Rebecca Moore reflects on Jeff Buckley’s final days in rare interview
It’s taken nearly thirty years for Rebecca Moore to speak publicly about Jeff Buckley — the singer whose voice could stop you mid-breath, and whose life was cut short by accidental drowning in 1997.
“Sorrow causes a lot of people, including myself, to kind of run and hide,” Moore tells People, of the years after her former partner died. Moore and Buckley met in New York in 1991, backstage at a tribute concert for his father, folk singer Tim Buckley. Their three-year relationship inspired songs on his 1994 debut Grace, an album that’s shaped the sound of everyone from Adele to Lana Del Rey.
Moore says they stayed close even after their romance ended. Their last phone call came just days before his death — a conversation that was “the most beautiful… but also the most disturbing” in their seven years of knowing each other. Buckley, then in Memphis working on his second album, told her he was “discovering a path to take care of himself and more healing,” had stopped eating animals, and thought he “might be bipolar.”
“He loved animals,” Moore recalls. “He would throw himself over the counter at a bodega to hug a cute cat… or roll on the cement dirty sidewalk with a dog.” But as the call went on, she sensed “some sort of mental health struggle… he was grief-stricken for the second half of the conversation.”
On May 29, 1997, before a planned recording session, Buckley waded fully clothed into a tributary of the Mississippi, singing along to Led Zeppelin. A passing riverboat’s wake pulled him under. He was sober, with only one beer in his system. His death was ruled accidental.
“I believe his death was an accident… but I do think in the days leading up to it, he was struggling,” Moore says. “The takeaway for me about Jeff is I hope we learn how precious we each are and take better, kinder care of each other.”
