Mary Guibert, Jeff Buckley's mother, was the primary recipient of his estate — which included the rights to his music — following his untimely death. When she found out that representatives at Sony were moving ahead with his album "My Sweetheart the Drunk" (ultimately changing the title to "Sketches of My Sweetheart the Drunk") without consultation from Guibert or those band members that survived him, fury struck. "I went home and then I started to get calls from the band members saying, 'Why are you going ahead with the album? Jeff never wanted those things! He wanted the [Tom] Verlaine tapes burned and blah, blah, blah.' And I'm going, 'Whoa, wait, nobody's doing anything!'" She recalled (per The Guardian).
Guibert closed in on Sony with her lawyer Conrad Rippy in an effort to combat hasty production of the Tom Verlaine recordings (the raw tracks that were set to become Buckley's second studio album). At that point, Steve Berkowitz and Andy Wallace of Sony had development of "Sketches" well underway with significant renditions to the tracks that were, according those closest to Buckley, totally antithesis to what he would have wanted.
