Plenty of songs have been called “Siren Song”, and I should confess at the outset that asking for the meaning of one is a bit like asking for the meaning of a song simply called Love. There’s one by Erasure, one by Jerry Cantrell, and one by a Ukrainian pop star who won her country’s Eurovision selection and then never went. The one I’ll spend most of this article on is the version by Bat For Lashes, released in 2009, because it has the most to say. The meaning of “Siren Song” here is a good deal darker and more interesting than the title suggests: it’s a song in which a woman argues with her own worst self, in the middle of a love affair, while the lover looks on.
The Myth Behind the Title
First, the phrase. The Sirens come from Greek mythology: creatures whose singing lured sailors towards rocks and doom, most famously in Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus has himself tied to the mast so he can hear them without wrecking his ship. By the middle of the sixteenth century English speakers were already using a siren song to mean anything irresistible that leads you astray, and the phrase has been working overtime ever since. It can describe a bad investment, a tempting biscuit or an ex who rings at midnight.
The metaphor works so well because it holds two ideas at once: beauty and danger. The song is lovely, which is exactly the problem. Anyone naming a record “Siren Song” is promising something seductive and slightly frightening, and the songs that use the title tend to live up to the billing. Bat For Lashes took the idea and turned it inward, which is where things get interesting.
Natasha Khan and the Invention of Pearl
Bat For Lashes is the stage name of the English singer-songwriter Natasha Khan, and “Siren Song” is the sixth track on her second album, Two Suns, released in April 2009. She has said she wrote it one afternoon at the piano in her bedroom in Brighton. For that record she invented a character called Pearl, a destructive, self-absorbed blonde femme fatale, the opposite of Khan’s own dark-haired, introverted self. She has told interviewers the idea partly grew out of a spell in New York, where she hoped to meet a crowd of artists and characters and found things didn’t quite turn out that way, so she dreamed one up herself.
It began, she has said, as an experiment in dressing up. She admired the photographer Cindy Sherman, the photographer Diane Arbus and the films of David Lynch, and she wanted to see how it felt to look like somebody else. Pearl, in other words, was a game that got out of hand. By the time she reaches “Siren Song” she’s no longer just a costume. She’s a voice, and she wants a say.
A Duel Inside One Song
The best way to understand the song is as a fight with two sides. The verses are slow and languid, with Khan contemplating what it means to be the devoted, nurturing partner, a gentle and almost old-fashioned ideal. Then the chorus arrives, and Pearl comes barging in on a crash of piano chords and pounding drums, wrecking the calm.
In effect, the song dramatises an internal battle between the wish for a perfect, innocent love and the urge to destroy it through emotional sabotage. The lover is caught between the two, hearing sweetness one moment and menace the next. And Pearl isn’t subtle about her intentions. She even introduces herself by name and describes herself in terms that make her sound dangerous. Which is the siren’s oldest trick: telling you precisely what she is, and trusting that you’ll lean in anyway.
The Sound of a Storm
The music does exactly what the lyric asks of it. It starts as a piano-led torch song, soft and unhurried, and ends as something much bigger and angrier, with a percussion-heavy finish that drives like an approaching storm. According to the promotional material, the drums on the track were recorded in two takes that were stitched together, creating a patchwork of beats and sudden breakdowns, which suits a song about a personality in pieces.
Reviewers have singled it out as the heart of the album, a high point where the idea of duality that runs through Two Suns is most thoroughly explored. There’s a lot of it about on that record. Two lovers, two planets, two sides of a personality: the album was billed as a set of modern fables about dualities, and this is the one in which both sides get to sing.
Who Is the Siren?
Here’s the question that keeps me coming back to it. Who, exactly, is the siren? In the myth, it’s the creature on the rocks and the sailor is the victim. In Khan’s song, the roles blur. The narrator is both the one who sings and the one who’s afraid of what her song will do. She wants to be a loving, constant presence, and she’s also aware of a voice inside her that will pull the whole thing down, so she warns the lover and, in the same breath, lures him closer.
There’s a rare honesty in that. Most songs about dangerous women are written by outsiders, from the point of view of the sailor. This one lets the siren speak. And what she says is less a warning than an admission: she knows, she’s sorry, and she can’t quite stop. That’s a good deal more human, and a good deal more heartbreaking, than the usual femme fatale.
Where You Might Have Heard It
If the song sounds familiar, there’s a fair chance it’s because of television. It was used in the very first episode of The Vampire Diaries, which introduced it to a huge audience of people who had never heard of Bat For Lashes. An instrumental version also turned up in an episode of Top Gear, accompanying a tribute to Ayrton Senna, which is not a sentence I expected to be typing when I started this article. The song seems to suit moods of dark beauty and romantic doom, whether the doom involves vampires or a Formula One legend.
The Other Siren Songs
For completeness, a few other records share the title. Erasure released a song called “Siren Song” in 1991, and the American guitarist Jerry Cantrell put one out in 2021. A more recent one is by the Ukrainian singer Maruv. Released in February 2019, it won the Ukrainian national final for the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest, but a disagreement with the broadcaster meant she withdrew before the contest itself. It was a big hit across Eastern Europe regardless, topping the airplay chart across the former Soviet states.
None of them are quite the same song, of course. If you came here for one of those, I hope the myth section was some use. But I’d argue the Bat For Lashes version is the one that, to my ear, best earns its title: it makes you wonder who’s singing, and to whom.
Conclusion
So, what does “Siren Song” mean? In its oldest sense it’s the sound of beautiful trouble: a pull towards something you know you shouldn’t follow. In Bat For Lashes’ hands it becomes something more intimate, a woman’s confession that the most dangerous voice she knows is her own. It asks whether love can survive the person who’s offering it, and it declines to give a tidy answer. That’s why I keep returning to it. The best siren songs don’t explain themselves. They just play, and leave you at the rail of the ship, deciding whether to listen. Play it once with the lights down. Then ask yourself which voice you were really hearing.