Vashti Bunyan - The Woman Who Lived Twice

It's only recently that I discovered my mother's grandfather was a Romani gypsy. I happened to meet real nomads several times during my travels, and there was one woman in particular who told me "You are one of us." And I was so happy about that, even though at the time I knew nothing about this great-grandfather of mine. He was the reason why my mother had such incredibly black eyes and hair. And I could never work out where she'd got them from.
(Vashti Bunyan)

Destiny in a name, or in this case, in a surname. In some ways, Vashti's artistic and existential arc seems like a secular retelling of the one undertaken by the Christian pilgrim, marching through obstacles, doubts, second thoughts and temptations towards the Celestial City, as recounted by her distant ancestor John Bunyan in "The Pilgrim's Progress". Although, to tell the truth, it resembles less a straight arc than an ellipse: a journey through the spatial-temporal cycles and the circular seasons of Anglo-American folk music that apparently leads back to its starting point, only to find itself the same, yet with everything else around it changed. A destiny written in the lines of the hand, and the strength to reach out that hand and reclaim a dream that had slipped away in the erratic inconstancy of youth. A small, big personal story that is also an example of how, between recurring patterns, cycles and anachronistic contaminations, past and present come together through indefinable degrees of separation in the "glocal" universe of third-millennium music. From Swinging London to the London of the Tube bombings. From the free spirit of the communes to that of mobile telecommunications. From a reel-to-reel tape holding the master of Just Another Diamond Day, to the cult following it gained on the internet and the CD reissue that preluded the spring thaw of so many past winters in Lookaftering. From Donovan and the Incredible String Band to Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. All of it in the reflection of Nick Drake and of a second chance to live again through music, and because of music, that befell them both, albeit in tragically different guises.
This is where our time machine can set off, travelling back along the musical paths of Vashti Bunyan — the woman who lived twice — priestess and acknowledged muse of today's female folk.

The Girl with the Guitar: Between Mary Quant and Joan Baez

Vashti Bunyan was born in 1945, in London. Her family lived right behind the Selfridges department store. Her childhood and adolescence passed quietly, filled with a love of animals, an early inclination for drawing, and a vaguer, more confused passion for music, absorbed from listening to her father's record collection. "The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly (…). My father also owned quite a few classical records. I've no idea who the composers were — if you asked me to name a piece by Handel I wouldn't have a clue what to say, but it's all in my head, I grew up listening to those melodies and they influenced me enormously. Along with the songs they taught you at school, Christmas carols (…). And American music, early rock, the rock played by white musicians, which was the only kind you could listen to back then." But then came the Sixties, which, as everyone knows, when it comes to pop music, always arrived a little earlier over there than elsewhere, while she was still a shy student at Oxford University's art school: the explosion of Merseybeat, of British rock, and then Dylan, of course, and the rebirth of folk music in the youthful imagination. "The first time I heard 'Blowin' In The Wind' I was at art school. The guy who played it wouldn't teach it to me because he didn't think it was right for a girl to sing Dylan! It seemed to me the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard: it contained everything I would have wanted to say."
That's how the young Vashti learned to play guitar and immersed herself in the new folk music, already with fairly clear ideas about how she didn't want hers to sound: "I also listened to Joan Baez, around the time I was taking guitar lessons. I didn't like her voice. That kind of mannered folk which, especially over here, was considered traditional. I never particularly liked her rather haughty way of singing — it seemed to me those songs deserved different treatment. I wanted to sing them more gently."
At eighteen, she made her first trip to the States, and in New York came into contact with the cosmopolitan, stimulating world of Greenwich Village. An exhilarating stay that, combined with the aesthetic and creative ferment then turning the Union Jack's already-declining colonial empire upside down, convinced her that her slender, nimble hands were made for writing songs and playing guitar rather than drawing portraits or still lifes. So she left art school and fell in with Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones. She recalls that meeting like this: "Legend has it that I was this little folk singer whom Oldham discovered and tried to turn into a pop singer: the truth is I wanted with all my heart to be a pop singer!" Returning to the subject, she explains: "I wanted to go against what was mainstream, meaning those singers who were fashionable at the time, who seemed to belong more to their mothers' generation. I wore jeans and t-shirts, I dressed like a boy. And I wanted to bring that attitude of mine into the pop mainstream."

