In his journal entry from August 1995, Jeff Buckley wrote:-
“Check out the electric piano on ‘Lorca’. Hah!! The vocal — haa! So funky. That song is nasty funk. Nightmare sex funky. In the context of Tim Buckley land…That work Tim did was it. That was it. In my memory of my father, when I die, you can all remember my admiration of that period. They hit it. They certainly hit something that no one else can touch.”

Reading the above comment before I’d actually heard Tim Buckley’s ‘Lorca’ instilled in me preconceptions which were usurped and shaken instantly when the opening track began. The initial few seconds of this first track unnerved me as I felt a foreign resonance from the music, and when the bass started, the pipe organ continuing, electric piano daubs entering occasionally, the electric guitar and the 12-string acoustic, everything, I thought existential nightmare horror-noir, not “nightmare sex funky” — the sex funk came a few years later with ‘Greetings From L.A.’, Buckley’s seventh album, although I suspect Jeff was not using the term “funky” literally.

The eponymous opening track, which is almost ten minutes long, has a completely improvisational stance, written in 5/4 time with an ominous marching bass toward uncertainty, it sounds otherworldly organic. This is real music and at times, because of the abstractness and dissonance, is hard to listen to, as reviewers of the time commented.

Second track, ‘Anonymous Proposition’, is another improvised composition, apparently like most of the songs recorded during this period, recorded in one take. This song is slower, more intimate, but like ‘Lorca’ has a celestial, rarefied tenor to it. The next three songs, ‘I Had A Talk With My Woman’, ‘Driftin’, and ‘Nobody Walkin’, have a more ritualistic sound to them, there are brief parallels with his previous album, ‘HappySad’. Apparently, and you would not think it, these three songs were removed from a live set at ‘The Troubadour’. Such is the unqualified ability and power of the music and vocal that I was utterly surprised.

With the music you appreciate the subtleties, the guitar piercings, the sense of discovery, and preference of the journey as opposed to the destination arrival. And I have not even mentioned ‘the voice’ yet. On this album, particularly the opening two tracks, Buckley’s voice has evolved into something more distinctive, singular and unique. Protracted groans, wails, hushes, elongated intimacies, controlling and sustaining single-syllable words, and expanding small, simple words into another language, another sound, making them mean more than you are accustomed to. He wanted to use his voice as an instrument, and amidst the discordant arrangements, he achieved his inception into transcending all influences, which was later fulfilled on ‘Starsailor’, which he regarded as his masterpiece (why has this album not been re-issued on CD). Indeed ‘Lorca’ was his gestation period, an inchoate chassis travelling unguided and accumulating, materialising and emulating in its path, which led to ‘Starsailor’.

This whole album emits a disposition, an atmosphere, a feeling which is difficult to pin down and comment upon completely. But I get the sense that Buckley and his musicians sometimes are not implicitly sure themselves — all they can possibly express, convey and articulate is a sonic abstraction which is connected to those incomprehensible internal thoughts and urges, which they are communicating through their instruments, and Tim, through his eclectic, primal vocal flourishes. Also, it sounds like the pipe organ and electric piano are slightly alien to the player (which Lee Underwood, Buckley’s guitarist, remarked upon), they know what sounds are feasible through broaching the instruments, and all of a sudden they could be drawn to it because of what they, and the group, are already playing — as an alternative instrument can command, suggest, evoke, guide blindly them into incorporating these sonics into the piece, you hear this groping and finding on some of the tracks (1 and 2 chiefly) — but this is what the album is about — discovery, visceral ambition, extemporizing the inner composer, experiencing the unknown, et al, which, unfortunately, is going to be passed on by alot of listeners. This album, and alot of music, needs to be recognised as the germinal phase upon first infliction. By this I mean it could tap into that part of your mind which renounces the arcane and nebulous, the sensation of the new and unfamiliar, disorientation, the bane of not knowing or having access to your many chartered routes of expectation. Some people are favoured to this — but do not admit it — why? — because either they cannot categorically define or expatiate it all — they feel out of their depth but are strangely compelled back — but maybe they go through this in private — some individuals have the language, they can elaborate on why they passionately favour something, but ultimately they talk in questions and indefinite comments. They just do not know — and this infuriates them that they cannot box it in comparable pertinence and division. If more people exhorted their fervency and enchantment about the things that they do not know (which is cumbersome, I know, because we repress our fears, we think twice about areas previously unvisited), around certain thinkers and visionaries, then maybe we might slowly plough headlong into an advanced realisation of said inscrutable’s and curio’s, people would think more about giving in to their unconscious abilities, fleeting thoughts, mercurial urges of spontaneity — those things they shackle and quash because of the perturbation of acceptance, the unnerving notion that they are treading water in a world of no land — nothing to link or associate with. These are the true joys of the pure, undiluted artist, that he or she can step out into whatever spotlight, under whoever’s gaze, into anyone’s eyes and ears, and have a persona he or she presents WHICH IS REALLY HIM OR HER, or nascently, THE BEGINNING OF WHAT HE OR SHE IS, OR WHAT HE OR SHE WILL OR MAY EVENTUALLY BECOME. Do not be a composite, a pastiche of the things that you want to be (its fine and essential to have starting points of influence, sure, but try to take it beyond a contagious facsimile), do not festoon others trivial predilections, life choices, idiosyncrasies, dialogue, appearance and ideas over yourself, or do not stategically hoist that veil up and down every so often to reveal that real, actual presentation of yourself, by giving temporal glimpses and teasing people, this will be an eventual decline, in myriad forms, in your life relationship.

People recognise establishments and formula all of the time, and those market-orientated, or devoid of any facet of substance or content themselves, shrewdly see this and adopt it, because these past or present conventions, achievements, et al, have been understood and scrutinised already — there is nothing left to think about, its all there “hermetically sealed”, as Buckley would say, and doused in canon law. So those who administer these procedures and mainstream actualities are pre-scripting their lives already, resigning themselves to their love and idolatry of someone else and not to the paramount reason of love for themselves, what ‘they actually possess’ and ‘not what they do not have’, and primarily what they are — if they truly know — but it is better to never know and keep searching than to be a cut and paste distillation of falsity.