Tim Buckley reached the pinnacle of his powers with the adventurous acoustic ambivalence and evocative experimental jazz of this dramatic dream letter. After two albums ('Jeff Buckley' and 'Goodbye and Hello') with songwriting partner Larry Beckett, Buckley was moving toward a more personal lyrical perspective. He would reveal: "Larry and I were writing differently at the time and if you write together, you’re usually good enough to know when you can’t. What I was doing on 'Happy Sad' was a lot more musical. The overall lyric expression is pretty hot to this day but I’m not the giant of the lyric that he is. For people to write together, it takes a lot of understanding because you’re not just writing a song, you’re writing an album. A song is just part of it, you know. Even though they cut the music up into different bands on the record, still, each song has got be part of the whole. I keep real good track of what I’ve done before and try to add on a new dimension, which wreaks havoc with business because they have to sell something over and over again if it clicks. But I know to this day I could never write another “Goodbye and Hello” because why say it twice? Followups are never as good as the original song ... It flowed. After doing 'Goodbye and Hello', Beckett wanted to get even rawer than I did so that’s why I did the album by myself. At that time and still today, I do believe that things cannot be changed in the world by hammering into people’s minds that some things are right and some things are wrong. You can’t pound in a point of view or a lifestyle. It has to be done by example, and doing songs on one-to-one relationships because you’re talking about rudimentary things that we all live on. I don’t regret doing the political trip; I just regret that the American people haven’t been told anything. And now, the paranoia is becoming real; it’s real great for a lot of us to know that what we were fearing in those days was right."
'Happy Sad' was produced by Jerry Yester and Zal Yanovsky at Elektra Sound Recorders in Los Angeles with production supervisor Jac Holzman and engineer Bruce Botnick and featured Tim Buckley on guitar, vocals, and twelve string guitar; Lee Underwood on guitar and keyboards; John Miller on acoustic bass; Carter C.C. Collins on congas and conduction; and David Friedman on percussion, marimba, and vibraphone. Buckley said: “I really loved doing that album, I’ll tell ya. It was really a break-out period of time for me musically. Yeah, ‘Love from Room 109 at the Islander’, ‘Buzzin’ Fly’, ‘Sing a Song for You’, ‘Dream Letter’… I was writing, I’ll tell ya that. We had a ball doing that. ‘Love from Room 109 at the Islander’ was recorded in a hotel overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and it was quite simple. I arranged it for harp and vibes and I couldn’t find a harp player in a studio that could cut it… I didn’t know about Alice Coltrane at the time, she hadn’t come on the scene. She was playing somewhere in Michigan but I hadn’t heard her. And after I recorded it, I saw her on the Today show, and I said 'damn!'… because I wanted that thing that the ocean gave...The trick of writing is to make it sound like it’s all happening for the first time — that’s what it’s all about, so that you feel it’s everybody’s idea. It took a long time for me to write that album, and then to teach the people in the band, but they were all great people so it was really a labour of love, the way it should be.”
'Happy Sad' became Buckley's biggest selling album, going to number eighty-one on the US album chart.
http://www.timbuckley.com/
"Strange Feelin'" – 7:40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_ColANWa9o
"Sing a Song for You" – 2:39
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6frpebzfMvs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPtSVouKW10
'Happy Sad' full album:
All tracks written by Tim Buckley.
Side One
"Strange Feelin'" – 7:40
"Buzzin' Fly" – 6:04
"Love from Room 109 at the Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway)" – 10:49
Side Two
"Dream Letter" – 5:12
"Gypsy Woman" – 12:19
"Sing a Song for You" – 2:39
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