Last Goodbye

Thirty-two years ago today, Jeff Buckley released Grace in the United States. August 23, 1994. Columbia Records. The label expected more from it. The album peaked at 149 on the Billboard 200. It was not what Columbia had in mind. “Last Goodbye” was released as a single the following year and reached number 19 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart. A belated arrival. A song about the end of something that sounds like the end of everything. The record the label considered a disappointment became, in time, one of the most studied albums in the history of rock music.

Jeff Buckley grew up in Southern California. His father was Tim Buckley. A folk and experimental singer-songwriter who died of an accidental heroin overdose in 1975. Jeff was eight years old. He met his father once. He moved to New York around 1990 and began performing solo sets at the Café Sin-é in Manhattan. Grace was recorded at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock and at studios in New Jersey and New York City. Andy Wallace produced it. Wallace had engineered Nevermind for Nirvana three years earlier. The album covered Leonard Cohen. It covered a medieval hymn. It moved between folk and jazz and electric rock without signaling the transitions. Buckley built something that did not sound like anything else being made in 1994.

Jeff Buckley died on May 29, 1997. He was thirty years old. He drowned in the Wolf River in Memphis, Tennessee. He had been in Memphis recording his second album. The unfinished sessions were released posthumously as Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk. Grace took years to find its full audience. Rolling Stone eventually ranked it among the greatest albums ever made. The album that Columbia considered a commercial disappointment is now taught in music schools. Some records take time to become what they always were.