When Jeff Buckley was growing up in Southern California, he was not called Jeff Buckley.

At that time, he went by “Scottie” Moorhead, pulled from his middle name and his stepfather’s surname. It was not until 1975, when his biological father Tim Buckley, the singer-songwriter best known for “Song to the Siren,” passed away from a drug overdose, that the young Buckley began using his own first name and his dad’s last. The elder Buckley was 28 years old at the time of his death, and his son was eight — they met, in person, just one time.

A little less than two decades later, Buckley released his one and only studio album, Grace, after several years of working the local New York City circuit. It went only to No. 149 on the U.S. Billboard 200, far below his record label’s expectations. Many critics, however, praised it.

After that, Buckley turned most of his attention to playing live with his band, with a bit of time devoted to writing songs for a second album. As time went on, Buckley, who played Glastonbury in 1995 for tens of thousands of people, wanted to scale things back. He felt most comfortable, evidently, in the kind of small clubs and coffeehouses he had grown up playing.

“There was a time in my life not too long ago when I could show up in a cafe and simply do what I do,” he wrote in a message to his fans via the internet at Christmastime in 1996, “make music, learn from performing my music, explore what it means to me, i.e. — have fun while I irritate and/or entertain an audience who doesn’t know me or what I am about. In this situation I have that precious and irreplaceable luxury of failure, of risk, of surrender. I worked very hard to get this kind of thing together, this work forum. I loved it then and missed it when it disappeared. All I am doing is reclaiming it. … I’m in the middle of some wild sh** right now…please be patient, I’m coming soon to a cardboard display case near you and I’m coming out of my hole and we’ll make bonfires out of ticket stubs come the summer.”

But Buckley never made it to the summer. On May 29, 1997, he went swimming in a portion of the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee, where he and his band were working on new material. Buckley, then just two years old than his father was when he died, vanished into that water and his body was recovered six days later. An autopsy ruled he’d died in a drowning accident — no drugs or alcohol were present.

It’s only been in the decades since Buckley’s tragic passing that Grace has earned more and more critical and commercial attention, eventually becoming what many would describe as a cult classic. Buckley became a first-time nominee for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2026, though he was initially eligible several years before that.

Below, we’ve written out five reasons why he deserves that spot.

1. Sometimes, One Album Is Just as Influential as 100

According to the Rock Hall itself, inductees must have “demonstrated musical excellence, impact and influence.” As mentioned, Buckley only ever released one studio album, 1994’s Grace, so one might argue that a singular album wouldn’t be enough to truly meet that standard.

We beg to differ. The most important thing to understand about Grace is that although it did not make commercial waves at the time of its release, it grew substantially in stature as the years went on. When Grace was first released, it went to No. 149 on the Billboard 200, which, naturally, wasn’t what Buckley’s team was hoping for — not that Buckley himself seemed to mind all that much.

“The nature of music is mystical. It’s not to sell Pepsi,” he told Hot Press that year. “It’s to express being alive and being a human being. It really does bind all peoples together.”

There is often a tragic tendency for an artist’s work to only really gain momentum and appreciation after their death, and that was certainly the case with Grace. After Buckley’s passing in 1997, more and more praise cropped up from critics and fellow musicians. One of the album’s tracks specifically helped bolster this new success, Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah“, but we’ll say more about that song later. By 2011,Grace had sold two million copies, and by 2016 it was certified platinum in the U.S. It also climbed up the charts to No. 31 in the U.K. and No. 82 in America and is consistently cited on lists of the best albums of all time.

The Rock Hall requests significant impact, but there is no time limit on that.

2. He Inspired Male Singers to Explore Their Upper Range

Buckley’s voice was one that few can replicate. With an extremely agile range,his ethereal tone was intimate, passionate and elegant all at once. There was something otherworldly and hypnotic about it — a bit like hearing a ghost sing.