On the other hand, it's not hard to guess what the nearly-same-age but already streetwise Oldham spotted in her, watching her play her first soft love songs in the dimly lit clubs of Soho: a dark-haired girl with big light eyes, sensual lips, a slim, supple figure, an innocence that hints at its opposite — in short, a beautiful girl, a bit Françoise Hardy, a bit Marianne Faithfull, ideal for Decca's stable of teen idols. It's 1965, the peak year of the British Invasion. She'd like to sing her own songs, but Oldham, remembering the success achieved the year before with the Rolling Stones/Faithfull pairing on "As Tears Go By", offers her another atypical (and melodic) track fresh out of the Jagger & Richards songbook: "Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind". The track is a tender, swinging dance number, arranged with some taste by the Oldham Orchestra (strings, horns, piano), suited to the dreamy, squeaky-clean image of the young beat singer. Her light, sighing timbre is already recognisable, but the single doesn't achieve the hoped-for success (an earlier version by the Stones themselves would only surface ten years later on "Metamorphosis"). Tucked away on the B-side is the first track composed entirely by Bunyan, "I Want To Be Alone", a callow, hazy, Orientalising folk-beat number that reveals the shadowier, more restless side of her personality (“I dont know why it is but I sometimes feel/ That I have to get away yet/  I know I love you/ But sometimes I want to be alone/ Somewhere on my own”, a theme that would recur several times, with far greater poetic awareness, in her later work).
She tries again the following year, still under Oldham's wing but this time for Columbia, with the self-penned pairing "Train Song"/"Love Song", two intimate, traditional folk sketches (voice, acoustic guitar and a touch of strings) in style, which foreshadow "Just Another Diamond Day" and, although no one noticed at the time, show off her most original qualities to best effect: the delicate soprano, the light, essential picking, the dreamlike mood steeped in an old-fashioned romanticism that today we'd call dream-folk, or something like it.
Then nothing more, apart from a feature on "The Coldest Night Of The Year", a saccharine orchestral pop duet with Twice As Much (a fairly well-known duo at the time: an obviously Albion-ised transcription of the vocal harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel), recorded in 1967 but only released in 1970, and the inclusion of the excellent "Winter Is Blue" (an inspired, melancholy little folk miniature, somewhat weighed down by the overuse of the moog, a second electric guitar and an orchestral backdrop) on the soundtrack of "Tonite Let's All Make Love In London" (1967), a kind of celebratory documentary about Swinging London. But the false promises of that seemingly golden world never came true; the failure wounded her, and she decided to change her life, to cut ties with commercial music.
Luckily, it's 1968, and a new world is already at the door.

Happy Together: A World Apart

When it comes to music, a lot can change in two years, especially if we're talking about 1967-69. Art-rock (and art-pop), in all its forms, is rewriting history. The concept album and the 33 rpm LP have cracked the dictatorship of the charts and the singles market, and have become expressive tools that most of the major bands, famous or otherwise, now view with favour and familiarity. "Alternative" music is possible even within the mainstream tradition. Sticking to England and just the most famous names: the Beatles wring out every last drop of creativity to make their finest works, the Stones first get drunk on psychedelia and then climb onto the barricades of May '68 in France, Pink Floyd take us touring unknown galaxies aboard their psychotropic spaceship, the Who prepare their definitive rock opera, and the Kinks celebrate the end of an era. On the folk side: the movement grows more articulate and progressive thanks to the records and experiments of Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band and Pentangle; Donovan, tired of being seen by everyone as the British Dylan, melts into acid, jazzy sounds; the Them frontman Van Morrison welds blues, Celtic folk and jazz into a sonic architecture of unprecedented power, while a shy, brilliant young man named Nick Drake emerges from his bedroom with misunderstood, inimitable records. There's a great open-mindedness and an incredible receptiveness on the part of the public. It's an extraordinary time to live and make new music together, music that expands, in countless directions, the alienating, treacherous circuits of mass-produced pop.

