I know there are dozens of versions of this song, and some people swear by Leonard Cohen’s original but the emotion in the guitar playing as well as the voice of this one gets me every time. And I mean the original studio version rather than the less impressive ‘official’ one. I love all of Buckley’s work (especially his unreleased duet with the amazing Elizabeth Frazer All Flowers in Time) but the reason this evokes such wonderful memories is that I listened to it on repeat on my headphones at midnight, wandering along on a beach in the middle of nowhere on Fuerteventura a few years back, nothing but blackness, sea and sand and this. No-one seems to know exactly what the lyrics mean, so they can mean something very special to you alone. I got lost in it.
It inspired me to write a story (as yet unfinished, about 7000 words in and now in a virtual drawer until I revisit some of the locations) set in NewQuay in Wales with invented folklore, very complicated poetry and a wonderful female protagonist called Jennifer who I think I may be a little bit in love with. But chapter 15, when you finally get to read it, was written in the early hours of the next morning by the hotel bar and a number of whisky sours, and this is the soundtrack to that chapter