One fall morning in 1967, poet Larry Beckett went to visit his friend since high school, Tim Buckley, with a piece he had written about an unrequited love, inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare, and a woman he never revealed. Buckley picked up the piece and started playing along to Beckett’s poem, “Song to the Siren.”
Later released on Buckley’s 1970 album Starsailor, he later called it “Song to a Siren,” a “love song to a hallucination … a fatalistic ode to unattainable love.”
Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
‘Til your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your isle
And you sang:
Sail to me
Sail to me
Let me enfold you
Here I am
Here I am
Waiting to hold you
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you hare when I was fox?
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks
Buckley later premiered the song on the final episode of the Monkees television show, broadcast on March 25, 1968.
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This Mortal Coil
In 1983, 4AD Records co-founder Ivo Watts-Russell formed This Mortal Coil, a musical collective alluding to a line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet—What dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil—and a line from the Spirit song,” Dream Within a Dream”: Stepping off this mortal coil will be my pleasure.
Along with Watts-Russell and label co-founder John Fryer, This Mortal Coil also featured members of the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Pixies, Throwing Muses, and more. Though short-lived, the group released three albums spanning its debut, It’ll End in Tears (1984), Filigree & Shadow (1986), and Blood in 1991, the year it dissolved.
It’ll End in Tears featured contributions from Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerard and Brendan Perry, and other arrangements, including Alex Chilton’s “Kangaroo” by Gordon Sharp (Cindytalk), along with contributions by Gerard, Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde, Colin Newman of Wire, and Rema-Rema, among others.
The second track on the album was an enthralling cover of Buckley’s “Song to the Siren.” In the new version, This Mortal Coil recast two of the original lyrics:
Buckley: Long afloat on shipless oceans
This Mortal Coil: On the floating shipless oceans
Buckley: Were you hare when I was fox?
This Mortal Coil: Were you here when I was forsook?
Long after Fraser’s version of “Song to the Siren” was released, it was covered more than two dozen times by Robert Plant, George Michael, Sinéad O’Connor, and Bryan Ferry, among others.
“All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun”
Years after the This Mortal Coil release of “Song to the Siren,” Fraser and Jeff Buckley became infatuated by one another’s voices—and each other—by the early ’90s, around the release of Buckley’s first and only album, Grace, in 1994. Buckley even wrote to Fraser after hearing her rendition of his father’s “Song to a Siren.”
“He idolized me before he met me,” revealed Fraser in the 2002 BBC documentary Jeff Buckley: Everybody Here Wants You. “It’s kind of creepy, and I was like that with him, which is embarrassing, but it’s the truth. I just couldn’t help falling in love with him. He was adorable.”
When they met, Fraser was in a relationship with her Cocteau Twins bandmate, Robin Guthrie, and both shared a daughter. “I was having a hard time in the band I was in,” shared Fraser. “So to meet Jeffrey was like being given a set of paints. I had all this color in my life again.”
There was a quiet enormity and intimacy to their union, with Fraser revealing that the two would often share one another’s journals. Both recorded a duet before theoir breakup and Buckley’s death “All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun,” which gives a candid glimpse into the couple’s chemistry, with faint sounds of Fraser’s laughter heard before she breaks into the first verses, My eyes are baptism … followed by Buckley on the next, Oh, all flowers in time bend towards the sun… and so on.
“Why do people have to hear everything?” said Fraser in a rare interview in 2009, still disappointed that a song she recorded with Buckley was leaked shortly after he died in 1997. “It’s unfinished,” added Fraser. “I don’t want it to be heard.”
Then, Fraser added, “Maybe I won’t always think that.”
Photo: Patrick Ford/Redferns
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