I have the album Morning Glory: The Tim Buckley Anthology andTrack 9 is Song to the Siren (a studio recording) and then Track 16 is the Monkees show recording, which is the same as the YouTube video. (BTW, I can't get the YouTube videos to play without stop-start staccato). Unfortunately this CD doesn't have printed lyrics.

As far as I can tell, and also doing a search on the (unreliable) 'Net the words are "Were you hare when I was fox". Some lyrics sites have the words "full sail" but TB is definitely not singing that. It is clearly a one syllable word.

dwditty, you said the lyrics are clear on the video, but what do you hear?

I hadn't realised what the words were. I thought he was singing "were you here when I was (something)" so it never made sense to me.

I first heard this song in a shared house in the mid 1970's, on a vinyl record of This Mortal Coil, and never realised it was a Tim Buckley song. (Well, I'm a bit confused because my friend who owned the record said it was Meredith Monk singing but that the group was This Mortal Coil.   But it doesn't look like she is singing it (I bought the CD) but two people from the Cocteau Twins are performing it and that is the connection, I think.) Maybe I think it was This Mortal Coil because I heard that on the radio in the '80's and assumed it was the same record because the arrangement was very similar. I really don't know.

I was fascinated with the song. I had already been exposed to Tim Buckley in the first shared house I lived in in 1974 when a woman staying there for a while was torturing me by playing this howling, caterwauling singer over and over again, until finally, after I stopped asking everyone to put the singer out of his misery, I "got" it and loved it. That was the Sefronia album.

Helen