Song To The Siren | The Existential List #5
In 1968, American musician Tim Buckley recorded a song called ‘Song to the Siren’. It was a departure from his usually intensely personal style and drew from the sirens in Greek Mythology who would lure sailors with their enchanting voices to shipwreck and drown. It did well in the charts, but Tim was always dissatisfied with the way the song turned out.
15 years later…
Liz Fraser, the lead singer of dream pop band Cocteau Twins, who had by this time been dubbed 'The Voice of God' for her abstract, ethereal soprano voice became enamored with the song. She covered it with the music collective This Mortal Coil.
This version turned out to be a critical and commercial success, and was eventually immortalized by director David Lynch in his surrealist classic 'Lost Highway'. Liz breathed new life into Tim Buckley’s old song and finally took it to the heights it deserved to go. Sadly, Tim never got a chance to hear his song ascend to its true potential. He had died of a heroin overdose years earlier.
But Tim’s son heard the song and became obsessed with Liz’s voice. Jeff Buckley also knew a thing or two about taking beautiful, troubled songs and revitalizing them. He had done the same of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’.
Liz and Jeff found muses in each other and fell in love. An intense romantic and creative relationship followed. The music they made together was never released for public consumption. Nor was it intended to be. Despite their deep connection, they couldn’t make it as a couple. They broke up and fell out of touch.
In 1997, Jeff accidentally drowned to death while swimming in a channel of the Mississippi River. After his death, a duet he recorded with Liz was leaked by an unknown source to the internet - their only released collaboration: ‘All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun’. Liz was recording vocals for Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ at the time. The news broke her heart.
As fate would have it, ‘The Song to the Siren’, Tim Buckley's old aloof song, would become an unintended, achingly personal epitaph to the son he barely knew. And for Liz, it became a hymn to her lover lost to the water.
Cocteau Twins broke up the next year and Liz retreated from the public eye almost entirely for the next 20 years save a handful of collaborations.
And so it was for a time…
Thankfully, things didn't stay that way. In the last few years, in addition to lending her celestial voice to several film scores, she has ventured back to the studio and stage. Every note she sings carries the spirit of wisdom, grace and beauty that wrestles with life’s suffering, and emerges out of dark nights of the soul. At 60, she is still going strong, still full of life, still leaving her heart onstage.
The Voice of God still sings. And for that, I am eternally grateful.
Love,
Yepi
P.S. Linked below are all the songs mentioned in this narrative, I wish you a beautiful listening session: