Tim Buckley

Sefronia
DiscReet, 1973

I found Sefronia in a $5 bin, worn and creased. Not in the romantic way, with the marks of love roughed into the corners and the edges of the opening made soft by a thousand thumbprints, but in a much sadder state. The cover had been shrink-wrapped in a film of plastic at some point, and it had started to constrict in parts and peel away at others, leaving little white wrinkles over Tim Buckley's face and a see-through layer like dead skin hanging off one side. It didn't look like it had ever been anybody's favourite record.

Sefronia was one of the last albums Buckley recorded. He was born on Valentine's Day, 1947, and – like his son Jeff would several decades later – began his musical career as a romantic, doe-eyed singer "mothering young women swooned over". He soon grew out of his folk-singer image, and started to experiment with jazz and improvisation, alienating most of his fans along the way. He spent the most impassioned years of his career trying to escape from the shadow of his first two albums, Tim Buckley and Goodbye And Hello.

As Buckley's hatred of the music industry crystallised, he discovered avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian and became inspired to do away with conventional lyrics and use his voice as an instrument instead. His personal masterpiece, as long-time collaborator Lee Underwood remembers, was to be Starsailor. Buckley knew it was going to be a difficult album to sell, but put everything he had behind it anyway. "You know you're not going to fit in," he said to a journalist at the time, "but you do it because it's your heart and soul."

Starsailor bombed, and took Buckley's heart and soul down with it. His record label took back all creative control and venues stopped booking him. He took up drinking, and then heroin. When he ran out of money, he agreed to attempt a comeback with a series of soulless and clichéd white-boy R&B and rock albums, including Sefronia. To add insult to injury, they bombed as well. Buckley died soon afterwards of a heroin overdose, at the age of 28. And so there I was, feeling spent and worthless (readers of this morbid little column may wonder if I ever feeling anything but), and that's how Sefronia came home with me.