Grace

Released August 23, 1994 via Columbia, Grace was cut at Bearsville in Woodstock in the fall of 1993, produced by Buckley with Andy Wallace, the engineer who had mixed Nirvana's Nevermind. The band is lean, Mick Grondahl on bass and Matt Johnson on drums, with Gary Lucas's guitar ghosting through "Mojo Pin" and the title track and Karl Berger's strings drawn in around the edges. Inside that frame Buckley goes everywhere. His voice floats choirboy-high over the quiet passages and tears into a howl when the songs crest, and his finger-picked guitar carries as much melody as the singing.

The record swings from the torch song "Lilac Wine" to Benjamin Britten's "Corpus Christi Carol" to the hard-rock lurch of "Eternal Life." "Hallelujah," built on John Cale's reading of the Cohen song, sung alone and edited together from more than twenty takes, is the track that outlived everyone's expectations, his included. "Last Goodbye" and "Lover, You Should've Come Over" are where the songwriter shows, all switchback chord changes and wounded patience. Buckley drowned in Memphis's Wolf River Harbor in May 1997, at thirty, with his second album unfinished, and Grace became the whole story. It sold 500,000 copies in its first year, short of what Columbia hoped for, and went Platinum in the US only in 2016.

This copy is on 12-inch black vinyl, graded Near Mint for disc and sleeve, unsealed.