On the margins of all this, somewhat frustrated, Bunyan too seizes the moment: Robert, her boyfriend, is a friend of Donovan's, who has invited him to visit an artistic commune he's setting up up in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye to be precise; it seems like a great opportunity to leave her old, fashionable London background behind, and Vashti, intoxicated by new hopes and so much freedom, decides to go with him. And this is where the fairy tale starts blending with reality: they have no car, no money, so Donovan sends them £100, with which they buy, from some gypsies apparently, a horse and cart. In May 1968, Vashti, Robert, the mare Bess and the dog Blue set off from London, following the route marked out by the A6, at the time one of the biggest and most manageable roads, taking what they believe to be the fast way to reach the far north of Scotland. It isn't quite like that: by the time they finally arrive, after a cheerful, rambling wander through the English countryside, more than a year has passed, and it's now the summer of 1969. Donovan has already abandoned the project, and there's no one there waiting for them.

Tragicomic. And yet it was perhaps an unrepeatable experience, and one worth having all the same: "That journey changed us radically. It taught us so many things about nature and about people. Along the way we had amazing experiences, escaped various dangers and discovered wonderful things. (…) We were determined to distance ourselves from the modern world in all its forms and conditioning. We wanted to be completely independent and act as if it didn't exist. To create a world entirely our own. We wanted to create a world apart, and for a while we managed it. And that's where the songs come from." Yes, the songs. Because during the journey Vashti, encouraged by Robert ("he told me to forget my usual love songs and draw inspiration from what was around us"), picked up her classical guitar again and jotted down, in words and music, a kind of oral diary sketching and mythologising the bucolic landscape surrounding them. All the things they see, the emotions they feel, the people they meet, those they get to know and those whose existence they can only imagine or glimpse. Vashti has the time of her life — she has finally found her own dimension, the ideal context in which to express all the bold simplicity of her style: that pure, childlike gaze, those rarefied, circular harmonies accompanied with the bare minimum, which had already shown through, like a watermark, in her earlier work. Even so, given the bitter disappointments of the past, she has little confidence that what she's doing — mainly for herself and her boyfriend, to have an indelible memory of their adventure — could interest anyone, let alone become a kind of concept album. And yet…

Diamond Days: The Folk of Fairy Tales

And yet here comes the happy ending (which suits fairy tales just fine, but which, as we'll see, won't survive its harsh collision with reality). While they're still on their way back, halfway through the journey to be precise, in the Lake District area, Vashti and Robert meet Joe Boyd, an American producer very much in vogue at the time for his work with the finest names of the new British folk scene (Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band), who had already had the chance to appreciate Bunyan's gifts back in her brief, unlucky London career. It's the winter of 1969, and for Boyd, who has just finished producing "Five Leaves Left", the debut album by Nick Drake, and who would soon put his name to another immortal masterpiece, "Desertshore", just a peek into our wandering singer-songwriter's musical suitcase is enough to see that there's talent and material there for a quality record. To dress the modest, bare-bones repertoire Bunyan had written on the road, Boyd, much as he'd done with Drake, assembles a team of excellent traditional musicians, mostly drawn from the ranks of the era's two great English folk groups: Nicol Williamson, multi-instrumentalist and leader of the Incredible String Band, Dave Swarbrick on strings and mandolin, and Simon Nicol on banjo, from Fairport Convention. The arrangements are handled by Robert Kirby, fresh off the excellent but controversial work (the author himself was never entirely satisfied with it) on Drake's record.

