Jeff Buckley - Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (1998)

“Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk” is a collection of polished studio tracks and four-track demos recorded by Jeff Buckley. Buckley was dissatisfied with material recorded in the summer of 1996 and early in 1997 and continued working on demo recordings to refine his sound. The album's original sessions were produced by Television frontman Tom Verlaine.
My Sweetheart The Drunk was the working title that Buckley used while writing and recording the album. The title was intended by his mother and sole heir of his estate, Mary Guibert, to be rendered with parentheses, as Sketches (For My Sweetheart the Drunk). This was because Jeff's work was not finished, and therefore was just an outline, or "sketch", of what would have been released.
Jeff Buckley was a mess of contradictions: a perfectionist who believed in spontaneity, a man who was at once humble and vain, a musician who shunned his father's tumultuous legacy while creating one of his own. These are some of the reasons why he took his time writing and recording the material for his second album, laboring over many songs for months at a time. Given such painstaking methods, it shouldn't have been a surprise that recording was an equally fastidious process. Buckley recorded enough material for an album with producer Tom Verlaine, but deciding that the results weren't quite right, he scrapped them and moved to Memphis to record the album again. He reworked a few songs as home demos as he prepared to cut the album, but it was never made Buckley died in a tragic drowning accident before entering the studio. As a way to enlarge his legacy, his mother and record label rounded up the majority of the existing unreleased recordings, releasing them as the double-disc set “Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk”. Excepting a few awkward moments and middle-eights, it's hard to see why Buckley rejected the Verlaine productions that make up disc one. The material isn't necessarily a progression from Grace; it's more like a stripped-down, edgier take on the sweeping, jazz-tinged goth folk-rock that made the first album so distinctive. Neither the nearly finished first disc nor the homemade demos and re-recordings on the second disc offer any revelations, but that's not necessarily a disappointment. Sketches adds several wonderful songs to his catalog, offering further proof of his immense talent. And that, of course, is what makes the album as sad as it is exciting.
The album was to be titled My Sweetheart, the Drunk, but was never finished, as the rest of the band were traveling to meet Buckley at the time of his death. The album was released posthumously on May 26, 1998. Despite its unfinished state, the album garnered many positive reviews.


Disc One
01.  "The Sky Is a Landfill"   (Jeff Buckley, Michael Tighe)  - 5:09
02.  "Everybody Here Wants You"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 4:46
03.  "Opened Once"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 3:29
04.  "Nightmares by the Sea"   (Jeff Buckley)  - 3:53
05.  "Yard of Blonde Girls"   (Audrey Clark, Lori Kramer, Inger Lorre)  - 4:07
06.  "Witches' Rave"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 4:40
07.  "New Year's Prayer"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 4:40
08.  "Morning Theft"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 3:39
09.  "Vancouver"  (Jeff Buckley, Mick Grondahl, Michael Tighe)  - 3:12
10.  "You & I"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 5:39

Disc Two
01.  "Nightmares by the Sea" [Original Mix]  (Jeff Buckley)  - 3:49
02.  "New Year's Prayer" [Original Mix]  (Jeff Buckley)  - 4:10
03.  "Haven't You Heard"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 4:07
04.  "I Know We Could Be So Happy Baby (If We Wanted to Be)"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 4:27
05.  "Murder Suicide Meteor Slave"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 5:55
06.  "Back in N.Y.C."  (Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, Mike Rutherford)  -
          7:37
07.  "Demon John"  (Jeff Buckley, Michael Tighe)  - 5:13
08.  "Your Flesh Is So Nice"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 3:37
09.  "Jewel Box"  (Jeff Buckley)  - 3:37
10.  "Satisfied Mind"  (Red Hayes, Jack Rhodes) (recorded 1992.10.11 WFMU)  - 6:00

Credits
Jeff Buckley - guitar, vocals
Michael Tighe - guitar
Mick Grøndahl - bass
Eric Eidel - drums
Parker Kindred - drums

Other [Columbia A&r, Original Recordings] – Steve Berkowitz
Other [Il Dottore Di Musica] – Chris Cornell
Other [La Mano D'aiuto] – Don DeVito
Engineers: Jeff Buckley, Michael J. Clouse, Ray Martin, Irene Trudel
Assistant engineers: Jim Caruana, Joe Lizzi, David Seitz
Mixing: Tom Cadley, Michael J. Clouse, Mary Guibert, Tom Verlaine, Andy Wallace
Mixing assistant: Steve Sisco
Art direction: Nicky Lindeman, Gail Marowitz
Design: Nicky Lindeman, Gail Marowitz
Photography: Merri Cyr
Liner notes: Bill Flanagan, Mary Guibert
Producers: Nicholas Hill, Tom Verlaine

Notes
Recorded Summer 1996, New York; Spring 1997, Memphis
Genre:  Folk Rock
Length:  91:46

© 1998 Columbia Records