1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 97. Tim Buckley – Goodbye and Hello (1967)

 

Sort of similar to Donovan, but to my mind just a bit more sophisticated and complex in the songs. I’d heard Pleasant Street used as a background tune (in Channel 4's student comedy Fresh Meat) and hunted it down because it’s fab, and also came across Song To The Siren (not on this album) but for some reason evaded really going down the Buckley rabbit hole. Like Donovan, there are some troubador ballad songs, especially the title track Goodbye and Hello, which with it’s tempo changes throughout and references to kings, jesters, machine guns etc. feels like an early prog-rock tune.

Pleasant Street is still one of the better tunes on the album, really showcasing Buckley’s vocal range, but the opener No Man Can Find The War is a barnstorming anti-war polemic, while I found Once I Was, a relatively short piece about a former love, to be profoundly beautiful. I had to look it up, because musically it’s a simple piece, doing the old 4-chord trick (Using chords based on the 1st, 3rd, 5th and relative minor of the key). There’s a refrain where the guitar part drops down to the relative minor, while Buckley’s vocal soars upwards in steps to span, I think, an octave, possibly further. The combined effect – gorgeous. One of the few tracks so far on this whole experience where I had to go back and listen again.

If I have one complaint, it’s that the mix feels a bit off sometimes. Instruments that feel like they ought to be more dominant are often mixed too low, and so I went looking for alternative versions to see what they would sound like with a better mix. Buckley notably changes things around a lot for live performances of many of his songs.

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