.................................the blog nobody reads: Gary Lucas on working with Jeff Buckley & GRACE

Friday, May 08, 2026

Gary Lucas on working with Jeff Buckley & GRACE

I found this account of the set up to Grace and Mojo Pin etc from Gary here so moving it bears repeating

GARY SAYS: "I wrote the music for both MOJO PIN and GRACE at a very low point in my career. I’d just learnt that my contract with Columbia Records with the female singer in Gods and Monsters circa 1991 had been summarily terminated as a result of an A&R regime change.
My wife freaked: “We don’t have health insurance!” (only in America, kids). “You’ve got to get your day job back!!”
I’d been a copywriter at Black Rock for 13 years before quitting in 1990 with a contract to record an album for Columbia—secured thanks to A&R major domo Rick Chertoff. Rick had recently moved on to another label.
“No, I’m not crawling back there to beg for that job! No one will ever take me seriously in music if I do that”.
Sometimes you just have to stick to your guns.
I rang Jeff, who I’d performed with recently at a Tim Buckley tribute in Brooklyn, and who was now back in LA living with his mother, to tell him the news. “I’ll be your singer!” he shouted down the phone. I went to bed happy that night.
When I awoke, I got busy writing new music for Jeff to sing on. In a kind of feverish trance, over the next few days I composed the music for what became the instrumental basis for both “Mojo Pin” and “Grace”, and sent them via snail mail on a cassette to Jeff with the provisional titles “And You Will” and “Rise Up to Be”, respectively. Those titles were meant to vibe him (and me) up. The power of positive thinking, you might say.
When he received them he rang me up to say: “They’re beautiful!” Which was music to my ears.
Jeff returned to NYC later that summer, and came round our apartment on one of the hottest and stickiest nights of the year.
“You know that one you call “And You Will”? Now it’s called “Mojo Pin”.
“Jeff, what’s a ‘Mojo Pin’”??
He mimed for me.
Oh well.
But as I am not a censor…
We demo’ed up this song and the other song he now called “Grace” a few days later at Krypton Studios on the Lower East Side.
Here’s the demo: https://on.soundcloud.com/uNBb8leSNiOnVUajCS
Both songs, if you care to A/B them with the versions on the “Grace” album, were pretty much all there way back in Aug. 1991."