Tim Buckley
Goodbye And Hello

With this second work Buckley begins to venture into the experiments that will consecrate him as a "navigator of the stars", leaving his shadow etched among the vaults of singer-songwriters of all time.
Already the tempos of the songs begin to show themselves more and more fluid and malleable, the arrangements become a dense echo of the journeys into the depths of drugs: listen to the pompous "Pleasant Street" in light of this, with its evident reference to the tunnel of addiction and the impossibility of doing without what gives the most vivid images.
Tim is always accompanied by his trusted lyricist Larry Beckett and guitarist Lee Undrwood, and on this occasion the precious work of Leonard Cohen's conga player, Carter Collins, lends its hand.
What Tim Buckley accomplishes on this record is one of the countless steps forward towards pure experimentation, driven by his jazz guardian spirits like Coltrane and Miles Davis; he fills the compositions with sudden tempo changes, free-form risks and surges into pure psychedelia, playing like a voice acrobat in the carnival of throats.

The pure gem "Once I Was" shines, which will later be revisited by his son Jeff, as if between the two there always existed a mysterious and transcendental umbilical cord: Tim pays homage to the abandoned family with "Dream Letter" and Jeff treasures his father's legacy in his short career.
"Hallucinations" forcefully transports us to a medieval market where Jethro Tull plays as guests; where the harp's carpet and the play of guitars give us a richly jagged wall on which to draw the graffiti of imagination.
"I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain" is the farewell declaration to his wife and son Jeff, elegantly played with a voice laid over a dense hammering of percussion and guitars: a liberating yet bitter anthem where abandonment can give a sense of newfound freedom but also fear of the unknown. This is a track where the neurotic sense of racing becomes penetrating and gasping: an Ode to Joy in acid where Tim almost screams not to hear the recriminations of those abandoned.
"Phantasmagoria in Two" is genuinely what the title declares: a melancholy and imaginative song in 2/4 sung with a falsetto barely cracked by tears; here too the sense of motion is very strong, serving on a golden platter the sound of the wind, the rustle of leaves teased by Underwood's free guitar.
Lee Underwood once declared that it was impossible to be bored with Buckley on stage, because he was always ready to change and play with genres, to experiment with his voice where no one had gone before.
The title track "Goodbye and Hello" is the vinyl equivalent of this free-spirited song, a child of its lysergic and psychedelic times, with proud trumpets breaking in between verses, with continuous angry bursts that turn the song in surprising, incalculable, and also very spontaneous directions, making joyful what was gloomy and difficult a moment before.

Once a very dear person to me said that poetry in order to be beautiful must surprise, continually move the camera from one scene to another, working on the juxtapositions of images and sounds not to bore and to enter the heart.
Goodbye And Hello is a poem.