I remember when the news first broke that Buckley had gone missing — the first thought that came into my head was that it had something to do with Elizabeth Fraser.
There was no real reason to believe so; although Buckley and Elizabeth had enjoyed a romantic relationship for eighteen months — and he cited her as his muse for his debut album, Grace — the two had split up two years before his death.
Barring some kind of psychic flash, I suppose the connection I was making was purely symbolic. I’d been doing what is now called synchromystic work for quite some time by then, and the fact that Elizabeth had made Buckley’s father’s signature tune “Song to the Siren” famous in 1983 was probably what I was processing.
I knew she’d dedicated the final Cocteau Twins album to Buckley, which was apparently slated to be released in early 1995, while the two were still an item.
That it wasn’t had allowed Elizabeth to include a few breakup songs — like “Half Gifts,” “Rilkean Heart” and “Calfskin Smack” — along with the previously-written (and lushly-erotic) love letters to him like “Treasure Hiding” and “Seekers Who Are Lovers.”
I didn’t think much about it until a few years later, when YouTube came online. I was able to watch a lot of music videos of the Cocteau Twins I’d never seen before.
The live performances in particular triggered something in my subconscious mind, because I was able to see just how extremely unusual this woman was, and how visibly enthralled — in the classical sense — she could become when the spirit moved her. It was anything but normal.
But a video from a 1982 performance called all of my previous assumptions into question: the Elizabeth there wasn’t the shrinking violet one might be conditioned to expect, but a rather aggressive and sexually-provocative Scottish street urchin, bending over and grinding her hips in a leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings.
Something just wasn’t adding up.
But little did I realize how little would add up when it came to the conventional wisdom in this case.
As you probably know, Chris Cornell’s death close to the twentieth anniversary of Buckley’s death blew the lid off the story for me, and led to what became an endless series of shocks that continues to this very day.
What was once an itch in the brain led to a series of revelations that went far beyond the death of a talented yet troubled young troubadour.
I took the work private as those revelations piled up, and that work became the bulk of my serious sync work for several years. Oddly enough, the Siren Saga receded into the background as a whole host of new facts came to the fore.
But I ended up circling back to the Buckley issue once it became clear to me that he’d encoded a number of references to Cocteau Twins songs — and Elizabeth’s backstory — into the new songs he’d been ready to play for his band the night he died.
And given what my group and I had been able to piece together from decades of hints and clues — especially concerning Elizabeth’s self-confessed history of suffering serious sexual abuse as a child — I began to wonder if Buckley might’ve gotten the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people when he kicked off “Eternal Life” on an MTV live performance by shouting, “I’d like to dedicate this to a pedophile,” while he and Elizabeth were still an item...
