Tim Buckley

Tim Buckley, born in Washington, D.C. in 1947, started out as a folk-rock troubadour with a guitar and a voice that seemed to have no ceiling, and then refused to stay put. Across his records for Elektra he wandered off the coffeehouse map into psychedelia, jazz, the avant-garde and finally funk, chasing wherever that voice wanted to go and letting the market fend for itself.

Happy Sad, in 1969, was as close as he ever came to a commercial peak, a record of long, drifting songs like "Buzzin' Fly" that take their time and let the melodies breathe. Starsailor, a year later, swung the other way into wild, free-form experiment, and it has since picked up a devoted cult. Tucked inside it was "Song to the Siren", the song he is best remembered for, a ghostly ballad that sounds as if it is drifting up from somewhere under the waves.

He died in 1975 of a heroin and morphine overdose, just 28 years old. He left a son, Jeff Buckley, who grew into a highly regarded singer in his own right and also died young.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.