Interview: Michael Tighe

Michael Tighe: “I wasn’t gunning for a spot in the band or anything, or even thinking about that – Jeff was just my friend.”

From ‘Grace’ to songwriting success, the New Yorker reflects on collaborating with Jeff Buckley and navigating a diverse music career

Michael Tighe’s entry into Jeff Buckley’s world was unexpected and life-changing. Initially just friends bonding over music and long nights playing pool, Michael joined his band and became an integral part of the creation of Buckley’s seminal 1994 album Grace, including co-writing the haunting track So Real. In the years following Buckley’s death, Michael’s career has blossomed and evolved, leading him to collaborations with Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, among others, and writing songs for the likes of Liam Gallagher, Kimbra, Kiiara, Bebe Rexha, Masked Wolf, Del Water Gap and Poppy Adjuda.

As Grace marks its 30th anniversary, we spoke to Michael about the serendipitous moments that defined his early career, his post-Buckley musical evolution, and the enduring influence of their friendship on his work today…

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How did you and Jeff Buckley meet and what led to the moment you joined his band?

“I was close friends with Rebecca Moore, who was Jeff’s girlfriend at the time. She was the reason he moved to New York – he moved from LA to live with her. They fell madly in love when he was doing a tribute for his father at St Anne’s Church, and she was a stagehand at that show. So shortly after that, he moved to New York and lived with her on Stanton Street in the Lower East Side. I would go by and hang out with Rebecca and Jeff and we instantly hit it off. We bonded over musicians like Son House and Robert Johnson – both of us were obsessed with Delta Blues at that point.

“We used to just walk around the village and play pool together. He didn’t really have many friends when he first moved here – it was just me and Rebecca. I would show him around New York and we played tons of pool together. That was our thing, playing pool and listening to the jukebox and stuff in the pool halls.”

Michael Tighe on Jeff Buckley: “I would show him around New York and we played tons of pool together.”

What were you doing musically up until that point?

“I was still in high school at that point, and I had only been playing guitar for about three years. I was just playing guitar, sitting on my bed. Jeff used to hang around my house a lot, and he played with my little brother, even when I was in high school… Then he went to Bearsville and recorded Grace and he gave me a CD of it before it came out… I was blown away. I knew Hallelujah was going to be great because he performed that live a lot, but I was really taken with his songwriting on Lover, You Should’ve Come Over, and I loved Lilac Wine.

“Listening to that album, I could feel that there was something legendary about it, but I wasn’t gunning for a spot in the band or anything, or even thinking about that – Jeff was just my friend. But one day he said, ‘We’re auditioning guitar players, so do you want to come up?’ And I was a little taken aback because I’d never even stood up and played guitar, I wasn’t technically proficient at all, but I guess I did something right [because] he asked me to be in the band shortly after. I think he liked my very innocent approach to guitar and music in general, and I just had all these weird riffs that he liked writing to.

“So I joined the band and maybe a couple of days after that Grace was wrapped – well, I don’t know if Jeff thought it was, but his team and the label definitely did – and we were going to record some B sides for the first single, which I believe was Grace. So we were rehearsing at this place called Montana Studios in Hell’s Kitchen and ended up doing a cover of Kanga-Roo and [writing and recording] So Real… What ended up happening is that [So Real] replaced a song called Forget Her, which actually the label really loved – it was quite commercial, it almost sounded like a 90s Aerosmith ballad. And Jeff, it’s not that he hated it or anything, he just thought So Real was a lot more deep.”

Tell us a little bit more about the subsequent years and how your career developed.

“After Jeff passed away, I was in a few different bands with some of Jeff’s friends and his girlfriend at the time, and the singer from a 90s band called The Grifters. We all formed a band called Those Bastard Souls. It was on V2 records, and we toured quite a bit for maybe about two years. It was kind of a way for us to grieve, making music together. When I was in Jeff’s band, I was just focused on guitar music, really not thinking about songs as a whole, not thinking about lyrics and vocal melodies very much. I always felt I would be good at lyrics because I wrote a lot of poetry when I was in high school, but when you’re playing guitar in Jeff’s band, you definitely don’t feel the need to write songs or sing songs! When he passed away, it made me start to come up with some melodies and lyrics myself.

“Then, after touring with some bands for a bit, I started to focus. I toured for two years with Mark Ronson during the Versions era and I sang a few songs on that – on Toxic, I played guitar. That was like an old-school revue with 25 players, horns, strings… It was so fun, it was like being in a circus or something, and that really helped heal me in a lot of ways, actually.

