for the track below.
