Morning Glory: The Tim Buckley Anthology

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.

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.

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

Excellent product and service

a brilliant tribute

great

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.

Tim Buckley released 9 studio albums in his (all too brief) career. The way I see it is that there were 3 stages to his career:the "learning stage" ("Tim Buckley" and "Goodbye and Hello"), which showed potential, especially in Goodbye and Hello, although both albums were a bit over-producedthe "good stage" ("Happy Sad" through to Starsailor"), where Tim came into his own and produced a run of excellent albumsthe "he's lost it stage" ("Greetings from LA", "Sefronia" and "Look at the Fool"), where most of the stuff that he released paled in comparison to what went before, although there were still flashes of brillianceI'm guessing a major problem with this compilation would be due to the fact that Tim's evolving style would have made it dificult to create a fluent album. Thankfully, Rhino have managed to compile something that flows from one track to the next quite well.Another strong point of this compilation is that it contains songs from Tim's 2 currently unavailable albums (Blue Afternoon and Starsailor), which I also happen to think are his best. Kudos as well for including the version of "Song to the Siren" from the Monkees.Wisely the "he's lost it" period songs are barely represented, but as with most other artist's compilations, there's gonna be people complaining about what has been missed out. And there have been some things which really should have been included here."I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain" and "Dream Letter", 2 songs wildly rumoured to be about his son Jeff and Jeff's mother, have been criminally omitted, as has "Down by the Borderline" from Starsailor, the best song he did not on here. And Lorca doesn't get a proper representation at all (although a lovely live version of "I Had A Talk With My Woman" has been included), even though his "OK-but-nothing-special-at-all" debut seems to warrant 5 tracksStill, it is a good introduction to his music, and it does contain unavailable tracks, although his available studio albums can mostly be found quite cheaply