The Story
Jeff Buckley arrived in New York with a borrowed guitar and a voice nobody could file away — a soaring, grief-lit instrument he sharpened through a legendary 1993 residency at Sin-é, a tiny East Village café where he played covers and fragments for whoever showed up. Columbia signed him out of that room.
Grace (1994) was the only studio album he completed: ten songs of cathedral rock, torch balladry and his reading of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', drawn from John Cale's arrangement. It sold modestly at first and then never stopped growing — Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums list moved it from No. 303 in 2003 to No. 147 in its 2020 revision.
He drowned in Memphis's Wolf River Harbor on May 29, 1997, at 30, while working toward a second album; the sessions surfaced posthumously as Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (1998). In 2008, after a televised performance revived the song, his 'Hallelujah' reached No. 1 on Billboard's Digital Songs chart — his first American No. 1, eleven years after his death. The recording was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2014.
Son of the folk singer Tim Buckley, whom he barely knew, Jeff Buckley left one of music's most complete small catalogs: every note of it is still in circulation, still finding first-time listeners, still doing what that voice did.
