‘Once I Was’: the bittersweet song that connects Tim and Jeff Buckley
“And sometimes I wonder / Just for a while / Will you ever remember me?” Tim Buckley sings it beautifully on his track, ‘Once I Was’. It’s a song about thinking of an old lover and an old life and wondering about your impact. Released in 1967, it was around a year after his son, Jeff Buckley, was born and about six months after Tim had abandoned him.
So much has been written, and I wondered about the connection between the Buckleys because it is a truly unique and richly emotional situation. Here, we have two stars, both revered and deeply respected as two of the finest musicians in history. But yet, despite being blood-related, the two had no real connection. “He left my mother when I was six months old,” Jeff Buckley told NME, “So I never really knew him at all.”
When we talk about the nepotism conversation, the link between Jeff Buckley and his father is far, far more complex. Not only did the two never really meet, but Tim Buckley died when Jeff was just a kid, stripping the son of that chance to ever grow the connection. It’s complicated further, though, by his father’s legacy because while Jeff didn’t know him, the world did.
As Jeff grew up in a normal life with his mother, coming to love music on his own with no real knowledge of his father’s profession, that connection between them stays largely nonexistent. It’s not that he was listening to Tim Buckley albums, nor was he getting into music as a way to latch onto the memory of his father or heal from the absence. In fact, his father’s name was actually somewhat of an annoyance to Jeff as he tried to forge his own path, stating, “We were born with the same parts, but when I sing, it’s me. This is my own time, and if people expect me to work the same things for them as he did, they’re going to be disappointed.”
Though no doubt, again and again, there were moments of confrontation when the ghost of his absent father hit him. It’s there on his song ‘Dream Brother’ as he warns a friend, threatening to run away from their family, “Don’t be like the one who made me so old, Don’t be like the one who left behind his name, ‘Cause they’re waiting for you like I waited for mine, And nobody ever came.” It also cropped up in his relationship with Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins as her cover of his father’s song, ‘Song To The Siren’, seemed to speak to him, allowing this new connection to open up that was enabled by the music he usually avoided.
But perhaps out of all these moments, it was the moment that Buckley was first forced to face up to his father’s legacy, his loss, and his music that felt most impactful. Despite barely knowing his dad, Jeff was invited to sing at a special memorial show for him in 1991, decades after his death, now that his son was an adult. While he’d spent a lifetime avoiding the link between them, Jeff said yes, and he chose ‘Once I Was’ to sing.
It’s hard to even imagine how difficult the task must have been. Not only would the occasion feel like finally stopping and staring the ghost down, but ‘Once I Was’ feels hauntingly apt. Written around the time Tim went running and dealing with the topic of leaving behind a memory of himself, Jeff no doubt felt like that memory was, in fact, him, the son that was abandoned and left to grow as an heir to a complex legacy.
“It was hard to learn it. I couldn’t do a really full version of it at home without crying,” he said, admitting that it didn’t get any easier at the performance, “I almost cried onstage.” In the recording, it’s like you can feel the difficulty. He talks awkwardly into the mic and seems to spend ages tuning his guitar and playing random riffs as if he’s avoiding starting, later seeming to even sing more like his father than himself.
But when he does, he’s heard singing out to the father, who had passed before they ever had a chance to reconnect. Jeff Buckley saying “Will you ever remember me?” to the memory of the dad he never got to know is a haunting scene in this complex story of father and son.
