Jeff Buckley So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley Music
by Jeff Buckley

About this Music

14-track pressing features tracks from his two studio albums and includes two rarities, 'So Real' (Live and Acoustic in Japan - non album version/ promo single) and 'I Know it's Over'. (Previously Unreleased - Smiths cover from a session at Sony Studios that was edited for broadcast on WNEW on April 6,1995. It was not included on the radio broadcast.) Other highlights include 'Last Goodbye','Forget Her', 'Everybody Here Wants You' and more. All of the tracks lifted from Grace are pulled from the re-mastered tracks that featured on the Legacy Edition. Sony. 2007.

Among the legions of rockers who died way too young--including Jeff Buckley's father, Tim--few have approached the artistic range and seemingly limitless potential on display here. In the decade since Buckley's death, there has been such a flood of posthumous releases that it might be hard to remember that he issued only a four-cut live EP and a studio debut album while he was alive. This anthology serves as an effective introduction for the initiate, showing how Buckley could rock with the slash-and-burn intensity of Led Zeppelin on "Eternal Life (Road Version)," turn rapturous with the reverie of "Lover, You Should've Come Ove," and cover the likes of Edith Piaf ("Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin") and Leonard Cohen (his by now iconic transformation of "Hallelujah"). Completists will need this for the live versions of "So Real" and the Smiths' "I Know It's Over," previously unreleased commercially. Whether Buckley would ever have been able to balance the control that mature artistry requires and the ecstatic abandon that distinguished him, such raw talent continues to startle. --Don McLeese