The final result is, in its studied, fairy-tale-like candour, a stunning bucolic tableau, an intimate, personal landscape that both encapsulates and epitomises the purity and eschatological naivety of a generational utopia bound up with love, nature and freedom. Not a philological recovery of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon folklore, then, nor an ideological, counter-cultural manifesto, but the Arcadian, almost Franciscan prefiguring of an Eden in which mankind's good will, its desire for peace and reconciliation, has finally mended the eternal wound of original sin. An elsewhere whose visionary power springs not so much from the narcotic sap of psychedelia or the fervent fertiliser of social protest, but from an enchanted, dreamy contemplation of the beauty of nature and of those who live in harmony with it, from humility before the immensity of creation, and from liberation from the needs and desires induced by modern life. "Dreamers should we asleep in bed", Bunyan sings at one point, as if underlining the fragility of this miraculous balance, built on spirituality and imagination, which doesn't necessarily have an objective, absolute counterpart in the reality of her time — as if she sensed the premonition that the spell could break at any moment. For this reason too, the album, the object of a belated, enthusiastic rediscovery, sounds today, compared with many of its contemporaries, so timeless, so little dated.
Neither the winding curls of the horns nor the open-sky arcs of the violins manage to disturb the diaphanous, evanescent essence of these little idylls, which follow one another with a fatal variatio, capturing the listener's senses and leaving them enraptured, open-mouthed, waiting for what comes next — like a folk tale told a thousand times by the fire, whose outcome is nonetheless awaited with bated breath.
But it's Bunyan's singing style, radiant and crystalline, just faintly clouded by a vein of melancholy, that unmistakable way of hers of shaping the high notes under her breath, on the tip of her tongue, that stamps such an original mark on a genre as old as it was, even then, overexposed.
At times she even seems able to do without accompaniment altogether, as in the a cappella opening of "Window Over The Bay", later joined by a sparse, hushed guitar, or simply surrounds herself with a crackling, frugal picking that seems lo-fi ante litteram ("Glow Worms", "Hebridean Sun", "Trawler's Man Song"), a template that many neo-acoustic singer-songwriters would recall at the end of the Nineties. At other times she loosens the reins and imperceptibly picks up the pace, launching into jig-like, engaging nursery rhymes such as "Lily Pond", the dance of the seasons in "Come Wind, Come Rain", and the delightful "Job Along Bess", in which, with the graceful hand of a children's book author, she sketches a portrait of the animals that were her travelling companions. A style of writing that loses none of its touching simplicity even when enriched by Lilliputian orchestrations, as in "Rainbow River" or "Swallow Song", by fine jazzy touches, "Timothy Grub", or when, thanks to splendid counterpoints of organ, flute and Irish harp, it takes on the character of a Celtic-Disney fantasy, as in the gem "Rose Hip November".

A work swimming against the psychedelic and progressive tide of its time, Just Another Diamond Day was released by Philips in 1970 and, much like Drake's debut the year before, met with practically no commercial success (we're talking a few hundred copies sold) and was dismissed by critics as a collection of children's songs or a ridiculous celebration of hippie optimism. Reflecting on their respective failures and on the parallel with the singer-songwriter from Tanworth-in-Arden, Bunyan has recently said: "I think in some way I expected people to be indifferent to what I was doing; what I didn't expect was for them to be indifferent to him. The difference between the two of us is that he knew he was a genius. He knew how beautiful his songs were, whereas I, at the time, really had very little faith in mine. (…) and that broke his heart. It broke mine too, but I found support in my children and in the peace of my domestic life, while he, probably, wasn't so lucky."

Farewell to Fairy Tales: Three Decades Without Music

It's a clean break, with no second thoughts or half measures, that Vashti imposes on her life toward the end of 1970. Between her love of music and her love of nature, the latter wins out. Rather than keep knocking on the closed doors of a world she no longer feels ready for (or that isn't yet ready for her), at the tender age of 25 she decides to quit traveling, to quit the grand illusions of being an artist, to shut her girlhood dreams away in a heavy old cabinet and become a woman, setting up house and family with Robert in the very same wonderful places that had seen them so nomadic, happy and hopeful just a year earlier (a past that must now have seemed impossibly distant to her, as if it had happened to someone else). The couple settles in Berneray, another island in the Hebrides, where Vashti will lead a quiet, secluded country life, raising animals, tending the house and the three children who will be born in the meantime (without the two ever marrying), growing used to measuring time by the changing of the seasons rather than by musical ones. Her guitar, put away who knows where to gather dust, will no longer sing even for her three children, except perhaps for an occasional lullaby: "I didn't even have an original copy of the album, just an old tape well hidden in the depths of some drawer. My daughter told me a few days ago that they knew I didn't want them listening to it (...). So apparently they'd take it and, without telling me, carry it out to the car, where there was a cassette player, and listen to it on the sly. Now I feel guilty for having somehow forced them to live without music, certainly without mine."

