Jeff Buckley’s career, like his life, was a short one, but a brilliant one. The son of folk singer Tim Buckley, he emerged in the music scene of New York City in the early 1990s, and cultivated a soulful, very 1990s-man persona. He was a great songwriter and an even better singer.
He released one instant-classic album, Grace, in 1994, featuring original songs like “The Last Goodbye,” “Lover You Should Have Come Over” and the title track, along with a take on Nina Simone’s “Lilac Wine” and the best cover ever recorded of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluljah.”
And then, Buckley died in 1997, drowning in the Wolf River in Memphis in the midst of recording his second album. He was just 30 when he died, just two years older than the father he barely knew was when he died.
He’s been gone for nearly 30 years now, about as long as he lived. A lot of people discovered Buckley long after he died. I was around back then, but didn’t get into his music until a while after he passed. My kids’ friends had a talent show recently, and one of the 15-year-olds sang “Lover, You Should Have Come Over,” and his music is fairly big on TikTok.
There have been a few cinematic takes on Buckley before, including a sort-of biopic called Greetings From Tim Buckley, but now we have the definitive documentary about the singer, featuring plentiful archival footage, testimony from Buckley’s mother and a couple of different girlfriends, and all of Buckley’s music. There are even various heartfelt voicemails left for different people.
Directed by Amy Berg, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a beautiful, ethereal documentary about the late singer. Like the upcoming Counting Crows doc, Have You Seen Me Lately, it tells a 1990s story with a lot of 1990s aesthetics.
Buckley comes across as a soulful and thoughtful young man, with an interesting relationship with his own masculinity. “Love, anger, depression, joy and Zeppelin,” he lists as his main influences. Sadness, like so many great artists, played a clear part in who he was and what he did.
The look, once again, feels a lot like a trip back to the mid-1990s, and that music is great to hear, especially lots of live versions that are fairly different from the studio tracks. At the exact hour mark, we hear his “Hallelujah” for the first time, the song that the whole documentary about the song wasn’t able to admit was better than Leonard Cohen’s original.
If I had one complaint, it’s that the film doesn’t spend much time on how Buckley’s music and influence spread after his death. That’s a story that could have used more exploration.
And finally, when you name a music documentary after one of the subject’s songs (or lyrics), I’m going to get the song in my head every time I think about the documentary. This has happened lately with “Have You Seen Me Lately,” “And So It Goes” and “It’s Never Over.”
