Grace

Jeff Buckley's voice is the kind of thing that stops people mid-sentence. A four-octave range that could move from a whisper to a wail inside a single phrase, with a vibrato so controlled it sounded like something between grief and ecstasy. Grace is the only studio album he completed before drowning in the Wolf River in Memphis in 1997 at age thirty, and the fact that it exists at all, fully formed and already one of the most emotionally complete records in rock history, makes it one of the more haunting what-ifs in music.

The album was recorded at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York with producer Andy Wallace, whose prior credits ran to Slayer and Bad Religion, an unlikely pairing that somehow produced something luminous. Buckley had been building his reputation as a word-of-mouth phenomenon at a small New York coffee house called Sin-é, playing to small crowds who would leave telling everyone they knew. Columbia signed him on the strength of that reputation alone. The album opens with "Mojo Pin," two minutes of trembling guitar tension before exploding into something enormous, and from there it refuses to hold still in any one place. There is blues, jazz, folk, hard rock, sacred music from multiple traditions, all of it running through Buckley's voice and coming out the other side as something that simply sounds like Grace.

His cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" became the definitive version, later inducted into the Library of Congress. But the original songs surrounding it, "Lover, You Should've Come Over," "Last Goodbye," "So Real," are just as essential, each one a small masterpiece of longing. This is an album that sounds like being in love and losing it at the same time.