Just Another Diamond Day: An Interview With Vashti Bunyan

The British folk singer released her first album in 1970 — and nothing happened. Decades passed. Time moved on. Then, suddenly, she became inexplicably famous. 

By Jessie Schiewe

A recent photo of Vashti Bunyan. (Fat Cat Records)

Vashti Bunyan had a cold — but you could hardly tell.

Even when she’s unwell, the 74-year-old’s voice sounds feathery and wan, sort of as if someone had pumped it full of clouds. It was a voice I knew well; a voice that has remained virtually unchanged for 50 years. 

I found myself on the phone with the British folk singer on a winter’s morning in 2016. I’d convinced her record label, Fat Cat, into letting me interview her even though I wasn’t on assignment and had no clue where I’d eventually — if ever — publish our conversation. 

It was partly my own selfishness that made me reach out to Bunyan, an artist I’ve been listening to since high school when I befriended a 1970s-obsessed classmate. For me, listening to her music is like sitting next to a window on a rainy day and gazing out.

Her tunes are melancholy and wistful, yet hopeful and not totally downtrodden. They’re like reminders that it’s OK to feel depressed or to yearn for the past or, even to act younger than your age. 

So when I finally reached her on the phone, I was ecstatic. And it wasn’t just because I am a fan. It was a privilege to be speaking with her, one of the most enigmatic, reclusive musicians in recent history.

Bunyan told me in her feathery voice that it had been a few years since she had last been interviewed by a writer, and I hoped this meant she was ready to talk, because I had a lot of questions.

In 1970, a 25-year-old Bunyan released her debut album, Just Another Diamond Day — a dreamy folk record of delicate, crystalline ditties filled with whimsical vignettes about glow worms and lily ponds and meditations about cold weather days. 

You might recognize some of her tracks, like “Train Song” and “Diamond Day,” which in recent years have appeared in a number of TV shows and commercials, for the likes of Reebok and T-Mobile.

Or maybe you listen to one of her proteges — artists like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom — who have channeled Bunyan’s gentle, breathy style into their own musical repertoires. 

But half-a-century ago, back when Just Another Diamond Day originally came out, none of these things had yet to happen. And at the time, Bunyan never imagined they would. 

“Rather unkind things had been said about it,” she said of her debut. “That it was just nursery rhymes for children. That it was nothing.” 

Defeated, she spent the next three decades avoiding music altogether. It was only in the early 2000s, thanks largely to the advent of the internet, that Bunyan revisited her music. Buoyed by the support she received online, she decided to re-release Just Another Diamond Day on CD and started accepting offers to do guest vocals on songs by younger artists like Banhart and Animal Collective. 

By 2005, she’d finished her second album, Lookaftering, and in 2014, she released her third, Heartleap. Her late-in-life redemption story even inspired a full-length documentary film. 

All of this was on my mind when I reached Bunyan at her “big, old Georgian house” in Edinburgh, Scotland, on that fateful, brumal day. As she watched “the sun dip below the horizon,” and as I sipped my morning cup of coffee, I finally got answers to questions I had long been wondering about. To quote the title of her first single, some things just stick in your mind.

OK Whatever: Just Another Diamond Day was the first vinyl I ever bought. 

Vashti Bunyan: Really?

Yeah, it was.

Well, thank you. 

I read that when you were writing Just Another Diamond Day, you and your boyfriend Robert Lewis were traveling around in a horse and cart. What did that look like? I can’t really picture it.

It was a little, old baker’s van that was about 6-feet by 3-feet, just big enough for a tiny mattress. It was very small with a wonderful horse who actually taught us how to go on. She was old and experienced and we knew nothing about horses but luckily she knew what to do. 

Bunyan sent us this photo of her and her boyfriend Robert Lewis arriving in their horse and wagon in Scotland’s Western Isles in 1969 after a long journey from London.

And you two were heading to Donovan's commune in the Hebridean Islands off the coast of Scotland, right?

We were, yes. But by the time we made it, he wasn’t there any more. It took us a year and a half to get there. Donovan had set off with his friends in a Land Rover and we'd set off at the same time with our horse and our wagon.

It was Donovan who had helped us to buy our horse and wagon. He persuaded us to go up to these islands that he'd bought off the northwest coast of Scotland because he was wanting to set up a kind of artists’ community with writers and painters and musicians in these abandoned houses that were there. It sounded great to us. It sounded like just what we wanted to do.

But by the time we got there, we had changed hugely. Donovan wasn’t even there; he was living in Los Angeles. And there wasn’t any room for us to stay by the time we got there either, so we kept on traveling. 

Then you went on to record Just Another Diamond Day. 

Yes. When I had finished the horse-and-wagon journey and I had finished all the songs, I went back down to London, having been sent for by Joe Boyd. We made the album in three days.

He brought in musicians that I didn’t know because I’d been on the road for a while and I had no electricity, no record player, no radio, or anything like that.

So I didn’t know who the Incredible String Band were. I didn’t know who Nick Drake was. I didn’t know who Fairport Convention were. I hardly knew who Joe Boyd was.

