January 26, 2024

I once told a young woman, Eve, who was taking over my radio show, “My favorite pieces of music are those that I didn’t understand, those with which I had to wrestle, play again, examine, sit with, play yet again, before I could wrap my head around them enough to pull them into an emotional space”. I’ve thought about that over the years, and what you just read is part of a development of the idea. The first part is that I realised there had to be something there to begin with, a spark, a motive to keep listening, an interest or curiosity, perhaps a discernment of what Robert Pirsig calls “Quality”. For example, Joni Mitchell’s album Blue. I didn’t get it, and I much preferred Court and Spark. But I kept listening. Now, along with thousands of others, it’s in my top-10 list.

Starsailor is one of those albums, and Tim Buckley is one of those musicians. I only began to listen to it years and years after I fell in love with a remake of “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil, and only then because it was so highly recommended by every critic I respected. I knew I loved it, but I had never heard anything like it, so I had to keep at it, paying attention to it – or not – but sitting with it before it bloomed into another top-1o.

This song is particularly fascinating because the lyrics of the video version and the album version are wildly different, but it treats of the same topic and the same emotion. If you stretched it, and yeah, you can, it seems as if the video version is the second half of an intricate poem about a separation of lovers, with classical allusions and symbolism you might find in an ancient Greek poem. So listen to the song before you watch the video. His live performance there is riveting.