Vashti Bunyan has only released two proper records in nearly 40 years, which affords listeners at least two minutes to consider their titles: Just Another Diamond Day and Lookaftering. The first is a statement about blissful passivity-- reasonably vogue in 1970 for singers with acoustic guitars-- but it's also about time as circular or never-changing. There's a pun in 2005's Lookaftering: To care, to look after, but also to consider in retrospect, to look at something later. She makes nostalgia and rumination sound like a limitless process; in a Vashti Bunyan song, imagining what the past would look like from the future is the closest you get to a description of the present.
For all the zealous praise her music inspires, Bunyan's original intention was, in her own words, "to break into the charts as a girl with a guitar and a sad little love song." Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind (out on DiCristina in the U.S. and Fat Cat in the UK) is a compilation of singles recorded in 1965 and 66 for Decca and Columbia with Rolling Stones manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham, a string of demos from the same period, and the full reel-to-reel of her first studio recordings from 1964-- a collection of those ambitions. Some of the orchestrated sides are decent, in a dippy, swingin' way (the Jagger-Richards collaboration "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind"); one is absolutely wonderful ("Winter Is Blue," both versions); others are appallingly bad ("Coldest Night of the Year" is like Spinal Tap doing Sonny and Cher).
Even though it's a pretty middling selection, it's an essential angle to Bunyan's portrait. She's said in various interviews and notes, in her gentle way, that she doesn't think of herself as a folk singer. And even the barest demos here really sound like demos, not just unkempt roughs of fully formed songs. Though most of her music has a serene, rural quality, she never romanticized remoteness, telling Pitchfork in 2005 of "winter-long mud and damp dogs" and how housework "pains" her. She didn't move to farms in Scotland and Ireland because it was more wondrous or lovely or romantic, but because she'd considered herself a failure and figured her lot in life was to bear kids and keep quiet-- projects she expresses a bittersweet ambiguity about in the lyrics to Lookaftering.
Despite the distortions that came with her maturity, this collection indicated that Bunyan's subjects have always remained the same: love, time, and the way love works over time. Just Another Diamond Day's sense of remove, though, was so profound that it's hard to imagine her anticipating anything, especially human contact. Lookaftering's "Feet of Clay" would've been a heartbreak song in 1966; in 2005 she wrote it as an acquiescence, a lover watching from a kitchen window as someone departs, an ode to the future in general, not any one in particular.Diamond Day and Lookaftering felt like they could've been separated by as little as a month. What sets these songs apart is disposition. Bunyan hadn't yet needed to figure out the secrets of time; how to traverse it or compress it. Ironically, the world must've seemed bright to her in 1965; in 1971, it must've seemed drab. And because nobody really expects-- or aspires to, I guess-- belated cult appreciation, Vashti Bunyan lived for about 30 years thinking she'd made some sort of mistake with Diamond Day. There's an allure to these adolescent pimples-- compounded by knowledge of the music she went on to make-- but it's more in service of capitulating a myth, to seeing a story and a trajectory, than to the music itself.
