Having Tim Buckley, the cult songwriter, as his father meant that Jeff Buckley encountered heightened expectations and preconceptions unlike those confronting most other singer/songwriters. Consequently, his own music shared only the slenderest connection to his father's output. Buckley's vocal delivery carried a sweeping, expansive quality that aligned with the mock-operatic scale of his sound, which blended Van Morrison with Led Zeppelin. The bold debut album Grace positioned him among the leading alternative artists of the 1990s, an ascent further defined by his untimely death in 1997, while his interpretation of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" effectively reshaped the composition for contemporary listeners.
Buckley first took up an instrument during high school. He later relocated to Los Angeles for formal music studies, where he appeared alongside multiple jazz and funk ensembles and also performed with Shinehead, a prominent figure in the dancehall reggae scene. Several years afterward he settled in New York and assembled Gods & Monsters alongside experimental guitarist Gary Lucas. Although the group quickly gained underground favor, it disbanded after a brief existence. Buckley then launched a solo career performing in clubs and coffee houses, gradually cultivating a substantial audience. He soon secured a contract with Columbia Records and issued the Live at Sin-e EP in November 1993. While the release drew favorable notices, critical enthusiasm reached far greater heights with his first full-length album, Grace, released in 1994. Unlike the earlier EP, this record employed a complete band, producing sonic layers that surprised many longtime followers from New York. The album nevertheless appeared on numerous year-end "Best of 1994" lists and yielded the delayed alternative success "Last Goodbye" during the spring of 1995.
An extended period of inactivity ensued while Buckley developed songs intended for his next project, then known under the working title My Sweetheart the Drunk. Tom Verlaine was initially chosen to produce, yet he eventually withdrew from the sessions. Work finally commenced in Memphis in the late spring of 1997. On the evening of May 29, Buckley and a companion visited Mud Island Harbor, where he impulsively entered the Mississippi River fully clothed. Minutes later he vanished beneath the surface; rescue teams responded immediately but without success, and his body was recovered on June 4 near the city's historic Beale Street district. Buckley was thirty years old at the time. A set of previously unheard recordings, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, surfaced in 1998, followed by two live collections—Mystery White Boy and Live a l'Olympia—issued across 2000 and 2001. Additional posthumous releases appeared over the subsequent fifteen years, including the 2007 compilation So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley and the 2009 live album Grace Around the World, though the most extensive archival project arrived in 2016 with You and I, which gathered early cover versions the artist had tracked.
