The residency that ended in ‘Grace’: Relive Jeff Buckley’s pivotal live shows at Sin-é
The death of Jeff Buckley always feels like one of music’s biggest tragedies. Aged only 30 when he passed, Buckley only officially released one album, and it was a masterpiece.
Grace, a perfect debut that spans the landscape of the artist’s talent, honours his various inspirations and announces him as a new, bright star unlike any other. It was his arrival, but he never got to come back with more, leaving the world to wonder what Buckley’s future might have sounded like. Perhaps the past can be a clue.
Some would dispute that Buckley didn’t release anything else. After his death, the sophomore album he was working on was shared. However, Buckley wasn’t actually happy with where Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk was going. He kept extending work on it to try and fix its faults, but passed before that could ever happen.
While that album gives a hint of what might have been coming next, it doesn’t feel truly representative of the artist himself. Buckley felt it was overdone, so perhaps the insight is to pull back to a point where things were totally stripped back.
Live at Sin-é is exactly that. In Buckley’s discography, this 1993 EP is an essential puzzle piece, marking his first commercial release with Columbia but also being the exact thing that got their attention.
At the start of the 1990s, Buckley’s interest in making music, during a period when he had yet to publicly sing anywhere, sent him to New York. Born and raised in California, he was clearly looking for a different scene, and he found one in the remnants of the one built by the beat poets and musicians of the early 1960s. He landed in the city’s cafe culture and the hot spots old artists and creatives used to haunt.
It was in New York that he finally found the courage to make real moves. In 1991, he made his debut there, performing at a tribute gig for his father, Tim Buckley. It was also in the city that he met Gary Lucas, who would become an essential collaborator. The two settled into a rhythm as a songwriting duo, first within a band, and eventually co-wrote several tracks that would appear on Grace.
But the ultimate turning point in Buckley’s development came at Sin-é, a small café in the East Village. Once a haunt for the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Iggy Pop, it became his stage. Buckley started a residency there, performing every Monday night.
Each week, his set would change. Buckley sang through budding originals, tested out new tracks and fresh demos, sang the Grace songs the world would come to know and love, but also a broad selection of covers from musical theatre classics to jazz numbers to French hits to rock songs, showing how expansive his world of inspiration was. Each time, it would simply be him solo with his Telecaster. Each time, more and more people would be drawn in.
This was a formative period because, eventually, record labels began to hear the whispers. Executives would be in the crowd, and the streets outside would be lined with limos as they began to fight over him. Eventually, he signed with Columbia who not only released Grace, with this residency slowly building up to that moment as the songs on it were developed over the course of his residency, but they also released first an EP of live tracks from the cafe, including those early renditions of ‘Mojo Pin’ and ‘Eternal Life’.
But the recordings from Sin-é, especially the ones on the expanded 2003 edition with 34 tracks of originals, covers, and even Buckley musing on life and his work, feel revelatory far more than the debut. They directly contributed to Grace, allowing that debut to happen. But when thinking about his issues with the recordings of his follow up and where he might have taken the album to correct it if he’d had more time, looking back at the origins of his work and these stripped back depictions of his inspirations feels like a vital clue for who he was and the sort of sounds he would always return to.
