Was there a Fred Neil influence on Tim and was it personal (as a mentor) or just a brief acquaintance?

Jerry Yester said that Tim met Fred at Herbie’s house before he even signed a recording contract. Later, Tim and I went to one of Fred’s recording sessions, where he was working out Dolphins, and from that day on, Tim became obsessed with him. This shows up in his writing on Goodbye and Hello, his singing on Happy Sad, and lasted ‘til the end.

Were you present at any of the recording sessions for "Tim Buckley"? If so, what were they like?

I was at all the sessions for the first two albums. Tim wasn’t a leader, so it was hard to get everyone in sync, but when the sound was right, he’d nail it in one take. He hated later takes, because repetition dissipated the passion.

You wrote the lyrics to seven of the albums twelve songs...did you have any say in the musical arrangements?

On both Tim Buckley and Goodbye and Hello, I was able to make musical suggestions on every track. On the second album, this included ideas for orchestration.

Did you help Tim with the lyrics on the five songs that he wrote?

Wings was Tim’s one-verse fragment completed by me; in Strange Street Affair Under Blue, I completely revised his and Mary’s versions. The others he wrote on his own.

Were you happy with the guitar playing style of Lee Underwood on your songs?

Lee could play in many musical genres, and Tim liked the way he could take an unexpected turn in his compositional style and have his lead guitarist right there.

A lot of the songs on that first album were written about people in your lives... which songs were specifically written for which people?

The songs were inspired by people you probably don’t know, and transcended them, so it’s best just to listen and dream your own people.

What kind of a feeling was it for you to drop the needle on that album and hear "Summer princess, midnight maiden" as the opening lyrics?

I considered songwriting and poetry as two different things, and songs not as important as poems, so it wasn’t much of a pleasure having songs recorded. By the time the first album came out, we were concentrating very hard on the next.

Do you remember how much your first royalty check was and what you spent it on?

I used to get a monthly allowance out of my royalties, and go out on a spree, dinner with my lover, and then to see Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.

In a review for our forum (which I never came close to completing) I wrote the following: "The album "Goodbye and Hello" was an unabashed duo's musical commentary on the social climate of America back in 1967. It conveyed compelling and compassionate tales in rhyme that capsulated some of what was occurring at the time.

“Drugs, love, war, heartache, and disillusionment were all topics touched upon in this break-through album. Beckett and Buckley saturated every song with their own unique poetic logic. They flaunted their ambiguous lyrics and then challenged the rest of us to decipher them."

On this second album, you and Tim obviously got a lot more serious and insightful. What would you consider the "theme" of this album to be?

Dylan said it in Tangled up in Blue:

“There was music in the cafes at night
And revolution in the air”.

We had no theme, only worked on individual songs, but soaked up all the themes and divisions of the sixties, and they found their way into the album.

Did song writing come easy to you or was it a difficult task that required a lot of changes and re-writes?

Because I didn’t take songwriting seriously, I used songs as quickly written experiments; if the experiment worked, I’d use the technique in poetry. When Tim died, I vowed that every song I wrote would be song and poem, and close to perfection.

Do you think that the psychedelic songs on the album could ever have been written if you two didn't experiment with drugs? Would the ideas for songs like "Hallucinations" for example, have come anyway or were they a direct result of your own experimentation?

Drug allusions were just taken out of the air; my couple of grass experiences inspired nothing by me. The word “hallucinations” was a metaphor of a love breaking down, and the idea of hallucinations was a pretext for experimental music.

I believe that the song "Goodbye and Hello" was a true masterpiece because of its many intricacies. I'd sit there reading the words and marvel at how Tim pulled off the chorus-combination of the two sets of lyrics and made it work. I don't think that a person can fully enjoy this song without reading the lyrics as they listen to it. I think that the brilliance of that song is lost on today's listeners because they don't use that approach. Where do you rate this song on your list of lyrical accomplishments?

I was proud of Goodbye and Hello for its musical ambition, Lee Underwood’s inspired twelve-string lead guitar, and Jerry Yester’s fresh orchestration based on it. The chorus lyrics, whose form was indirectly suggested by James Joyce’s musical experiments in the Sirens episode of Ulysses, were meant to be sung on top of each other, contrapuntally, not side by side, antiphonally.

Bob Dylan almost single-handedly moved our generation to write songs more like poems, listen to the language, and interpret the complexities. All that didn’t last too long, though for me, it’s alive. Unfortunately, though I’m nostalgic about the old songs, I think all but a few of my lyrics for Buckley are clumsy and not worth saving. I do love Song to the Siren, the first two verses of Monterey; Starsailor, an unreleased song called Venice, and Tijuana Moon.

Would you care to explain the lyrics to "Morning Glory"? Was the "fleeting house" a metaphor for fame?

Tim said, “Can you write a song about a hobo?”. I don’t think it’s my place to interpret my lyrics, but the more poetry and criticism you read, the easier it is. Because images in poetry can have more than one meaning, “fleeting house” means all the things it can reasonably be taken to mean in the context.
For me, the real meaning is more in the feeling it gives you.

Was Tim using "Pleasant Street" as a metaphor for the euphoria one feels when using a particular drug?

Tim was nowhere near heavy drugs when he wrote Pleasant Street. It is what it sounds like, any surrender to any seduction, even if degrading.

I feel that "No Man Can Find The War" was probably the best anti-war song ever written; my second favorite being "The Great American Eagle Tragedy" by Earth Opera. When you were inducted into the army, did your superior officers know that you wrote that song?

Thank you for the compliment on No Man Can Find the War.

How did you feel about being inducted into the U.S. Army? How difficult was that period for you?

It was very painful to be unexpectedly torn away from my life and lover, as the government tried to make me a slave.

Did you and Tim write back and forth to each other?

We were out of touch for that year, missing the opportunity to write the theme song for the film "Midnight Cowboy".

Were you in any mood to listen to "Happy Sad" while you were in the Army?

I didn’t know about it till I got out, though I did hear the songs once at The Troubadour.

After the Army days, how long did it take to get back into the swing of things?

I took a bus home, instead of flying, so that slowly going into that prison would be matched by slowly coming into freedom.

What did you think of the three albums that Tim made without you?

The music is haunting, the words not too important or good; some experiments fail, but he was brave to try. He was following his own way of growing into new music, influenced by everybody and nobody.

When you returned to writing with Tim on the "Starsailor" album, were you convinced that this was the right direction for Tim to take his music?

We never went in any conscious direction, only followed that mysterious beauty.

Lee Underwood has stated that Tim considered "Starsailor" to be his masterpiece. Do you agree?

Tim was too dissatisfied with his work to think anything a masterpiece, though he was proud of the lyrical, chordal, and time signature experiments on Starsailor.

What do you consider Tim's best work to be?

Dream Letter, the live 1968 London concert, though it could have used Song to the Siren as an encore, is his finest work.

Did Tim tell you of his struggles with management over his career moves?

We were best friends for ten years, and he told me everything important. The record company was trying to make career moves for him; he didn’t think about that.

Did the song “The Earth Is Broken” move you at all?

I was unaware of the song’s existence. Imagine, I’m standing listening to the Dream Letter concert for the first time, The Earth Is Broken comes on, and it slowly dawns on me that in part it’s an outpouring of love by his live voice to me in captivity, all these years later, when he’s a ghost and I’m in freedom. I was deeply touched.