Meanwhile the months, years and even decades passed relentlessly: gone were the Seventies of "Sunday, bloody Sunday" and the labour crisis, in came the Eighties of strikes and the two Ladies, Diana and the "Iron" one, and then the Nineties of the labour revival and the britpop one. All things that, to Vashti, in the muffled remoteness of her isolated nest, must have seemed as current as the old fairy tales she had once tried so hard to believe in: "When the kids started growing up and leaving home, I began to feel truly cut off from the rest of the world. Sure, there were always the things I loved, like the horses (...) and that sense of absolute freedom. But the isolation had become more and more oppressive for me, maybe also because I was born and raised in a big city. (...) It's not about always going to the theatre or being surrounded by people all the time. It's nice just to know that at any moment you could go out and meet people. When you live in the middle of nowhere, you risk going mad if you dwell on it." Until the gradual return to normal life, toward the end of the '90s, when the couple decides to separate and Vashti moves to Edinburgh to begin, at over fifty, a new life. But this time it will be the fairy tale that gets its revenge on reality. And, waking from her long slumber, Sleeping Beauty will have more than one surprise in store.

Second chances and dreams come true: folk in the internet age

By pure chance, or through some strange twist of fate. We'll never know. Some things end, others begin, just like that. Looking for a practical and cheap way to keep up with the news and gradually get back in step with the times, Vashti buys herself a computer with an internet connection. One day she tries typing her own name into a search engine. We've all done it at least once, I think, half for fun, half out of curiosity, though I doubt anyone has ever gotten results quite as surprising. She discovers that, over thirty years of semi-obscurity, what she considered her greatest failure had turned, in the cult following of fans, in the circles of great folk musicians born or raised in the late '70s, in the belated mea culpas of the critics who had once been so scornful, and among the thrilling discoveries of its most perceptive younger generation, into a kind of lost masterpiece. Surviving original copies are fetching absurd prices on eBay, and bootleg versions are generating heavy peer-to-peer trading traffic. Urban legends are even circulating claiming that who knows who is really hiding behind the name Vashti Bunyan, or that the artist died young under more or less fanciful and mysterious circumstances.

She must have smiled at that, and maybe felt something more: "It was an indescribable surprise to read all these reviews saying exactly the things I would have wanted to hear back in my day. I was literally stunned by it." An opportunity like that, as we said, doesn't come along by accident. Or maybe it does. But it would still be a crime to let it slip away. Once she recovered from her disbelief at the news, Vashti throws herself headlong into tracking down the original masters, reacquiring the rights to them, and within a couple of years (2000) the CD reissue of Just Another Diamond Day is put out by Spinney Records.
At first Vashti isn't very optimistic; she fears the past might repeat itself, that the harsh law of the market might once again get the better of her newfound confidence as a musician, so she braces herself psychologically: "We expected the CD to sell two or three hundred copies, maybe among people who were genuinely interested, or thanks to the fact that the Incredible String Band played on it." Instead it sells more than 50,000 copies. And an unbroken chorus of praise rises up on both sides of the Atlantic. Time, and the changed perception of this kind of music — no longer just a vehicle for social critique or a musicological study of tradition, but a universal expressive language, freed from its historical dynamics and original content, finding a formal echo in new artists' urgent need to say something about themselves in the present — have done justice to her small, great gem, and a new career can now begin right where the other one had broken off.

Turning back and lookafter the future

"At first I was genuinely terrified, because I hadn't sung in so long and I didn't know if I'd still be able to do it. I wasn't even sure I remembered how. But the moment I found myself in front of a microphone, I felt as if I'd never stopped doing it all those years. (...) It was as if my life were starting all over again, my musical life was about to become everything I'd always wanted it to be."
Yes, because offers are not lacking, and they're prestigious ones. It's the tribute paid to her by indie artists of different ages and backgrounds, working at the crossroads of alt-folk and cutting-edge electronics. While some songs from the pre-"Diamond Days" period (like "Winter Is Blue" and "17 Pink Sugar Elephants", a psychedelic reworking of "Train Song") resurface on compilations of period rarities, Vashti thaws the frost from her vocal cords, singing for the first time in more than thirty years on brand-new material. Her comeback dates to 2002 with "Crown Of The Lost" (featured on the album "Writers Without Home"), a piece written for her by Piano Magic: a minimalist, dream-pop-leaning setup, with drum-machine beats pulsing beneath an elegant texture of piano and acoustic picking, to which Vashti's voice — soft and unassuming, like a loyal friend who has watched over us in silence for years — lends an ancient, pagan charm, the formula of a woodland spell. Top-notch stuff, like "Dark Ages", again produced by the London collective (from the "Saint Marie" EP in 2004), a dark, synthetic madrigal about regrets and missed opportunities, and "Rejoicing In The Hands", a lovely lo-fi piece of crochet-work by Devendra Banhart (a longtime fan of Bunyan's, who apparently used to write her name on his arms before going on stage early in his career), to which she lends a delightful countermelody.

