“The first time I heard “How Soon Is Now” (by The Smiths), I can remember things changing in myself. It was 1984, in my friend’s apartment in this really horrible building in Hollywood. We were there eating some sort of horrible food, with ketchup ‘cause we didn’t have any money, and it came on the television. The video was great, but the song completely blew everything away. I’ve never heard of The Smiths before and it was like, whooosh, I went out and got Meat Is Murder. It was the first time I ever heard writing like that over music like that. It influenced me because the writing was so great, because Morrissey’s lyrics were so great in such a way, I don’t know, like just completely freaky, unique. Really cool and not only literate, because that’s a real precious term to use for it. It was just a better world than what I’d been hearing, and clever in a real admirable way, not in an annoying way. It really felt like the steam of teapots and uniforms and public schools, some sort of distant romantic vision of what it meant to be English.”
- Jeff Buckley