"I wrote this song while lying, listening to the telephone in my apartment... but she never called”: The story of the heart-breaking ballad that’s become – finally – Jeff Buckley’s first Billboard chart hit

Almost three decades after his death, Jeff Buckley has finally scored a hit on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, when Lover, You Should Have Come Over entered at Number 97.

The reason is, inevitably, because the song has gone viral on social media, TikTok specifically. Though viewings on the platform don’t actually count towards the US chart, the track has obviously stirred up enough interest that it’s spilled over onto other platforms.

Positioned as track two on the second side (if we’re talking vinyl) Lover, You Should Have Come Over is in many ways the pivotal song on Grace, the only album Buckley released in his lifetime. It’s a six-minute ballad with some stylish, unexpected chord changes, shiwcasing Buckley’s impassioned vocal embellished by harmonium, organ and some brilliant percussion from drummer Matt Johnson. Its coda sees Buckley show off his full vocal range, twisting, diving and pirouetting like a dancer in full flight.

Jeff Buckley - Lover, You Should've Come Over (Official Audio) - YouTube

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The lyric was inspired by his relationship with his then-girlfriend Rebecca Moore and by all accounts was based on a real life event. At one gig in Italy before he died, Buckley introduced the song by saying: "I wrote this song while lying, listening to the telephone in my apartment... but she never called."

It is, of course, easy to scour the lyrics for meaning but lines like ‘I feel too young to hold on/ And much too old to break free and run’ can’t help but feel poignant knowing now that their writer had just three years left to live.

Though Grace is now acknowledged as a classic album, it – and Buckley as an artist – was very much a cult concern at the time. In his lifetime, he had only one minor UK hit – Last Goodbye stalled at Number 54 in 1994 and though contemporary reviews of Grace were positive, sales were slow – it reached a pitiful Number 149 on Billboard.

Jeff Buckley All That I Ask (acappella) - YouTube

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Buckley went out on the road to promote it and indeed one of the UK shows on the tour, at the Highbury Garage in September 1994, was to prove pivotal for one British band. At the time, Radiohead were struggling recording The Bends and had hit an impasse with one track in particular: Fake Plastic Trees. Taking a break, Thom Yorke, Colin Greenwood and producer John Leckie popped into the Garage and were suitably inspired.

“He just had a Telecaster and a pint of Guinness. And it was just amazing, really inspirational,” Colin Greenwood later told Uncut. “Then we went back to the studio and tried an acoustic version of Fake Plastic Trees. Thom sat down and played it in three takes, then just burst into tears afterwards. And that’s what we used for the record.”

It wasn't just Radiohead who were listening. Luminaries as diverse as David Bowie, Bob Dylan and Robert Plant all hymned the brilliance of Grace. Muse frontman and guitarist Matt Bellamy said that hearing the album convinced him to use falsetto and would later buy the Telecaster Buckley had used on Grace. Apres Radiohead and Muse le deluge, of early Noughties sensitive male singer-songwriters using falsetto.

We can hardly pin the blame for those on Buckley. But one senses, with the current revival of Lover, You Should Have Come Over, and the success of last year’s Amy Berg documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, that thirty years after he departed this earth, the Jeff Buckley heritage industry is only just getting started.