Grace

Grace is Jeff Buckley's only studio album released during his lifetime, recorded in the fall of 1993 at Bearsville Studio in Woodstock, New York, and released in August 1994 on Columbia Records.^[1] Buckley co-produced the record with Andy Wallace, and classical composer and jazz vibraphonist Karl Berger contributed string arrangements.^[2].

The album blends Buckley's own compositions with a handful of covers, most famously his hushed, guitar-and-voice reading of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and a version of the standard "Lilac Wine." Critics have described the record as one of the most sensuous albums to emerge in the years after grunge, praising Buckley's four-octave range and his willingness to move between delicate falsetto and full-throated wail within a single song.^[2].

Buckley found the recording process at odds with his instincts as a performer, who preferred to change arrangements nightly on stage. He later compared studio work to painting, describing his discomfort with permanently fixing decisions that, in performance, he would rather leave fluid.^[2] Songs like "So Real" and "Last Goodbye" grew out of his relationship with Rebecca Moore, whom he had met in New York in 1991, giving the album a throughline of romantic ambivalence even as its scope stretched into grief, spiritual longing, and mortality.^[3].