Jeff Buckley: Everybody Here Wants You

Brad Pitt:
I'm constantly surprised at - so many people do not know about him, still - and at the same time there's something very, very beautiful about that.

Jimmy Page:
Technically, he was the best singer that had appeared probably in - I'm not being too liberal about this - if I say, in two decades.

Hal Willner:
He was just one of those guys that everybody fell in love with the second they met him.

Brad Pitt:
He tapped into something and he was the conduit. And it makes me think of this: where does art come from? Where does a true genius come from?

Mary Guibert:
He made a declaration that he was *not* going to be a singer, that he was going to be a guitar god and that was it.

Jeff Buckley:
Half of the art of making records is letting the whole thing go... even your mistakes. The nature of it is excruciating. Or, it's obsessive. Because you're dealing with ultimate things. You know? It's not like a live show where you play it and it just disappears into the air like smoke. It's like painting - sound painting.

Jeff Buckley:
"Grace" is basically a death prayer. Not something of sorrow but just casting away any fear of death. No relief will come, you'll really just have to stew in your life until it's time to go. But sometimes, somebody else's faith in you can do wonders.

Brad Pitt:
[on becoming a Jeff Buckley fan] I found him because, it was actually my wife had him. [pauses then corrects] Had the *disc*. [Jennifer Aniston snickers off-camera.] "Had him" - she wishes! - Had the disc and it came on one night, and you hear that opening tune for "Mojo Pin," that haunting thing off in the distance. And I remember asking, "What is that?" And she said, "That's Jeff Buckley." Where have I been? Do I know nothing? And since then it's just... been a bit of an obsession.

Brad Pitt:
There's an undercurrent to his music, there's something you can't pinpoint. Like the best of films, or the best of art, there's something going on underneath, and there's a truth there. And I find his stuff absolutely haunting. It just... it's under my skin.

Brad Pitt:
He's Plant and Page in one, on a technical level. It's mind-blowing.

Mary Guibert:
What Robert [Plant] gave him was the ability to just take the envelope all the way open, just to fling it wide open to his voice, and take it wherever his heart would take him. And Nusrat took him to the Divine, so it was sort of a natural progression between Robert and Nusrat, and Jeff was the bridge between the two. And when he found that bridge, it was bliss for him.

Interviewer:
Extraordinary voice. I mean, everybody knows your dad is Tim Buckley, of course. I mean, he sort of had that same sense of abandon, didn't he?

Jeff Buckley:
Yeah - he abandoned *me*.

Merri Cyr:
As much as he seemed to want to separate from his father as a performer, or his father's career, it influenced him constantly.

Jeff Buckley:
Can I say something? I don't hate my father. And I don't resent him existing. It's just something that I've grown up with all my life - not being part of the life that has so much energy over here, and having my own. ... It's my way of resisting people's trivialization of my music. If it should be known, and it should, I have a great, great admiration for Tim and what he did, and some things that he did completely embarrass me to hell, but the things that were great, I'll hold up against anything. But that's a respect as a fellow artist, because he really wasn't my father; my father was Ron Moorhead. But, because I've done so many interviews and I look at the page, I think that the feeling that comes across... it's not accurate, it shouldn't be remembered as that.

Elizabeth Fraser:
To meet Jeffrey was just like being given a set of paints. ... I had all this color in my life again. I just couldn't help falling in love with him. He was adorable, he was lovely. I read his diary; he read mine. We'd just swap, we'd literally just hand over this very personal stuff, and I've never done that with anybody else; I don't know if he has. So in some ways there was a great deal of intimacy, but then there'd be times when I'd just think, "I'm just not penetrating this Jeff Buckley boy at all."

Jeff Buckley:
[asked how he would like to be remembered] As a good friend. I don't really need to be remembered - I hope the music's remembered.