Grace by Jeff Buckley

Grace, the only studio album Jeff Buckley ever finished, came out on Columbia Records in August 1994, produced by Buckley himself with Andy Wallace. He'd moved from Los Angeles to New York City in 1991 and built a following at Sin-é, a little East Village cafe, before Columbia signed him in 1993.

He made the record mostly at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York, with Gary Lucas, Mick Grondahl, Michael Tighe and Matt Johnson among the players, and it sounds like nothing else from that year: part rock band, part torch singer, part choirboy, with a voice that can swoop from a whisper to a wail in a single breath. Alongside his own songs, the aching "Last Goodbye", the storm-tossed title track and the slow-burning "Lover, You Should've Come Over", he takes on the jazz standard "Lilac Wine", the hymn "Corpus Christi Carol" and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", which he turns into a hushed, trembling prayer.

It stalled at 149 on the Billboard 200, short of what the label hoped for, and the first reviews were mixed. Then Buckley died in 1997, and the record's reputation only grew, with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Bob Dylan and David Bowie among its admirers. It had sold two million copies worldwide by 2011 and went platinum in the US in 2016. His "Hallelujah" topped Billboard's Hot Digital Songs chart in 2008, reached number two in the UK, and joined the National Recording Registry in 2014.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.