Song To The Siren

"Song To The Siren" isn't just one of the high points of Tim Buckley's songbook. That troubled ballad, written by the American folksinger in 1967, recorded several times and only released three years later on "Starsailor", would become a kind of family and generational stargate, a subtle thread capable of binding together bonds and destinies. Starting with those of his son Jeff and his muse Elizabeth Fraser, the alien deity of dream-pop.

The long journey of "Song To The Siren"

Written by Tim Buckley in 1967 together with his lyricist Larry Beckett, "Song To The Siren" had a tortuous journey. The first version, performed live in 1968 during the final episode of the TV series "The Monkees", was bare and slight: just Tim with a twelve-string and little else. Some lines were different, including the famous "I am puzzled as the oyster", which would later become "I'm as puzzled as the newborn child" on "Starsailor". Dissatisfied with the early recordings, Tim reworked the lyrics somewhat and delivered a profoundly different version: the placid, inoffensive gait was transformed into electric pathos, glacial harmonies and a vocal performance more anguished and spectral than ever. What emerged was the album's masterpiece, one of the most underrated hidden gems in the American songbook. A psychedelic ballad that seems to reach us from a place outside of time. "A perfect combination of melody and lyric", Beckett would call it.

As is sadly well known, Tim Buckley died at just 28 years old, on the evening of June 29, 1975 in Santa Monica, California, from an overdose of heroin and alcohol. His son Jeff would always have a complicated relationship with his music. Hardly surprising, given that he never had any real relationship with him beyond one isolated meeting when he was eight years old. "He left my mother when I was six months old," Jeff Buckley revealed to NME, "so I never really knew him." But when Jeff began his own music career, the comparison became inevitable. Many claimed he was following in his father's footsteps, with Jeff trying to push back: "We were born with the same qualities, but when I sing, it's me. This is my time, and if people expect me to do for them the same things he did, they'll be disappointed."

Yet despite trying to shake off any affinity, Jeff felt that bond, one destined inevitably to surface. In 1991 he agreed to sing one of his father's songs at a memorial concert. Before performing "Once I Was", however, he revealed that it was his mother who had introduced him to Tim's music when he was older, after years spent unaware of who his father was or what he did.

In 1994 those emotions resurfaced on his debut album, the masterpiece "Grace". In "Dream Brother" Jeff warns a friend against abandoning his family, singing: “Don’t be like the one who made me so old/ Don’t be like the one who left behind his name/ ’Cause they’re waiting for you like I waited for mine/ And nobody ever came”. Lines that betray a pain never fully worked through.

But it would be another voice that would finally bring the worlds of Tim and Jeff together, uniting them ideally forever: the siren song of Elizabeth Fraser.

The dream-pop siren

The siren's song comes from the ethereal Britain of 4AD-brand dream-pop. The label founded in 1979 by Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent was defined by its leaning toward an atmospheric, dark new wave laden with strong symbolic meaning, whose figureheads were precisely the Cocteau Twins of Liz Fraser (voice) and Robin Guthrie (guitar), models for what would come to be defined as dream-pop, and Dead Can Dance, with Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, exegetes of the movement's properly esoteric side, venturing as far as world music. But Ivo Watts-Russell wanted to go even further: starting precisely from the idea of a Cocteau Twins cover of "Song To The Siren", the architect of 4AD moved on to a more ambitious project: an open supergroup involving the label's most important names, coordinated by the label boss himself acting as producer, with the aim of creating a genuine sonic manifesto, a celebration of their shared musical journey.

Thus were born This Mortal Coil and the album "It'll End In Tears", released in 1984. Featured on it, besides the two aforementioned bands, who were obviously the main protagonists, were members of groups such as Cindytalk, Colourbox, The Wolfgang Press, Xmal Deutschland, Modern English, as well as other musicians including bassist Simon Raymonde, who would later join the Cocteau Twins permanently for their next masterpiece, "Treasure". The musical contributions come in two forms: carefully chosen cover versions alternate with original tracks (almost all instrumental) to create a homogeneous, coherent atmosphere.

