"Impossibly fragile" is how this Guardian profile describes the songs on Vashti Bunyan's legendary 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day and it's apt. Her frail, otherworldly, toy-like voice, the arrangements, and the songs about lily ponds, rainbows, glow worms, and rosehips are so delicately, perhaps precariously, balanced that you feel you must remain perfectly still while the record is playing: if anybody moves, the whole thing could come crashing down killing everyone in the building and smashing her into a million pieces.

Vashti Bunyan's history reads a bit like a parody, as 60s personal journeys so often do. She was the typical British art school student and aspiring singer-songwriter obsessed with American pop. Andrew Loog Oldham tried her out as the poor man's Marianne Faithful, but that got nowhere, despite a nifty recording of a Jagger/Richards song, "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind." Then she was alleged to be the female New Dylan. Finally, in frustration, she went back to the land, traveling through the Lake District in a horse-drawn milk cart, dressed like a member of the cast of Fiddler on the Roof, on a quest to join a communal artist colony being formed by Donovan on an island off Skye. Donovan had already left by the time she got there two years later, but in the process Bunyan had written the songs that were to become Just Another Diamond Day.

She now says her boyfriend Yoko, I mean Robert, is ultimately responsible for the content of the nature songs, which some have found twee and cloying:

On the way [to Donvan-ville] and partly to cheer herself up, she wrote songs, entirely for herself. Robert had told her to focus on what was around her - the animals she kept, life on the road - instead of looking inward as she had in the "miserable love songs" of her former almost-career.

"What Robert said to me about the outside," she says now, "I think it stopped me, in a way. Although it was wonderful what he did, it was a dead end. What I have done now is come way way round in a big circle to before that, and allowed myself to carry on from the early songs.

She's talking about her new, second album Lookaftering, which, it will probably not surprise you learn, features collaborations with the folk-hipsters of today. I like a good miserable love song myself, so I'm looking forward to it, but I hope there's at least one lily pond song, just for old time's sake.

MonsValentine

Dallas, TX

May 2004

SEP 16, 2005 09:56 AM

nobody gets hurt.

Farhaad

Arcadia, CA

February 2005

SEP 16, 2005 12:14 PM

CoryTx said:
nobody gets hurt.

You beat me to it!

impboy

Los Angeles, CA

September 2003

SEP 16, 2005 02:50 PM

ya know, i had just read about her collab with devendra banhart just yesterday and was thinking, "hmm, wonder what she's about?" i guess we can hail things like arthur magazine and 'FMU for the resuscitation of all things psychedelic and folky like Vashti and Gary Higgins, whose Red Hash was just re-released by drag city. neat back-story to go along with that guy, too. just read the link's contents.

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Dr_Frank

Oakland, CA

May 2005

SEP 16, 2005 08:00 AM