Jeff Buckley

Jeff Buckley, born in 1966 and raised as Scott Moorhead, spent a decade as a session guitarist in Los Angeles before anyone knew his name, then built a following in the early '90s playing venues in Manhattan's East Village. Columbia signed him, the Live at Sin-é EP arrived in 1993, and in 1994 came Grace, the only studio album he would finish.

It is a record that refuses to stay in one room. Folk rock, soul, blues, gospel and churning alternative rock all pass through it, and above everything is that voice, a thing of impossible range that can whisper, keen and then soar into the rafters without ever sounding like a stunt. He played guitar, dulcimer, sitar, harmonica and saxophone besides. "Last Goodbye" and "Grace" have a swooning, storm-tossed drama, "Lover, You Should've Come Over" aches, and his reading of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is hushed, intense and utterly naked. He toured Grace hard, across the US, Europe, Japan and Australia.

In 1996 he started work in New York City on a second album, with the working title My Sweetheart the Drunk and Tom Verlaine producing, and in February 1997 he picked it up again after moving to Memphis. On May 29, 1997, while he was waiting for his band to arrive from New York, he went swimming in the Wolf River, a tributary of the Mississippi, and drowned. He was 30. What was left came out later: 4-track demos and studio recordings for My Sweetheart the Drunk, plus reissues of Grace and the Sin-é EP.

His reputation has only grown since. Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Matt Bellamy of Muse have both named him as an influence, his "Hallelujah" joined the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2014, and in 2026 he was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On the countdowns, "Last Goodbye" and "Hallelujah" still stop listeners in their tracks.

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