Starsailor

There’s nothing quite like Tim Buckley’s 1970 masterpiece Starsailor. You could call it folk music, I guess, and songs like the brilliant “Song to the Siren” would certainly fit that description, although there’s something that permeates through all of Buckley’s music that makes it impossible to pin down. In this album especially, he uses elements of jazz, rock, and blues to create his most formally astonishing collection of songs. Starsailor opens with “Come Here Woman,” one of the album’s best (and most sensual) tracks, wherein Buckley sings to a nameless woman, “Give me broken lies/When you don’t feel pain/Let me smell your thighs, mama/Let me drink down a little rain.” After the opener, things calm down a bit; “Moulin Rouge” is one of album’s lightest tracks, but Buckley’s impassioned vocals give it the emotional weight it needs. Next up is my personal favorite, the aforementioned “Song to the Siren,” which contains some of Buckley’s best lyrics:

“Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you hare when I was fox?
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks,
For you sing, ‘Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow:
O my heart, O my heart shies from the sorrow.’”

Experimental, gorgeous, and dazzling, Starsailor remains every bit as intoxicating almost forty years after its initial release. There’s nothing else like it.

~ by jaime on August 2, 2008.