"Everybody Here Wants You" (Jeff Buckley cover)

Recorded Live at Spooked Horse Ranch

Sometimes I miss when my brain used to get rearranged every 3 months. You get older, and it becomes a less frequent experience. But when you’re young, everything is new, and so therefore you’re regularly having your entire world redefined.

Hearing Jeff Buckley for the first time was one of those moments for me.

I’d scored the CD from my friend Laura, who was older than me and therefore much cooler. She worked at Sony records, where they had this giant closet of all their releases, and while visiting her at work one day, I left with a treasure trove of CDs. Jeff Buckley’s “Live at Sin-é” was one of the records in that pile, and it messed me up good.

The album was recorded live at what was once a coffee shop in Brooklyn. I remember hearing tales of guys like Jimmy Page and The Edge traveling all he way to NY to hear him play in this little coffee spot. I don’t know if the stories are true, but if you listen to the record, it’s easy to imagine why someone would travel across the world to hear that voice.

I eventually played a show there during the very early years of Envy on the Coast, and even though the space had since been fully converted to a venue, no longer resembling the coffee shop on the album’s cover, I still felt like I was walking on hallowed ground.

“Everybody Here Wants You” is by far my favorite Jeff Buckley song. It’s so beautifully raw and dynamic, so it naturally felt like the perfect song to irreverently interpret with synthesizers and drum machines.

We did it all live at our studio (“we” is my friend and frequent collaborator, Warren Trunz, and I). I really didn’t want to be tied to a computer in any way other than to record the performance, so there’s no tracks or anything and we left all the rough edges. I hope you enjoy it.