Morning Glory: The Tim Buckley Anthology

Though I'd bought this used it looks like new. This seller has done this before, I pay for used and get a new looking CD. Aside from that the liner notes, a cd booklet, say it all, Buckley's voice is sublime. Plenty on these two discs new to me and old faves Two versions of Song to the Siren, a wonderful studio version plus the Monkees tv version. Some great live performances recorded in London with an excellent ensemble backing band. Buckley's music is outside the mainstream of his time and there's nothing dated or trite here. Wish I'd got into it sooner, but better late than never!

Item supplied quickly and is in as new condition. The style of music is not totally to my taste but is well worth the money.

Tim Buckley was a complete one off artist who burned very brighly indeed before heroin killed him in his late 20s. This set contains all his best (or at least his most accessible) material as well as a decent booklet and is by some distance the best place to start if you want to get going with this most singular artist with an amazing voice and incredibly diverse range of material (mainly infused with folk, jazz and rock).Wonderful stuff indeed.

Excellent product and service

Enjoyed listening to this. I prefer the examples of his earlier work which are on CD 1.

a brilliant tribute

You don't necessarily need to have a Top 40 hit to fix yourself place in pop culture's firmament. Many artists who die prematurely have seen their stock continue to rise year on year. Think Nick Drake, Gram Parsons, and Jeff Buckley. Think also of the latter's much-mythologised, and very good-looking, father, Tim, dead at 28 of an accidental heroin overdose.Between 1966 and 1974 this singer-songwriter, a tenor with a five-and-a-half octave range, released nine albums, and whizzed through a whole bunch of different genres - including folk, jazz, and R&B - in a recording career that was marked by critical praise, little commercial success, and a frustrating lack of consistency. That makes the assembly of a collection difficult without omitting much of the context of what made the singer special to generations of geeky rock critics and needy record shop staff. That point was proven by the 2006 re-release of The Best Of Tim Buckley. That career-spanning and broadly chronological collection struggled to sum up every turn in Buckley's artistic evolution in one almost CD-filling 75 minute package. There was no space amongst its 18 remastered songs for the likes of 'Buzzin' Fly', 'Blue Melody', 'Hong Kong Bar', or `Sweet Surrender'.How does this double CD fare? Slightly better than that, as it includes all of the above amongst its 33 tracks. Over its generous running time of more than two-and-a-half hours it concentrates on his most accessible tunes, drawing most heavily from his earliest albums and shorter songs, pitching in a handful of late-'60s live recordings that were not released until long after his death. The likes of 'Morning Glory', 'I Must Have Been Blind', 'The River', and, of course, the much-covered 'Song To The Siren', a self-destructive love song that is in the same mould as Irish lament 'Carrickfergus', almost justify the embarrassing quasi-religious hyperbole on the back cover ("He had an angels voice... [and] a martyr's fate"). Also, as you would expect, his final 2 albums - Sefronia and the unfortunately-titled Look At The Fool - that are considered by most as transparent attempts at commercial success, are given short shrift in the chronologically-arranged running order.Any best of is always going to be debatable. However the credentials of this particular overview of this complex and flawed artist are undermined by the conservative approach to his edgiest works. For instance, there is nothing at all, from his least commercial effort, 1970's Lorca (although a lovely live version of 'I Had A Talk With My Woman' has been included). Yet, his unspectacular, self-titled debut warrants 5 tracks, even though Lee Underwood, who played guitar on the record and became his long time sideman, dismissively described the early Buckley as "a Bambi-eyed little boy poet prattling about paper hearts and Valentines". The omission of key tracks in his back catalogue like 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain' and 'Dream Letter', that can be found on the pretty similar 2011 compilation Starsailor: The Anthology, also counts against it.Still, Morning Glory does feature one previously unreleased track - the lovely prototype solo version of 'Song To The Siren', with a sparser arrangement and a different lyric - which he performed on The Monkees' TV show.

What a voice this man had! If you're reading this, you probably know that already and you're wondering whether this album is any good. The answer is an unqualified yes. This provides alternative versions of some of Tim's finest songs, with understated, mostly acoustic accompaniment. These songs are all live takes from BBC radio (John Peel show) or TV (Old Grey Whistle Test) recordings, and the varied song style highlights both his uncannily powerful and wide-ranging and emotion-filled voice (swooping seemingly without effort from bass to falsetto) and his determination to experiment with a variety of musical styles, from blues to folk, jazz and anything in between. For me, the more conventional, electric numbers that begin the cd ('Dolphins' and 'Honey Man', both recorded in 1974), while brash and powerful, weaken the impact of the cd as a whole, because from track 3 on, the performances are absolutely timeless, reflective and transcendent. These tracks, recorded in 1968, are all acoustic-driven, with electric guitar and bongos accompanying Tim's stunning voice. The highlights are 'Sing a Song For You','Morning Glory', and 'Once I Was' with its wonderful surly spoken prelude which sounds like 'Just tell Herbie(?) to shut up and turn the thing on' contrasting with the subsequent gorgeous, wistful vocal. These tracks benefit from the sparse accompaniment which renders them timeless, avoiding the dated sound of some of his 60's studio recordings.