Song to the Siren

Buckley and Larry Beckett wrote it in 1967, and Buckley was unhappy with early attempts to record it, so it stayed unreleased until Starsailor in 1970. In 1968 he played it solo on twelve-string guitar, in E major, on the last episode of The Monkees, with a different line in the final verse, I am puzzled as the oyster. He changed it to I'm as puzzled as the newborn child after Judy Henske, the wife of the producer Jerry Yester, laughed at the original. Beckett told the Guardian that Buckley glanced at the lyric over breakfast, reached for his guitar and started singing, and that apart from minor changes it is what is heard now. Both men regarded it as their greatest collaboration. The Starsailor recording is lusher, in B-flat major, with heavy Leslie speaker and reverb on the guitar and high-pitched background vocals.

Pat Boone released the first recording, on his 1969 album Departure. The version recorded by This Mortal Coil, with Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins, was their debut single in September 1983. It reached 3 on the British independent chart and 66 on the main singles chart, and sent listeners back to Buckley's work. The Guardian counted 24 covers by 2011, among them Robert Plant, George Michael, Sinead O'Connor, Bryan Ferry, David Gray, John Grant and Sheila Chandra. David Lynch used the This Mortal Coil version in Lost Highway in 1997.