“Grace” by Jeff Buckley

"Grace" was the title song and first single from Jeff Buckley's 1994 debut, and it started out as somebody else's tune: "Rise Up to Be", an instrumental by his collaborator Gary Lucas. Buckley built on Lucas's riff, wrote words sparked by a rainy goodbye to his girlfriend at an airport, and turned it into a song about losing your fear of death once you've found a love that's real. It had been a fixture of his gigs from around 1991, turned up on Songs to No One 1991–1992, and Buckley brought Lucas in to play guitar on the album version.

Andy Wallace produced, engineered and mixed it, and he gives the band room to swell: Mick Grondahl's bass and Matt Johnson's drums surging underneath while Buckley's voice climbs toward the rafters. Rolling Stone ranked it 394 on its 500 greatest songs list in 2021.

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