(Credits: Far Out / Magnolia Pictures / HBO Documentary Films)
Sun 14 December 2025 4:00, UK
Jeff Buckley’s Grace cannot be understated in its beauty.
Before manifesting Grace, Buckley had been a modern troubadour for years, travelling from his native California to downtown New York City. Initially finding his way to Brooklyn to perform at a tribute concert for his late father, Tim Buckley (whom he had only met once), he would find his unofficial home at Sin-é, a cafe in the East Village.
He went from performing for casual coffee-drinkers to being faced with massive crowds of soon-to-be fans. People came in waves to watch the young singer, spilling out from the small cafe onto the sidewalks. Afflicted with an unconscious mystique from day one, the expectations of Buckley held weight, and he knew that his official debut would need to reflect his spirit as wholly as possible.
Grace first came from early writings dating back to his initial move to New York roughly two years prior, three covers – a jazz standard, ‘Lilac Wine’, a hymn, ‘Corpus Christi Carol’, and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, based on John Cale’s rendition – and jam sessions set to lyrics. The latter fed Buckley’s preference for improvisation over the standard recording style of prepared material.
He’d assembled a band of relative strangers, which, while intimidating to be so vulnerable with musicians he barely knew, worked well when he was looking to experiment and had his energy matched. “It’s not like a live show where you play it, and it just disappears into the air like smoke,” he once said of the recording process. “It’s like painting, sound painting. It’s in a crystallised form, so it’s very nerve-wracking: which brain cell do I put down here forever and ever?”
(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
The original last song from the sessions was ‘Forget Her’, a heartbreaking ballad that Buckley’s label, Columbia, instantly favoured for its commercial value. But Buckley and his band were not convinced of their rushed recording, knowing that there was a missing piece. One day, towards the completion of Grace, guitarist Michael Tighe played a descending chord progression that Buckley latched on to, developing it into a song called ‘So Real’.
“He got really excited and was like, ‘Oh, my record is saved because I have this song ‘So Real’ now,” Tighe recalled. “He felt that it tipped the balance of that record to the favourable side of the spectrum, aesthetically.”
‘So Real’ begins with a muted riff, building into a swaying chord progression that flows with Buckley’s yearning story of an all-consuming love, so powerful that it sparks fear. “I love ‘So Real’ because it’s the actual quartet that you see in that picture right there that you have on the wall, on the album,” Buckley said of the band in an interview. “And that one I produced live, all one moment, the vocal is the first take, all one take. It was three o’clock in the morning.”
‘So Real’ has that sort of dream-like quality to it, as though Buckley is grasping at a memory, just before he wakes up. Glimpses of sleeping on his lover’s couch, the dress she wears and a joint nighttime walk paint a delicate picture, before the drawn-out, repeated chorus of “Oh, that was so real” precedes a loss. Towards the end, the near-whisper of, “I love you / But I’m afraid to love you,” reverberates like a confession in the dark.
Buckley’s belief in ‘So Real’ prompted him to replace ‘Forget Her’, which was later included on a tenth anniversary Legacy Edition of Grace. This decision was cautionary to Columbia, but Buckley’s decision was final, and he recorded the overdubs and ‘So Real’s music video between Manhattan and New Jersey, before being officially released as a single in June 1995.
‘So Real’ represents one of the many risks that Buckley boldly took when shaping his debut, and it proved to be one of his most defining endeavours. Thankfully, in an instance where artistry prevailed, ‘So Real’ got the moment it deserved.
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