The emotional songs Tim Buckley wrote about his son, Jeff Buckley
American musician Jeff Buckley endured a bittersweet introduction to the music industry. Despite being the son of Tim Buckley, the folk artist abandoned his family when Jeff was born, unable to cope with the demands of fatherhood. When Jeff was eight, they met once, a few months before his father passed away from a drug overdose in 1975. Thus, Jeff continued his life as normal, playing in several struggling bands following his high-school graduation before landing his first public singing gig at a 1991 tribute concert for his father.
Discussing his father, Buckley once told NME: “He left my mother when I was six months old. So I never really knew him at all. We were born with the same parts, but when I sing, it’s me. This is my own time and if people expect me to work the same things for them as he did, they’re going to be disappointed.” Despite his father’s absence, Buckley decided to pay tribute to him for “personal reasons”, as he later explained: “It bothered me that I hadn’t been to his funeral, that I’d never been able to tell him anything. I used that show to pay my last respects.”
The musician covered his father’s song ‘I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain’ as tribute, which he repeatedly claimed was written about him and his mother, Mary. The 1967 track was penned when Buckley was an infant and features lines such as, “The Flying Pisces sails for time/ And tells me of my child/ Wrapped in bitter tales and heartache/ He begs for just a smile”. Tim alludes to his son and his status as an absent father with the words, “She says, ‘Your scoundrel father flies/ With a dancer called a queen'” and “O the child dreams to be his hands/ In the counting of the rain/ But only barren breasts he feels/ For her milk will never drain.”
Although Buckley wanted to distance himself from his father’s music, his rendition of the track left a strong impression on the audience and proved to be his entry into the industry. Yet, after releasing one studio album, Grace, in 1994, Buckley died in 1997 in an accidental drowning accident. Hauntingly, his father’s song included the lyrics, “‘I’m drowning back to you’/ I can’t swim your waters.” However, ‘I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain’ was not the only track Tim wrote for Jeff. The 1969 song ‘Dream Letter’, like the title suggests, acts as a message to his family that he could not send.
Directly addressing Mary and Jeff, Tim sings: “How’re you and my child?/ Oh, is he a soldier or is he a dreamer?/ Is he mama’s little man?/ Does he help you when he can?/ Oh, does he ask about me?” According to Tim’s guitarist, Lee Underwood: “Several times he spoke to me of having abandoned Mary to fulfil his destiny as a musician. Tim intended to explain his leaving when Jeff came of age. Meanwhile, he wrote ‘Dream Letter’ as a kind of love song reaching across the years to a son he hardly knew. He cared, but he’d made a choice early on: family or music. He chose music.”
The heartbreaking track inspired Jeff’s song ‘Dream Brother’, in which he advises his friend not to leave his pregnant girlfriend. He sings: “Don’t be like the one who made me so old/ Don’t be like the one who left behind his name/ ‘Cause they’re waiting for you like I waited for mine/ And nobody ever came.”
Listen to the songs Tim wrote about Jeff below.