‘Song To The Siren’: How his father’s song connected Jeff Buckley to Elizabeth Fraser
Jeff Buckley built his own musical legacy. Born in 1966 in California, he described himself as “rootless trailer trash”, clawing his way out of his origins and into world-renowned thanks to his incredible voice and poetic lyrics. Yet still, the legacy of his father loomed large. Despite only meeting once, Tim Buckley’s music haunted Jeff, both as a reminder of the parent who never raised him and as a fateful string that seemed to tie him to a lover, Elizabeth Fraser.
Buckley’s connection to his father’s music was complex. That’s to be expected, given that Jeff had no relationship with him beyond a one-off meeting when he was eight. “He left my mother when I was six months old,” he told NME, “So I never really knew him at all.” But when he launched his own musical career, lines between the two were inevitably drawn, with people wanting to claim that Jeff was following in his father’s footsteps or was his prodigy in some way. He defied that as he said, “We were born with the same parts, but when I sing, it’s me. This is my own time, and if people expect me to work the same things for them as he did, they’re going to be disappointed.”
But despite trying to shrug off any links between them, there was an inevitable tie between the two. There was always bound to be. It comes up in complex ways. In 1991, Jeff clearly still felt connected enough to his late and estranged father to agree to sing one of his songs at a memorial concert. He revealed before he sang ‘Once I Was’ that it was his mother who had shown him Tim’s music as an older child, having previously been unaware of who his father was or what he did.
In 1994, the complex feelings came up again on his debut album, Grace. On ‘Dream Brother’ he warns a friend against leaving his family behind, 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…” hinting at the pain it caused him.
The connection or lack thereof between a child and estranged or dead parents is far too complex to be explained here or really understood by anyone other than the individual. But it was clear that Buckley’s relationship to his father’s music was an ongoing struggle between yearning for a link to his past and his Father and anger that the musician had left him.
Then, another voice cut through. In 1983, This Mortal Coil released a cover of ‘Song To The Siren’, a track off Tim Buckley’s Starsailor. For the track, they called in Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins to add her signature wistful, dream-like vocals. That’s what drew Jeff Buckley in, acting quite literally like a siren song, daring him to connect with his father’s legacy but through this new and beautiful lens.
His love for the song and for this cover version translated into a love for Fraser. “I mean, he idolised me before he met me. It’s kind of creepy,” the singer said, recalling their eventual meeting and the start of their relationship. But their admiration was mutual as the singer was just as captivated by Buckley’s own artistry and spirit. She said, “I was like that with him. This is embarrassing, but it’s the truth. I just couldn’t help falling in love with him. He was adorable.”
They only dated for a year, between 1994 and 1995, but it was an intense romance. “I read his diaries, he read mine, you know we’d just swap, we’d literally just hand over this very personal stuff, and I’ve never done that with anybody else. I don’t know if he has,” Fraser recalled fondly. “So in some ways, it was very, there was a great deal of intimacy, but then there’d be times when I’d just think ‘oh no, I’m just not penetrating this Jeff Buckley boy at all.’”
It was also a collaborative love as they recorded an unreleased duet called ‘All Flowers In Time Bend Towards The Sun’, which has become cultishly beloved through a leaked demo track. It seemed that when the two got together, both coming from incredibly difficult childhoods and united through that fact due to Jeff’s complex relationship with Tim Buckley’s music, it was a healing thing.
Beautifully phrased by Fraser during a retrospective on Jeff Buckley’s life, she said that meeting him was like “being given a set of paints, do you know what I mean? It was just like I had all this colour in my life again”. And for Jeff, it seemed that his love for Fraser and her voice gave him a way to love his father’s work, too.