But the real proving ground for fully gauging Bunyan's innate, reborn talent (even though it was never truly dead) is the EP Prospect Hummer, which she shares with Animal Collective in 2005, a few months before the release of her second official album. Four tracks of abstract, polyphonic and (partly) deconstructed avant-folk: in three of these electroacoustic compositions, Bunyan's lead voice flows out, perfectly harmonized — one gets the distinct sense that, despite her unusual history and her musical distance from the artists accompanying her, she has practically never sung anything else — allowing her to keep cultivating her own personal "garden of Armida", transfigured, for the occasion, into mechanical, futuristic shapes. The EP opens with "It's You", an operatic melody sung almost entirely a cappella, accompanied by cascades of rippling arpeggios that fall into dissonance, and the occasional piano and choral counterpoint; the title track does even better, a sort of hand-cranked little march built on clicking guitar chords, with exotic choral interludes, and Bunyan's half-whispered trilling, more absorbed and dreamlike than ever, like a magical piper leading her army of metallic followers who knows where; then, after an instrumental piece, "Baleen Sample", with swirling eddies of guitar and whale calls standing in for vocals, the EP closes with "I Remember Learning How To Dive", seemingly more traditional, marked by the ceaseless ticking of an alarm clock/metronome and tangled up with odd vocal doublings.

Vashti feels so at home in these slightly off-kilter, metaphysical latitudes that she signs with Fat Cat, the label for which, at the end of that same year, she will release her masterpiece: Lookaftering.
This long-awaited, long-distance comeback is, as it could hardly fail to be, a long bridge suspended between past and present. And not only because, under the guidance of neo-classical composer Max Richter, beloved and reassuring figures from both the songwriting past (Robert Kirby) and present (Devendra Banhart on acoustic guitar, Joanna Newsom on harp, Adam Pierce on dulcimer and Adem on harmonium and autoharp) gather around her. But also because, through this deeply personal work, Vashti is able to take up and finally tie together the threads of her life as a woman and a musician, to fill in the thirty empty years since her predecessor's release, to reflect on motherhood, isolation, disillusionment, and finally on the parting from her children and her lifelong partner. On the other side of Bunyan's artistic and existential coin: the shadowy, domestic, twilit face opposite the luminous, idyllic one of "Diamond Days". The acquiescence of domestic confinement, the lethargy of habit belonging to a grown woman, gradually taking over from the restless wandering of the girl who once dreamed of being a gypsy. No regret for the turn taken at the crossroads of fate, no resentment toward those who disappointed her, herself included, but an infinite sense of nostalgia — not for anything in particular, but for the dream and the eager anticipation of that hypothetical something, which perhaps remains the best part of a life lived — a surrendered, melancholy sweetness that accepts with resignation the passing of time and the inevitability of solitude, yet keeps alive, in a corner of the hearth, the hope of one day waking beneath the open sky of that ideal, fulfilled image of herself that had seemed lost forever. The poetic portrait of a hidden, intangible feminine neurosis, part Sylvia Plath, part Emily Dickinson, softened by the calm and relief of hindsight.

