Opened Twice: Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk at 25

In February of 1997, I was sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office.

The room was packed with people who, like me, were coughing and sniffling; it was one of those NYC winters when everyone had a cold.

I hadn’t been there long when a tall, thin guy around my age came out of Dr. Silverman’s office and into the waiting room. His appearance was somewhat disheveled. I saw him from behind and my first thought was, “This guy looks like he could be homeless.” Then he turned around and my next thought was, “This guy looks sort of like Jeff Buckley!”  Though I hadn’t started writing about music professionally yet, I was a big fan of Grace. Before I could get a good look at the guy, he was gone — or so I thought.

Five minutes later, he returned. I heard him whispering something to June, who was Dr. Silverman’s assistant. She explained to him that the doctor was already with another patient but that she would go into his office and look for the item that the young man had apparently forgotten. I heard him tell June that it was a notebook; that’s when I knew it was Buckley. 

While June was looking for the missing notebook, Buckley said out loud — to no one in particular — something like,”If I lose that notebook, I’m fucked.”  He then began looking around the waiting room to see if maybe he’d left it there. I was the last person he got to and, when our eyes met, I offered him the magazine I’d been reading. He laughed — I can still see it — and said, “Oh, no, no!” A minute or two later, June came back into the waiting room with the notebook and Buckley — obviously relieved — left for good. 

When it was my turn to see Dr. Silverman, I asked him if that was Jeff Buckley who had come out of his office and he said yes. “Do you know him?” he asked. I said no, but that I was a big fan of his music. Dr. Silverman said that he’d never heard his music (he was a great doctor but he was not a rocker!) and that this was the first time he had treated Jeff — for a sore throat. Three months after this strange experience, Jeff was dead.

I won’t get into the details of Jeff Buckley’s death here or the events leading up to it; if you’re a fan, chances are you know that stuff already. What I will mention is that Jeff has been living in Memphis at the time of his death, working on the follow-up to his acclaimed 1994 debut, Grace. This sophomore album was to be called My Sweetheart the Drunk. There had been a number of sessions with the late Tom Verlaine producing. But Jeff decided he wasn’t entirely happy with these sessions. He wanted to re-record the songs with Andy Wallace (who had produced Grace) at the helm. In fact, the night he drowned, his band was literally touching down in Memphis on a flight from NYC. Like much of Jeff Buckley’s life, it was a “truth is stranger than fiction” moment.

Obviously, My Sweetheart the Drunk was never officially completed. But a year after his death, Columbia Records — in cooperation with Mary Guibert, Jeff’s mother and the executor of his estate — released a double-disc album called Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk. The first disc consisted of the 10 songs that compiled the album per se. The second disc featured alternate versions, cover songs and truly minimal sketches: four-track recordings, some of which saw Jeff tapping the microphone in lieu of a kick drum! The liner notes made it abundantly clear that Jeff had not considered any of these songs finished.  Sketches was the first posthumous Buckley release of many. 

The day I bought Sketches — from a record store in Greenwich Village that closed years ago — I remember feeling a mixture of anticipation and guilt. I wanted to hear his “new” music and the build-up to it had been tremendous. But at the same time, I did feel a pang of guilt. I was buying a product that was not finished and that, for all I knew, Jeff might not have wanted to be released. Of course, my desire to hear the music won out. When I walked into the store, I was surprised to learn that the manager was playing Sketches at that very minute. The song I was hearing, “Everybody Here Wants You,” was great — but I could have sworn it was being sung by a black woman! Such was the range and malleability of Jeff’s voice.

So was Sketches worth buying? Absolutely. The 10 songs on disc one add up to a pretty excellent studio outing — albeit a very different one than Grace.  To these ears, Grace (which also included 10 songs) was very consistent. True, there were a variety of tempos (including one song that out and out rocked) and three of its tracks were covers. But from the slow, ethereal opening of “Mojo Pin” to the final lines of “Dream Brother,” Buckley more or less sustained one mood over the course of the whole album. On Sketches — whether by design or accident — he doesn’t do that. There are many moods on this album and every song is different from the next.

The opening trio of “The Sky is a Landfill,” the aforementioned “Everybody Here Wants You” and “Opened Once” ranks right up there with any music Buckley released. “The Sky is a Landfill” is a strong opening track, operatic in its vocals, abstractly poetic in its lyrics. “This way of life is so devised to snuff out the mind that moves,” sings Buckley before declaring, at the song’s end, “I have no fear of this machine!”  It’s a statement of purpose.

The next two songs are ballads, but they have little in common with each other. “Everybody Here Wants You” may be the most beautiful song Buckley ever wrote. The lyrics and music are evocative (Mick Grondahl’s bass especially), but it’s his voice that makes this song. As I said, when I first heard “Everybody,” I thought a black woman was singing.  Prince probably would have killed for this tune. This is a song of yearning and Buckley sings the Hell out of it. “Opened Once,” by contrast, is less about yearning than about memory. It’s a short song, the lyrics are abstract and possibly homoerotic — but they work. And the final line — “I am a railroad track abandoned/With the sunset forgetting that I ever happened” — is pure poetry. 

If the rest of disc one isn’t quite up to that standard, it’s pretty close. Other highlights include the glam-rock of “Yard of Blonde Girls” (the one track that Jeff didn’t write) and the moody jangle-rock of “Vancouver.” The final track, “You & I,” is basically an a capella tone poem. Buckley is all over the map on Sketches — but more often than not, he arrives at his destination.

There is also a song on that first disc called “Nightmares By the Sea.” It would be somewhat haunting under any circumstances — but in light of Jeff’s drowning, it’s hard not to look at it as a premonition. The line “Stay with me under these waves tonight/Be free for once in your life tonight” is particularly eerie.

VIDEO: Jeff Buckley “Everybody Here Wants You”

The second disc is mainly for completists and, to be honest, some of it can be hard to get through. But again — it bears mentioning that these really are sketches, not songs. As Bill Flanagan says in the liner notes, “These are all Jeff, in private, experimenting, having fun, plotting his next move.” In addition to various originals and alternate versions, there are covers of the country classic “Satisfied Mind” (which was recorded by both Porter Wagoner and Johnny Cash) and the Genesis deep cut “Back in NYC.” Once again, diversity rules.

In the end, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk is well worth owning. While Jeff himself may not have been happy with where the songs were at the time of his death, it should be noted that he was something of a perfectionist. In this writer’s opinion, Sketches was almost as good as Grace while being an entirely different beast.

As for Dr. Silverman… In December of 1998, I bought him a Jeff Buckley CD as a holiday present.

• Author
• Recent Posts

Dave Steinfeld

Dave Steinfeld has been writing about music professionally since 1999. Since then, he has contributed to Bitch, BUST, Blurt, Classic Rock UK, Curve, Essence, No Depression, QueerForty, Spinner, Wide Open Country and all the major radio networks. Dave grew up in Connecticut and is currently based in New York City.

Latest posts by Dave Steinfeld (see all)

• In Quintessence: Squeeze’s ‘East Side Story’ At 45 - May 15, 2026
• If the ‘Shoes’ Fit… - March 31, 2026
• Lowdown: Boz Scaggs’ Silk Degrees Turns 50 - February 19, 2026