Phil Mongredien 

Jeff Buckley: You and I review – one from the vaults…

Jeff Buckley’s first session for Sony, dusted off after more than two decades, fails to match the best of the late star’s recorded output
  
  

jeff buckley portrait
Jeff Buckley: hasn’t the best of what he did been heard already? Photograph: Frans Schellekens/Redferns

Recently rediscovered in an archive, You and I was the 26-year-old Jeff Buckley’s first session for Sony. Backed up with eight perfectly serviceable covers (Led Zeppelin, Sly Stone, two by the Smiths), the big selling points here are early takes of two of his own songs. Grace is as explosive and spellbinding as the more familiar later version; Dream of You and I, however, isn’t so much a song as Buckley recording a “memo to self” about an idea for a song. There is a very good reason this has sat in a vault for 23 years: it fails to capture Buckley’s magic as well as the Live at Sin-é EP, which would be his debut release later in 1993.

 

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