“Song To The Siren” by Tim Buckley

"Song to the Siren" finally made it onto record in 1970, on Tim Buckley's Starsailor, three years after he and Larry Beckett wrote it; Buckley hadn't been happy with his early attempts to cut it. In 1968 he had sung it alone on the last episode of The Monkees, just his voice and a twelve-string acoustic, a plain folk reading with a different set of words.

The version he produced for Starsailor goes the other way, lusher and in a new key, the electric guitar swimming in reverb and Leslie-speaker swirl, with high, ghostly backing voices hovering over it. Stan Agol engineered. After Buckley's death in 1975, a string of covers by other artists made it one of his best-known songs, and the Monkees performance later surfaced on the anthology Morning Glory.

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