Vashti Bunyan
Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind: Singles and Demos 1964-1967 (Dicristina Stair)
By Claire Evans
Published: November 12th, 2007 | 11:20am
Vashti Bunyan has had, to put it mildly, an unorthodox musical career.
After spending much of the 1960s bumming around the London folk scene, hanging around with Donovan and the Rolling Stones, looking boho-cute in long pea coats, she released a tiny gem of a psych record, Just Another Diamond Day, in 1970. The album went critically unnoticed and Bunyan, gently brushing off her girlish folk years, moved on, settled down in Ireland, and had kids.
What she didn't know, however, was that over the decades, her album would accrue the kind of mysterious, breathless cultural cachet that most musicians would give an arm and a leg for. It became a secret favorite of tastemakers worldwide, selling on eBay for upwards of $2,000. And so it was that she would find herself, many years later, a mother of three, hanging out with Devendra Banhart, recording albums with Animal Collective, and globe-trotting on the back of her now revered body of work.
It somehow makes sense that she would crown this unlikely success with another trip through time, this time to the gloriously fertile period between 1964 and '67. Her latest release, Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind, is a compilation of rough-hewn demos and breathy live recordings that predate Diamond Day — not to mention, presumably, a good percentage of her listenership.
While Diamond Day was golden and dreamy, suffused with a honey-voiced agrarian sensibility, Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind is a colder kind of gem. Her surreal soprano is still there, punctuated with the minimal, just-hanging-in-the-air instrumentation that she is so famous for, but these songs — with titles like "I Don't Know What Love is" and "I Want To Be Alone" — seem to come from a blustery period of Bunyan's youth. Appropriately, a good half of the album was almost lost to the mists of time until quite recently, when Bunyan found some dusty tapes in her brother's attic.
This collection of tracks lack the pastoral gauziness of Diamond Day. Instead they evoke the minor chords of a lugubrious winter break-up, as seen through the potent heart of a young woman. And sure, much of the material here is creaky and rudimentary in comparison to her later albums, because Bunyan's personality had yet to break through the cozy mid-60s standards of lady-strummed folk music. But the seeds of a powerful force are definitely present, wispy and precious, hidden between the pop production and reel-to-reel roughness. It's clear to see, and a little painful, how such a sensitive optimistic young singer might have taken a wrong turn somewhere among these demo recordings, ending up in musical isolation for 30 years.
Welcome back, Vashti. We've got a little catching up to do.
Issue #24
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