Jeff Buckley and being Original

In all my wasting away of precious time, the internet seems to be the number 1 cause.

I'll surf for hours on end searching for who knows what. It's an addiction. Ironically, most of the time I find nothing and tell myself I'm never surfing again. Sounds similar to the "i'm never drinking again" phrase. Like I said, it's an addiction.

Anyway, I think every artist, in whatever arena goes through low periods in their life. I'm starting to find that when this happens with me it's because I'm ignoring what wants to come naturally. 

Jeff Buckley had it down. 

Personally, I think his guitar playing is a bit underrated. His voice tends to overshadow what's happening underneath though a lot can be learned about the guitar from his chord voicings and progressions. 

Check out the Live at Sine recordings. His version of Strange Fruit is mind blowing. Who knew he played the blues?

Here's the segment of the interview...

JB: G.I.T. was started by Howard Roberts, the guy who played the wah-wah guitar on the theme to Shaft. And this other guy named Pat Hayes. I don't know. It just seemed like a racket, really. John said a lot of things to me that stuck in my mind. He said that there was nobody who stopped you, sat you in a room and said, okay, we have all these artists that you're learning the licks from, you have your guitar heroes, your virtuoso lust objects. But there's nobody who can make the kind of music you can make now except for you. And you can make it now. You don't even have to know how to go fast. And that makes all the sense to me in the world. It's also kind of an unseen process, that concept, originality. It's like that in all the education systems; there's never any real...identity education, self-generative identity art sort of thing, to be yourself. If everybody in Melbourne had a Wurlitzer organ and had the passion to sing something or make something, you'd have hundreds of thousands of different styles, if they were coming exactly from only their DNA, only their makeup, and their emotional percepts, their idea about what art is. You could have way-removed genres from what is already accepted, avante garde country-rock-punk-folk-whatever. It's unlimited. But for some reason, the conventions always take over and there's a very ready and powerful formula to step into...