Jeff Buckley

A tragic hero of alternative music in the ’90s, guitarist, songwriter, and virtuosic singer Jeff Buckley was known for his eclectic musical vocabulary and dynamic performance style, which pointed toward both the future and the past. Born in 1966 in Orange County as the son of psych-folk maverick Tim Buckley, Jeff began his career as a guitarist-for-hire in Los Angeles. After moving to Manhattan in 1990, he performed extensively, intercutting originals with covers and arrangements of traditional songs in his sets. Both his debut EP (1993’s Live at Sin-é) and LP (1994’s Grace) feature ardent, mercurial originals and inventive takes on classics by Nina Simone, Benjamin Britten, and many others. In the decades since its release, his rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has become the song’s best-known version. Buckley passed away at 30 in an accidental drowning while working on his sophomore album. In 1998, Columbia released unfinished songs from the record as Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, the first of a series of posthumous releases.