Songfacts®:

• This song features the last studio performance of Jeff Buckley before his death less than a year later. Patti Smith told Mojo she was introduced to the singer-songwriter by Tom Verlaine, who contributed guitar towards Gone Again. She recalled: "I told him we were recording: Why don't you come by? He was listening to Fireflies and said, 'Could I try something or this?' He left and came back with a strange shaped box. He took out this Indian instrument, and played it (She makes a high delicate humming sound)."
  
  Smith added that after Buckley died, his mother passed the Indian instrument onto her. "When they found him in the water, he had a tiny key in his pocket," she said. "It was for this instrument. The only thing he played it on was my record. He played it so intently. And it's got a broken string. But it did work. It was the firefly on Fireflies."
• Following Tom Verlaine's work on Gone Again, Jeff Buckley invited him to produce his second album, My Sweetheart the Drunk. Buckley and his guitarist Michael Tighe had long idolized Television's landmark 1977 debut, Marquee Moon, and hoped to capture some of its intricate twin-guitar interplay.
  
  "We were so in awe of Marquee Moon," Tighe recalled to Uncut magazine. "We were obsessed with the two guitar parts and really wanted that sound for the album."
  
  Verlaine produced a series of sessions in New York during 1997, but the album was left unfinished after Buckley drowned that May in the Wolf River Harbor in Memphis. The recordings were later compiled and released posthumously in 1998 as Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, offering a glimpse of the ambitious second album Buckley never had the chance to complete.