The Rebirth of a Troubadour
How Vashti Bunyan survived a 30-year musical hiatus
If the only way to get to Carnegie Hall is through practice, Vashti Bunyan has beaten the odds. “Carnegie Hall is just beyond my wildest dreams… There was no way I could have ever thought that, in a year, I would see myself on that stage” she said. “I suppose you could just take 30 years off and then wake up one morning to an e-mail from [Talking Heads star] David Byrne in your inbox.”
When Just Another Diamond Day was released in 1969 to virtually no commercial response, Vashti Bunyan gave up writing and moved to the English countryside to live as a wife and a mother. Though she has been hailed as “the female Bob Dylan,” Bunyan remains remarkably humble. “I think what I’m doing now is what I ached to do back then. This really was what I wanted, and I didn’t manage it in any way, shape, or form. People talk about me coming back, but I’m not coming back. I’m starting over again.”
After a 30-year hiatus, Bunyan typed her name into an Internet search engine in 1996 to discover that artists such as Devendra Banhart, Andy Cabic (of Vetiver), and Animal Collective had discovered her album, long out of print, and considered it a lost classic. “I didn’t even have a copy of the tapes, but when I got my hands on them, I immediately set about a reissue,” Bunyan said. The reissue was critically acclaimed and led to Bunyan’s collaborations with Animal Collective and Banhart, about which Bunyan said, “I owe them a huge amount. Never mind me godmothering them. I owe them.”
While Diamond Day sounds almost childish in its blind idealism and hope for the future, Bunyan’s second album, Lookaftering is an opus about motherhood, the past, and Bunyan’s love for her children. “I think on Lookaftering, it is more focused on my life and looking back on what happened, versus what is going to happen,” she said. “Certainly when I was making Diamond Day, I would never have thought there would be that gap or that there would be any difference between what I did then and what I’ve done now.”
Recounting her past, Bunyan said, “When I was kicked out of art school and moved here in the West Village, there was a record store, and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was there, and I just grabbed it, and I listened to it for just hours and hours. I, there and then, decided that this is what I wanted to do, to be this troubadour singer with a guitar on my back and go around singing my own songs.”
A woman who only pressed 100 copies of her first album “couldn’t expect to be a wild, runaway success,” Bunyan said, but now she looks to new artists as her inspiration and credits them and the changing musical landscape with keeping her optimistic.
“Through the Internet, there is room for everyone to be seen, to be heard. If you’re good, you will get through… And I think that has allowed for people to be more generous toward one another.”
Bunyan has strong commercial inclinations, as well, evident in her allowing “Diamond Days” to be featured in a T-Mobile advertisement last year. “I felt that, back in the day that I made Diamond Day, I wasn’t intending for it to be lost, obscured, precious, so when I got the chance for it to be used in an ad, I knew a lot of people wouldn’t like it, that they would feel it was selling the song away,” she said. “I really loved the fact that it had been rejected from the commercial world at first, but it made it worth it that now people were listening.”
As Bunyan took the stage last Friday at Carnegie Hall, she was far from a “trembling mess,” as she characterized herself. Tall and statuesque, she collaborated with Banhart, Scottish folk collective Adem, and Cabic in a truly mutual feat of musicality.
More than anything, Lookaftering is an album about memory.
“I think that a lot of what I’ve come to understand over these last couple years is how hard I would have found it to carry on music and look after my children,” Bunyan said. “And I wish it were possible for women to do that and not get so caught up in the domestic life, which is obviously what happened to me. My life was just completely taken over by Lookingaftering ... I’m glad that I was able to go back to what I’ve done before and to do it afterwards, but I know a lot of people don’t get that chance.”