Every piece of tragic poetry singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley hoped to be remembered by can be found scrawled in his familiar handwriting on the pages of his Mead composition notebooks.
These notebooks and the doodles scribbled in the margins are featured extensively in Amy Berg’s documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, providing a never-before-seen perspective into the life of the elusive artist. The film was released early last month in limited theaters nationwide, one of them being a thirty-minute drive from UCF’s campus.
The Enzian Theater in Maitland is known for its old-fashioned cult-theater charm and was selected to show the film, along with unseen live footage from one of Buckley’s early concerts. I had the chance to see it there and was immediately greeted with an exclusive movie poster of Buckley, along with the same handwriting floating all around him.
Buckley was born in 1966 in Anaheim, Calif., to Mary Guibert, a teen mother and first-generation Panamanian immigrant. Guibert admits in the documentary that she was young and immature when she had Jeff, often saying that they “raised each other.” His father left before he was born to pursue his own music career.
Growing up in a household where music was a constant, Buckley drew inspiration from artists as varied as Nina Simone to Led Zeppelin and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Music had always been the most important and consistent thing in Buckley’s life.
A clip of Buckley saying “Music is my mother and my father; it is my work and my rest…my blood…my compass…my love…” is heard multiple times throughout the documentary.
Following Buckley’s performance at St Ann’s Church in Brooklyn for his father’s tribute service, he saw an escalated interest in his music from labels. He signed with Columbia Records and lived in the East Village at the height of contemporary and experimental art, serving as a safe space for a creative collective that fostered the creation of his iconic and only studio album, Grace, in 1994.
Buckley reiterated throughout his career, albeit it being short-lived, that he wanted to be remembered as a songwriter. It was never about fame, money, or notoriety — he just wanted to be known through his music. His album was a smash hit in Europe and moderately received in the U.S. However, his single “Hallelujah” has since surpassed a billion streams, and his only studio album, Grace, has gone platinum.
In recent years, his song “Lover, You Should Have Come Over” has resurfaced online in conversations young people have about experiences of yearning and unrequited love. Over 30 years later, his music continues to resonate with raw, soul-bearing emotion in tribute to the broken-hearted.
Berg incorporates details and footage of Buckley’s life in the documentary through his doodles in intermittent animations, his notebook pages, unseen video of his performances at the small coffee shop where he worked, and messages he left on the phones of loved ones. She even includes clips of his bookshelves featuring authors like E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, and Homer, as well as cassettes from Siouxsie and the Banshees, Patti Smith, and Art Tatum.
The most notable of his phone messages was an hour-long, fully produced outgoing voicemail styled like a radio show featuring the one and only Spinach the Cat, a fictional character Buckley created.
Buckley’s sensitivity and dedication to his music were highlighted in the film and corroborated by interviews from those closest to him. His former bandmates, executives, mother, and past partners contributed to the film and remember Buckley wholly and honestly. He was not a perfect man by any means, but he was sincere and passionate about what and who he loved.
In his ordinary life and in his career, Buckley was unselfconsciously himself. The label tried to get him to reshoot his Grace album cover numerous times, but he pushed to keep what they called too “effeminate” and embrace all sides of himself as recounted in the documentary. He was called slurs in high school for accepting his more feminine aspects and defending the women close to him. He was a “staunch defender” of women’s rights, according to Joan Wasser, a female artist. Many of his vocal techniques he often attributed to female singers such as Nina Simone, Judy Garland, and Edith Piaf. His haunting and thoughtful lyrics seem to resonate with women, even now.
The years following the release of Grace were a whirlwind for Buckley and the people close to him. He struggled with manic depression and frequently went missing when overwhelmed. He also toured for two full years, playing monumental shows and festivals where he met many of his musical inspirations at the time. He became great friends with Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, and David Bowie regarded Grace as the “best album ever made.” He watched Led Zeppelin live and climbed the scaffolding on the stage to listen. Radiohead wrote “Fake Plastic Trees” after watching one of Buckley’s performances. Paul and Linda McCartney made a point of meeting him, but compared him to his father.
His father was a looming presence over his career as a successful musician with a similar voice. The relentless comparisons contributed to a decline in his mental health, as well as the constant promotion of Grace and pressures to release a second album.
Buckley moved to Memphis in 1996 to give himself space to write another album. He stayed there alone and befriended his neighbors. Over the course of his stay at his Memphis home, Buckley experienced a psychotic break as his manic depression worsened. He drowned while swimming in the Wolf River, waiting for his bandmates to meet him in Memphis to record his sophomore album, Sketches For My Sweetheart, the Drunk. He was listening to Led Zeppelin, and his body resurfaced at the foot of Beale Street. He was 30 years old.
Buckley was an artist who will always be remembered for the music he made and what he could have been. Berg does an excellent job of encapsulating Buckley as the man he was, stressing the music he was making and where it originated from. He did not just play or write music; Buckley wanted to be his music, and Berg understood this. Berg captured his life not as a eulogy, but as a tribute to his humanity. She does not deify him, but rather restores his wholeness — it felt like a journey through archives and an almanac of personal antiquity. It felt like a mother remembering her son and women remembering their lover.
The showing I attended also featured 20 minutes of unseen concert footage that is not in the digital version of the film. The concert was filmed at The Middle East club in Cambridge, Mass., where he played some of his most memorable songs from Grace before its release. His music at this point was at its most poignant and raw, untouched by label executives or even the outside world. It felt as if I were the only one in that theater, and I can only imagine those at the show felt the same way.
In those final 20 minutes of unseen footage, Buckley’s voice echoed through the theater as if it had never left. And for that brief moment, he wasn’t just a memory or a martyr — he was music, alive again.