The musician that Brad Pitt called a “true genius”
“Where does art come from, and where does true genius come from?” Brad Pitt muses. It is a question that actors ask themselves more than most performers. In film, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, everything can fall flat simply because of a lack of je ne sais quoi, which fittingly translates to English as “a quality that cannot be described or named easily.” This mystic missing element might sound pretentious if it wasn’t for the fact that when you truly come across that unnamable quality, it is oddly unmistakable.
For the Uber-cool Brad Pitt, one artist simply slapped him across the chops with a stunning dose of je ne sais quoi that buoyed their monumental talents to ethereal heights. That artist was Jeff Buckley. Speaking about the late musician in a BBC documentary, Pitt revealed that Buckley was one of his favourite musicians of all time and mused: “I’m constantly surprised that so many people do not know about him still. And at the same time, there is something very, very beautiful about that, that he just keeps slowly building and expanding.”
Indeed, the legacy of Buckley’s slow build within the music industry – following on from his father Tim Buckley’s own troubled folk career – imbues his art with a tragic sense of narrative. Much like his father, part of the reason for his underground status came from the fact that he happily defied mainstream norms, instead, operating on the influence of his own whims. For Pitt, this made him a unique talent. “He tapped into something,” Pitt remarks, “he was the conduit. It makes me think of this: ‘Where does art come from, and where does true genius come from?'”
Moreover, by defying the mainstream, many people’s introduction to Buckley even has its own mythical edge. Pitt was no different. “I found him because, well, it was actually my wife who had him – had the disc, ‘had him‘ haha she wishes – then it [Buckley’s album Grace] came on one night and you hear that opening tune ‘Mojo Pin’ and its that real soft, haunting thing off in the distance,” Pitt recalls. “I remember asking, ‘What is that?’ She said, ‘That’s Jeff Buckley’.” Baffled by the beauty of its existence, Pitt asked himself: “Where have I been? Do I know nothing? Since then it’s been a bit of an obsession.”
After finding Buckley, Pitt has been trying to decipher exactly what it is that he pours into his enigmatic sound to make it quite so enchanting in the glim hope of siphoning some of that performative magic to fuel his own acting. “There is an undercurrent to his music,” he says, “there is something that you can’t pinpoint. Like the best of films and the best of art, there is something going on underneath and there is a truth there.”
In southern Spain, they have a word for this certain something: ‘Duende’. This word was defined by poet and (perhaps) purely platonic love interest of Salvador Dali, Frederico Garcia Lorca, as exalted emotion unearthed from within, “a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained. The roots that cling to the mire from which comes the very substance of art.”
When Lorca delivered a speech on this matter titled Theory and Play of The Duende, he proclaimed: “I want to see if I can give you a simple lesson on the buried spirit of saddened Spain.” Continuing: “Whoever travels the bull’s hide that stretches between the Júcar, Guadalfeo, Sil and Pisuerga rivers frequently hears people say: ‘This has much duende’. Manuel Torre, great artist of the Andalusian people, said to someone who sang for him: ‘You have a voice, you understand style, but you’ll never ever succeed because you have no duende’.”
Buckley, who died in 1997 at the age of 30, was brimming with duende. He had a voice that could haunt a vacant house. With stunning bravura, he skipped between bellows that could stir honey into tea from a thousand paces and the sort of hush that wouldn’t even blow the pappus seeds off a dandelion. And there is no noticeable middle ground between the two states either, both resonate from his ‘chest voice’ and they bleed into each other like the seamless melt of ice into cider. This naturalistic tap into pure emotion is a force to behold and a near-impossible feat from a musicological standpoint. With it, he inspired a generation to pursue things rather differently. As Lorca suggests, it was Buckley’s fellow artists who were quickest to recognise the bravura beneath it all.
In fact, he changed the face of music with his work. In an era when the mainstream seemed to be launching itself towards more of a pint-swilling direction, Buckley held a beacon that proclaimed wine sipping will always have its place too, and this was manna from heaven for those who were picked last in PE, so to speak. With the Britpop war waging and the mainstream seemingly racing along for the ride, the zeitgeist had bleeding-heart outsiders losing faith in what they were doing faster than a couple on Grand Designs amid the first harsh winter in the caravan. But Buckley, his electric guitar and not a jot of anything else, came along to the UK shores and helped to restore the stock of introspection.
Dougie Payne of Travis was lucky enough to be among the 40-strong crowd in Glasgow in 1994. He told us, “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. 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.” And everybody was moved. In fact, Thom Yorke was so moved that after seeing him he would never be the same singer again, with Pitt going on to appraise Yorke’s own talents as the “[Franz] Kafka and [Samuel] Beckett of our generation”.
Yes, it was clear to all that Buckley had a stockpile of sacred duende to all his fellow artists. Alas, beyond that, as every actor knows, you don’t just need passion but a degree of learnt proficiency too. Buckley also had that in spades. Jimmy Page famously declared that he and Robert Plant were so impressed by Buckley that he actually “scared” them. So, it feels fitting that Pitt compared his talents to the Led Zeppelin pair themselves. “I find his stuff absolutely haunting, agh, it gets under my skin. I mean, he’s [Robert] Plant and [Jimmy] Page in one. On a technical level, it is mind-blowing,” he concluded.
