“I’ve been listening to a recording of a show I did in Norway,” says Vashti Bunyan. “And I’m just amazed at how soft it is. When I’m listening back I think, my goodness, it sounds like a child up there singing.”
Naturally Bunyan would be her worst critic; almost no one likes the sound of their own voice, but “child” is a stretch. Though Bunyan does sing quiet, willowy folk numbers, her voice is thick with wisdom, like a mother in her most maternal moments. And even via phone from Glasgow, Bunyan speaks so gently into the receiver that you wonder if there is a baby in the next room she’d prefer not to wake. It’s the kind of voice that draws you in close, it s extreme intimacy making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. This same sort of calm saturates her latest effort, Lookaftering, her first album in 36 years, and one that was made with the help of psych-folk’s current heavy hitters Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Otto Hauser of Espers.
Bunyan’s 36-year hiatus was the result of a total disappointment with the music industry overall, spurred by the lackluster reception her 1970 debut Just Another Diamond Day.
“I think the album I made was just so misunderstood because it came out too late,” she says of what is now considered a major influence on the new wave of psychedelic folk. “It didn’t represent the freedom, the lack of self-consciousness, I wanted to come through in the music. After that, I never picked up a guitar again, it just hurt too much to even look at it.”
For the next three decades, Bunyan moved around rural Scotland were she lived a modest life, raising children and tending to her animals. But around the late ’90s, she found the Internet and through a little searching discovered a whole new generation of people talking about Diamond Day in ways she always wanted them to. The conversations she had with some of those folks, as well as chats with a soon-to-be-wildly-popular Devendra Banhart, eventually led to the 2004 reissue of Diamond Day by DiCristina Stair, and the courage to give the music gig another shot. Working with German-born composer and producer Max Richter for her follow-up, Lookaftering, Bunyan made a wavering wheat field of an album, one that is delivered with equal parts melancholy and peace of mind.
But what’s most striking is how it seems as if Bunyan never took a 36-year break, but rather just picked up where she left off in 1970. Though the songs are about blatantly middle-age things (children, rural living, reflection, and frustration) they are sewn of the same folk thread that ran through the debut she crafted when she was in her 20s.
But the biggest relief for Bunyan is seeing her brand of pensive folk music get a proper reception, and knowing she had a significant role to play in its creation.
“For a young woman singer in the late ’60s, it was much harder to make yourself felt,” she says. “There wasn’t as much cooperation back then. With Lookaftering, I felt like I had more of a say as to how it came out.”
And what of that three-decade break? Does she feel any regrets?
“I’m glad I gave my life to my kids,” she says. “If I had lived a musician’s life, I might not have been able to give them as much time. Now, it’s a bit of a shock for them to see me doing music again, but they’ve all been very wonderful and supportive about it. I’m touring for the first time ever in my life. If you had told me a few years ago I’d be playing the U.S., I never would have believed it.”
