International Pastoral

Heavily Lauded Brit Folk Singer Vashti Bunyan Tours The United States For The First Time

originally published January 31, 2007

The well of rewarding yet critically and commercially neglected post-Woodstock, pre-punk singer-songwriters runs deep. Bill Fay’s apocalyptic baroque pop songs, Emitt Rhodes’ companionable, Paul McCartney-indebted melodies, and Roy Harper's oceanic space-folk ballads spring most immediately to mind, and those are just tips of the iceberg. Now, thanks to a number of factors - file-sharing, “record collection rock” acts like Stereolab, pop culture’s retro fixation - many of these artists are receiving more attention than in their heydays. And CD reissues of forgotten gems often sell better than blog-approved indie-rock records; most of the “new” releases on display at Wuxtry were first released more than three decades ago.

Foundational Sounds

Vashti Bunyan possesses one of the most compelling stories and most affecting bodies of work to emerge from this wide-scale recovery project. As a teenager in mid-1960s London, Bunyan recorded a couple of pop singles for Decca and Columbia. These records flopped, however, and the songs she subsequently cut never even saw the light of day. Disenchanted with the music industry, Bunyan left the city in 1968 to pursue a rural life, setting out in a horse-drawn wagon with partner Robert Lewis and a dog named Blue. “I [tried] to escape modernity,” she recalls, “as a way of teaching myself the basic things of life - something I felt was missing from my upbringing.” Her travels also helped her develop her songwriting voice, and when she returned briefly to London in the winter of 1969, she brought an album’s worth of material to the doorstep of storied folk-rock producer Joe Boyd (he helmed classic albums by Nick Drake, Richard and Linda Thompson, and, years later, R.E.M.), who had unsuccessfully petitioned her to enter the studio with him before her wanderings.

Boyd quickly recruited a pack of musicians with whom he worked regularly - Fairport Convention members Dave Swarbrick and Simon Nicol, Incredible String Band-er Robin Williamson, and arranger Robert Kirby - to help Bunyan bring her songs to life. Just Another Diamond Day, the LP that resulted, sold only about 300 copies when it was released the next year, though, so Bunyan, then a mother, once again washed her hands of recording and resumed her rural travels.

Vinyl nerds would refuse, however, to let Diamond Day languish in obscurity, and by the late 1990s, it had become a prime collector’s item. The Spinney label quietly pressed a CD reissue in 2000, and a clutch of influential artists - Four Tet’s Kieran Hebdan, Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde and Devendra Banhart - began to tout the album as a personal favorite. Banhart became a particularly vocal Bunyan proponent, gushing with hyperbolic praise in interviews and cultivating his own aesthetic with an eye towards her work. When DiCristina Stair sponsored a second re-pressing of the record in 2004, critics and folk-pop fans crowned it a five-star classic, and with good reason: its songs stood the test of time well. Young Bunyan’s back-to-nature optimism was more convincing than that of many of her peers, largely because she wasn’t afraid to let catastrophes befall her characters. In “Timothy Grub,” for instance, a car called Happiness runs out of gas during a countryside drive. And the musical accompaniment - delicate banjo, fiddle and mandolin, tasteful strings - is nearly as immersive as that which Kirby would arrange a couple of years later for Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter.

Generational Growth

But Bunyan’s story doesn’t end with her enshrinement among Britain’s folk-pop elite. Greatly encouraged by the warm reception her music received throughout the early part of this decade, she began to record and perform once again. She chalks her reemergence up to a more liberal artistic climate: “Popular music conventions have changed, and in doing so have made somewhere for my songs, mainly because ‘convention’ is now a much wider and ragged-around-the-edges place,” she says. In early 2005, Fat Cat released Prospect Hummer, an EP-length collaboration between Bunyan and acclaimed American experimental rock act Animal Collective. Later that year, Lookaftering, Bunyan's second solo LP in more than 30 years, hit the streets. A lush, fragile affair orchestrated by Max Richter, a modern composer whose accessible pieces have found a broad nonacademic audience, Lookaftering couches Bunyan’s radiant voice within an inviting world of shimmering piano, vibrant mellotron and Hammond organ, and glistening acoustic guitar.

If this description leaves you expecting an overly polite swath of indie-pop wallpaper, then take a look at her lyrics, which bear the marks of unresolved inner struggles. In “Brother,” for instance, Bunyan eulogizes her late brother John. Other songs discuss difficulties she experienced in reconciling her free-wheeling spirit with the constraints of motherhood. “When I was young, I refused to dream of motherhood and domesticity,” she explains, “so when I had children and my life was reigned in to accommodate their need for security, there was always conflict. This is what I addressed in some of the songs. Motherhood and femininity and the expectations placed upon women have been battlegrounds in my head all my life - I was never an ‘earth mother’ however much I adored and spent all my time with my kids. I think my music is about the captivity that comes with love and a need for freedom coupled with responsibility and care for my young.”

In “Wayward,” these issues come to the fore: “Didn’t want to be the one / The one who’s left behind / While the other one goes to life / And comes back home to find / Me sitting pretty happily,” sings the mother of three. In “Lately,” she comments on motherly anxiety’s spiritual pull (“Never was much given to prayer / But lately I’m pleading with the air / To keep you safe from harm my dears”) and encourages her offspring to adopt her come-what-may liberalism (“The only things that you should keep in rows / Are your perfect teeth - and the rest you know / its own sweet way will always go”).

Bunyan’s reservations about traditional gender roles do not, however, mean that she regrets putting music on hold to care for her children. “I have no regrets," she says, "especially now that I have experienced being back in music and touring and have found out how selfish I have to be. I know how much it would have taken out of my children’s lives and I am so grateful I have been able to do both now.”

National Travel

For this tour, Bunyan's first of the United States, five backing musicians will join her; two of whom, Kevin Barker and Helena Espvall, play with psych-folk revivalist act Espers. The band will perform songs from both of Bunyan’s solo albums. Even though the Diamond Day songs were written long ago and were left untouched for most of that time, Bunyan feels that “they are still deeply rooted inside of me… They are my background.”

Bunyan & Co. will premiere no new pieces, but she is “slowly” writing more material. As long as it doesn’t take 35 more years for album No. 3 to come out, her deliberateness seems wholly acceptable.

Phillip Buchan

WHO: Vashti Bunyan, Vetiver
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Tuesday, February 6
HOW MUCH: $15