The choice of covers is the album's distinguishing feature, since it amounts to a meticulously curated series of tributes to cursed, tormented figures, heroes left in the shadows of Sixties and Seventies rock history, like Tim Buckley himself and Alex Chilton of Big Star, who would be rediscovered by the new wave generation precisely thanks to this record. On "Song To The Siren", over Guthrie's sparse guitar touches, Fraser manages to transform the romantic, quintessentially Sixties yearning for the infinite found in Tim Buckley's "Starsailor" into something different. The This Mortal Coil version in fact evokes a liminal dimension, a dialogue and interpenetration between the bodily, earthly aspect of the mother-woman's voice and its lunar ghostly counterpart, elusive and irreducibly consigned to the beyond, whose archetype is Diana-Hecate. This duality of the feminine sphere, which makes the woman a conduit toward the elsewhere for so many travelers in literature, through the spiritual uplift of love (need we recall Dante and Beatrice?), makes the obsessive recourse to female voices in a project like this one indispensable. Yet none of the voices within This Mortal Coil would manage to reach where Liz Fraser did with "Song To The Siren". A deity of the sea's waters, boundary of the afterlife, protector of thresholds and crossroads (the lost roads?), bearer of light in the night, lunar goddess, Hecate, as a representation of the eternal feminine archetype, underlies the sonic world of This Mortal Coil and its cultural coordinates, which venture as far as the sacral realm without slipping into the facile neo-paganism of so much post-punk, while retaining the elegant austerity of one who, lending an ear to the night, enters into deep relation with the world beyond.

Love at first sight

The This Mortal Coil cover struck the young Jeff Buckley like a bolt of lightning. A true epiphany. That version of "Song To The Siren" sounded like the most irresistible of exhortations to reconnect with his father's legacy through a new and wondrous lens. He decided to contact Fraser. And the meeting between the two was another case of love at first sight. Between 1994 and 1995, Elizabeth was recovering from a stormy separation from Robin Guthrie, her life partner for thirteen years and the father of her only daughter, Lucy Belle. Jeff was finally seeking his own way through the songs of "Grace". Both were fragile, lost. A sweeping love story blossomed between them.

Fraser would recount many years later: "He idolized me even before he knew me. And that scared me a little. Yet I was the same way with him. It's embarrassing, but it's the truth. I couldn't help falling in love with him. He was adorable." The two exchanged ideas, impressions, dreams, even their diaries. "I read his diaries, he read mine," Fraser would recall, "we handed them to each other, giving over very personal things, and I've never done that with anyone else." And even though an enigmatic distance remained ("Sometimes I thought, 'Oh no, I just can't get into Jeff's world,'" she would further reveal), the encounter would also prove an unexpected gift for the Scottish singer: "It was like being handed a box of colors," she recalled in a BBC retrospective, "as if all these shades had come back into my life."

The lost duet

The two found themselves caught up in a relationship with tumultuous undertones. Their meetings during their respective promotional tours that year were passionate and turbulent. Despite the rumors swirling around their romance, Buckley did everything he could to protect their privacy, always denying the relationship in public, while Fraser poured the joys and sorrows of her love for Jeff into the songs she wrote.

The encounter also produced a mysterious duet, never released except on a bootleg from 1996. A track in which their two voices blend perfectly, and the imperfections of the live recording — amid whispers and giggles — make it all the more special: "All Flowers In Time Bend Towards the Sun". Listening to that demo, which circulated under the radar for years, reveals a palpable intimacy, to the point that it almost feels like an intrusion to listen. As the two acknowledge their natural connection and, despite the pain of the past, let themselves fall into love, "bending towards the sun": “All flowers in time bend toward the sun/ I know you say there’s no one for you/ But here is one”.

Their relationship would end in 1995, worn down by the diverging paths of their lives: Jeff constantly on the road for "Grace", Liz touring with Cocteau Twins to promote the EP "Twinlight". Years later, Fraser would confess: "In hindsight I wish I'd been more of a friend to him. His career was everything to him at that moment, and I wish I'd been more understanding, that I'd known how to be content with a different kind of relationship. I lacked something in that moment, and it was my fault".

In 1997 Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River in Memphis, in circumstances tragically similar — yet entirely different — to those that had taken his father's life. Fraser was in the studio with Massive Attack recording "Teardrop". "It was so absurd," she would tell The Guardian, "I'd dug out the letters we'd written to each other. 'Teardrop' is in some way dedicated to him. Or at least that's how it sounds to me — I need to be able to forgive myself".

Elizabeth Fraser would remain with Cocteau Twins for another two years, marked by Guthrie's drug dependency and her own nervous exhaustion, until the band's final split — a painful choice that would cause an irreparable rift in her subsequent relationship with her former partner.

"Song To The Siren" thus remains a snapshot of a joyful, turbulent meeting between two kindred spirits: the fragile singer of "Grace" and the ethereal chanteuse from Grangemouth. It also sealed an ideal reunion between the worlds of Tim and Jeff Buckley, father and son, united by immense talent and an adverse fate.

(Contributions by Ariel Bertoldo and Lorenzo Salzano)

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07/03/2026