“Then after that, Andrew Wyatt – who I had been in bands with – was doing a lot of songwriting for a publishing company downtown, and he suggested that I do songwriting sessions. At first, I was a little bit reluctant because I had come from the ‘band school’ where, you know, music was very precious to me – I only wanted to do it with people I completely trusted. So the idea of these blind date sessions repelled me, but I instantly fell in love with it because you end up meeting so many talented people, and that’s interesting. You always learn things from people you know, and collaboration is one of the most exciting things about music.”

Was that a bit of a hurdle for you to get over? Did you force yourself into it, or was it more that Andrew pushed you into it?

“Yeah, he suggested it. Maybe I have a tiny bit of social anxiety or something, so just meeting someone new stressed me out a little bit. But I would meet them and we created a lot of cool songs in those sessions. Andrew and I continue to work together – we wrote for Liam Gallagher’s solo projects, and that was really cool. Some of that felt like some of the Buckley stuff, like a song with Andrew and Liam called Chinatown – I really like that one.”

Which other songs did you work on with Liam?

“Wall Of Glass – that was an interesting process. The seed of that started with me and Andrew Fox, we made a song called Wall Of Glass and it had some of the same lyrics and phrasing as the verse of what ended up being Liam’s. Maybe a month after we wrote it, Andrew Wyatt called me and said, ‘I’m about to go into the studio with Greg Kurstin and Liam Gallagher, do you have any ideas that might work for him?’ So I sent him that and they came up with a totally different take on it, but they kept a lot of the phrasing and the concept and the title and a fair amount of the lyrics.

“And Chinatown was really cool. It started with just the acoustic riff on my iPhone, I sent that to Andrew and he loved it. He has a place two blocks down on Mott Street, so I went over to his place and we started to write that together, and it came very quickly. When he was recording it, he was trying to get the guitar player to play my riff in the studio in London, but it just wasn’t feeling quite the same. So he ended up just using my iPhone recording! That’s what you hear on the track, which I think is really cool because it almost sounds like a sample. I think, texturally, that’s cool with production, to almost make it sound like you’re sampling yourself.”

Michael Tighe: “It’s a whole other level of collaboration and communication when you meet people who are obsessed with the same songs you’re obsessed with.”

Do you tend to write with a specific artist in mind, or just create songs and see what happens?

“Yeah, sometimes I would be writing with an artist and sometimes I would have my own personal, ‘secret target’ that I would write for. Like, I had some great sessions with this artist, Teddy Sinclair, who has a band called Cruel Youth, and we both shared a love of girl groups like The Ronettes, so we did a really cool song called Portrait Of A Female. So it really helps when your tastes align with the person. There’s this massive pool of inspiration and if you’re in the room with someone who’s doing music professionally, you know they’re going to know great music. But it’s a whole other level of collaboration and communication when you meet people who are obsessed with the same songs you’re obsessed with.”

Do you have any tips for how to get to that level of alignment? Or advice for how to handle collaborations that aren’t working?

“Sometimes my publisher will send me ideas and I try to say yes to as many sessions as possible because I always feel like you can learn. Occasionally you’ll hear someone’s music and you’re like, ‘I know I can’t really contribute to this. I feel like we probably don’t have any of the same influences.’ But that being said, sometimes opposites can yield something cool. I’ve had some really straight-up pop sessions in LA that were cringy for me, but the end product was really cool. One of the really cool things about publishing companies setting you up is the chance and the randomness of it. What comes out of me, naturally, isn’t necessarily so pop or commercial, but I feel that it’s sometimes cool with a writer who is very commercial and very pop. That yields something pretty interesting. And I think pop music is more interesting than it’s ever been, in some ways, because it’s so genreless.”

Absolutely. We speak to so many people who say you can’t predict what’s going to be popular and commercially successful, so you have to forget that and just do your own thing, even if it might feel completely uncool now – it might end up being cool in the future.

“Exactly, and as long as someone in the room is inspired, you know that it might be good – if no one’s inspired, it won’t be. I don’t think there is any formula to songwriting as much as everyone wants there to be! If the inspiration strikes you, when it does, you just have to hope that you can see it through.

Could you see yourself leaving New York and living in any other city?

“I love Memphis, like I could live there, yeah, and New Orleans I find very inspiring. Also Los Angeles – I’m a New Yorker so it’s exotic to me because it’s so different from New York. So much of the inspiration here in New York comes from the humanity, walking on the streets and looking into people’s faces and the stories that the faces tell. That’s one of the reasons I feel like I’ll always stay here or have a place here.”

Find out more about Michael at his publisher’s website: concord.com

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