Despite the modern, minimalist cut of the production, Lookaftering is an ageless, timeless record (outside of any time at all), both in its sounds and in its instrumentation, as far removed as possible from the songwriter's recent electronic excursions. Compared to her distant debut, Richter and Bunyan dilute the folk matrix into a more complex, enveloping and carefully crafted neo-classical orchestration, but without ever risking smothering the intimate, confessional "kernel" of her signature melodies; the guitar lines and picking work are skilfully woven into the delicate harmonic inlay of piano, harp and period string instruments (dulcimer, harmonium, mellotron, Rhodes) and elevated by the string and wind arrangements (themselves unconventional: oboe, English and French horn, the occasional hint of trumpet). A clear, orderly, elegant jewel box holding songs as tender and weathered as ancient, priceless parchments.
Whether she surrenders to the evidence of a farewell ("Lately"), or gives herself over to memories that haunt her like ghosts from another life ("Here Before"), whether she chooses a bare setting of piano and voice (with a playful wind countermelody) as in "Hidden", or voice and guitar (doubled in the finale) as in "Wayward", whether she draws on Renaissance tradition ("If I Were", with Joanna Newsom's harp standing out beautifully) or Victorian tradition ("Feet Of Clay"), Bunyan remains essentially true to herself, letting herself be guided by her unerring whisper, a siren's call, the unsinkable compass of her winding musical journey. A soliloquy that reaches its most moving peak in tracks like "Turning Back", dedicated to Nick Drake and perhaps, in part, to herself as well (“Indifference is the coldest hand/ It is the wave that clears the sand/ of castles built by baby hands/ before the gulls come in to land”), and "Same But Different", with the strings swelling in the finale, and that gorgeous oboe opening that leaves you literally breathless. "Wayward Hum" closes the album fittingly, a reprise of the title track with a hushed murmur standing in for words, which is perhaps the clearest epitome of her singular style.

Some things stay with you: a circle closing

The rest is the small-scale chronicle of recent years. Sparing but steady tours across all the major English-speaking countries, almost always backed by respected alt-folk musicians, like Espers or Vetiver, appearances at prestigious festivals, tributes from major fellow artists. The rest, as had already happened with Drake, is down to advertising: in 2006 "Diamond Days" becomes a TV earworm thanks to T-Mobile, and in 2008 "Train Song" is the chosen leitmotif for a Reebok ad campaign. Talk about irony. Eternal returns absorbed into the sprawling panta rei of the culture industry, which she comments on with great irony, fatalism and wisdom: "For me it was a kind of vindication. Proof that what I'd always thought about my songs was true: that they could sell well, that they would catch people's attention. And I don't feel guilty about it. With the money I earned, I was able to pay for my children's college education."

Commercial potential aside, the cycle of this second youth of hers comes to an ideal close in 2007, with the release of the double compilation Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind. A double album whose A-side effectively sums up her yé-yé beginnings, rounded out with rarities and alternate takes, while the B-side brings to light a bare, live-to-tape recording of a voice-and-guitar session (which today would pass for a fine lo-fi record) dating from 1964. All you need to do is listen to the click of tongue against palate, the warm rustle of breath, the soft film of saliva moistening the pauses in the melodic line, as they flicker across the few rough grooves of the age-old recording, giving shape to small love sonnets for voice and guitar like "How Do I Know", "Leave Me", "Find My Heart Again", "Go Before The Dawn" and "I Know", to get a sense of just how much hidden influence she holds over the current scene.

Having moved on from the valued collaborators of her second album, Vashti Bunyan calls on Robert Kirby to handle the orchestral arrangements for her new recording project, taking over from Max Richter. Recorded and arranged with piano, keyboards and guitar, Heartleap (2014) doesn't suffer from the technical formalism of the recording studio, presenting itself as an album free of panic or tension, a more meditative, personal project, a pure distillation of crystalline harmonies and gentle singing.
Bunyan reaps the rewards of that never-dark, always deeply communicative intimacy that sets her apart: her music caresses rather than indulging in the exuberance and arrogance of modern times; it is as fragile as a lullaby and as rich in mysticism as a prayer, a place where the roar of silence speaks louder than words.
As ever, the artist craves no special attention, nor does she play the music industry's "beautiful loser" card to win over her audience: she is simply happy to be able to speak through her music without having to wear any other mask. On Heartleap she weathers life's storms ("Across The Water"), surprised to find she can meet old friends again ("I opened my eyes and you were there", she sings on the enchanting "Here"), and faces the sweet, aching memory of things lost ("Mother"), lining up some of the album's most memorable moments.
Vashti Bunyan's third album is like a newborn you're afraid to leave unattended, an album whose beauty becomes almost impossible to put into words, though just listening to "Jellyfish" alone is enough to understand that we're in the presence of a new masterpiece with no fixed place in time: even the synth sounds never needed replacing with the more natural sound of a piano to keep their bucolic, poetic charm intact. Creativity has won out over fear, honesty has demolished ambition, giving us a jewel to be carefully guarded, lest the glare of the spotlight dim its beauty.

Contributions by Gianfranco Marmoro ("Heartleap")

Ride the wave of great music

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