Your Own Kind of Girl

fluorescent lights were switched off, and in their place was a candelabra. When Jeff arrived—lean and small, a guitar strapped to his chest—he struck me as fragile, and sweet. What surprised me were the jokes he told us before the show, to warm us up, about the Melbourne weather, about the way we spoke—just shooting the breeze, all casual like, but so fun, and so cool. When he did finally sing, when that sound coming out of his mouth hit my chest, dear God, I thought I would explode with the beauty of it. Eyes as big as saucers, I could not believe what I was hearing, the power of it, the way it sucked all the loneliness up and out of my chest and put there instead the most remarkable feeling of connection and warmth and hope. It was this night, this feeling, that really changed things for me again—that reminded me, once more, of the brilliant power of song, of the way it can change a heart, change a feeling, change a life. I was reminded, yet again, that music matters.

Later that night, me and Jill and Anna made friends with Jeff’s sound guy. We went out for a drink with him. At the end of the night, he asked for my number. The next time Jeff came to town to play, the sound guy got us seats right up the front, once even sitting on stage. We saw him in Melbourne, and we also drove up to Sydney to see him perform at the Enmore Theatre. But at this show everything felt different. At that first small instore, we felt like we were part of only a handful of people in the world who knew of Jeff. We’d seen him play twice more since then, and still felt part of a secret club. Now, at the Enmore, with every cool kid in town in attendance, it felt like the whole world wanted a piece of him—and it also seemed obvious to us that he was not enjoying the pressure. The thing I’d noticed first with my sister Anna, the model, and could see here too was that fame was not all it was cracked up to be.

Later that night, Anna and Jill and I were invited upstairs, backstage, for the after-party. It was a small room, there were only about a dozen people in there to begin with, and the feeling was quite calm, until Jeff walked into the room. As we watched strangers swarm around Jeff with their words and their wants and their need to be near him, a feeling of sadness came over me. Me and the girls hardly spoke, just watched. At one point our mate the sound guy called me over, and then introduced me to Jeff himself. He told Jeff that I was a singer, and he should hear me sing. I didn’t know what to say. We exchanged just a few words, a joke. I think I may have even attempted to speak Spanish. (There is no logical explanation for this. It’s possible I was trying to be funny. More likely, I think I was just freaking out!)

Another time, our mate tried to get Jeff and I together for a jam up in Jeff’s hotel room. We went late in the afternoon before the Melbourne gig, and a bunch of us sat on Jeff’s bed, me playing Jeff’s guitar, waiting for him to appear; he was in the next room apparently, occupied with his lady. I remember feeling so scared I actually dropped his guitar, something my girlfriends still rib me about to this day—the way my hands go clumsy and weak when I’m overexcited.

Jeff Buckley and I never did get to play together. And what I saw behind the scenes of his fame, how people wanted a piece of him, wanted him to smile and dance and listen to their problems, scared me.

Just like in the movies, once Jeff’s sound guy realised we were not going to fuck him, not going back to his hotel room, he dumped us. Stopped calling. Stopped inviting us to shows. What a sleaze. The whole thing—everything about being a young woman backstage at those shows—made me even more fearful of the music industry, of what lay ahead for those ‘privileged enough’ to sign record contracts.

But what did not leave me was that feeling of when Jeff stood up, heart on his sleeve, chest to the world, and let us have it—all of it. Let us have all the beauty and all the horror and all the brutality and all the joy in his soul, and it hit us in our faces and our hearts and this, I think, is when I returned in earnest to teaching myself the art of writing songs, and I longed then and forever more to keep looking for and trying to make moments through song that shimmered, and were true, and meant something.

When I returned from London, and for many months afterwards, I could not play music. It was too much for me—too much information, emotion, memory.

For even longer afterwards, I could not write songs, could not imagine I would ever write another song. Could not imagine I had it in me anymore to take a risk like that—of writing a song, of dreaming of a life in music again. I closed the door, I suppose.

But after Joffa and I finally broke up, towards the end of my first year of university, the songs came back, all grown up. More honest. Less angry. Dozens of them, one after the other, night after night. Music became my great love once again, and this time, I did not fall apart. This time, I was able to make something of my heartbreak, and this is when I got it—that songs are like containers. They are one of the only things in the world strong enough to hold emotions this raw, and this contradictory. A song is like a Tardis