But he had promised to make this album at the end of the journey and so he kept his promise. 

But then when Just Another Diamond Day finally came out in 1970, you decided to abandon your musical career altogether. Why?

I didn’t hear the result of the recordings for almost a year, by which time I’d had a baby and moved to the Scottish borders. And it was a bit of a shock to me as to how it came out.

Joe had taken away all the tapes with him to America, and I had no input in the mixing or anything about it. So when I heard the demo that he sent me, I couldn’t connect to it.

It felt like somebody else had done it. I knew that they were my songs and I loved some of them. But some of them I didn’t love. It wasn’t what I considered my style at the time. The treatment to some of the songs was very folky.

When Just Another Diamond Day was released, Joe asked me to do some promotion for it, and I had to make a decision: to go back to London and push the album or stay in the borders and just get on with my life.

I didn’t want to bring my child up in London. I was brought up there and I didn’t want to do that to my kid. So I decided to abandon everything. 

The other thing that happened was that while I was staying in the borders with my child, I read a review of the album. It said it made the reviewer sort of unaccountably depressed and he couldn’t understand it. But that’s how he felt after he'd heard the record.

And for me, that was just devastating. To think that I’d made somebody else so unhappy was just awful.

And I remember standing on the pavement outside my cottage and reading the paper and closing it and saying to myself, ‘I’m never doing this again. I can’t do this anymore. I’m obviously no good at it.’

And it’s not like anybody mentioned the album when it came out. It was just friends and family who talked about.

Nobody else really took any notice of it. And so it just disappeared out of my life.

I could never listen to it because it felt like such a terrible failure. It wasn’t what I had intended it to be — not that I’d ever really intended it to be anything.

If it hadn’t been for Joe, I would never have recorded those songs at all. But if you ask me why I abandoned it, it was because I didn’t feel it was really a part of me anymore. 

You waited 35 years to return to music and release your second album, Lookaftering, and I’ve always wondered, what did you do with your life during those three decades?  

I was a mother of three, and I think my partner and I, Robert, were always looking for the elusive place that we could make our own. We lived in various rented farmhouses. And we made our living by buying and selling old country furniture, farmhouse, antique-y stuff, and having markets by the side of the road.

I called it living on wit, and that’s what we did really. We just did what we could to get by. 

Eventually we did find a place that we could buy and make our own. We had various animals and there was always lots of people going through. There wasn’t much music, but there were a lot of friends and a lot of children and horses and dogs and stuff. It was a pretty rural life.

Then, after 22 years of that, Robert and I separated, and I came to Edinburgh where I fell in love with my lawyer. Then I had a completely different life. I moved into the city with him and my youngest child, and I’ve been here ever since. 

And then, around the turn of the century, you revisited Just Another Diamond Day. Why?

Yeah, that was crazy, absolutely crazy. It was because when I first got on the internet in about 1996, I put in my name — as I imagine quite a few people do — and I found somebody on an Incredible String Band website who was asking if anybody knew what had happened to me.

I thought, ‘Oh, that’s strange. Well, I’ll write to that person since there's an email address.’ It turned out to be a record collector in Sacramento and he'd bought the album in 1970. 

That’s when I realized that the album hadn’t disappeared completely. It had disappeared out of my life, but it still existed and people were still talking about it.

I started to read kind things that were said about it instead of the rather unkind things that had been said about it in its own day — that it was just nursery rhymes for children and it was nothing. To hear people say things about it that I would have loved to have heard back when it was new, to realize that people actually understood what it was about — I think that encouraged me to find out more about whether I could actually bring the album out again. 

It led to me finding out who it all belonged to and who the publishers were and who the masters belonged to. Eventually, I found the master tape and it was reissued on CD. 

But it was only when we went into the studio to remaster it that I realized what a beautiful job Joe had done and how beautiful it sounded. Because I’d never really heard it since 1970. I didn’t have a record player and I’d only heard it on scratchy, old tape players. 

And so it wasn’t until the year 2000 when we took it into the studio that I actually listened to it. The people who were with me said, ‘Oh, that’s really great.’ And I said, ‘Is it? I don’t know.’ But then I did hear it differently and I began to appreciate it for how brave it had been at the time it was made. I also realized how brave Joe had been to consider recording those songs in the first place. Because it wasn’t really like anything else at the time. 

Tell me a bit about your musical upbringing. Did you sing as a child?

I think I was always musical. I used to sing myself to sleep every night and I listened to music all throughout my childhood. My father had an enormous collection of classical records. It’s all very familiar to me now. I know nothing about who wrote what or what things are called, but all of that music is in my head. And I think I terribly wanted to be a pop singer from the age of about 16 or 17. That was what I wanted. But I didn’t start writing songs until I was 18. 

Your voice — which is breathy and soft as a whisper — is so unique and alluring. How did you develop that vocal style?

I don’t know. It just happened. I didn’t have any training at all.

Well, actually I was sent to a voice coach once, an operatic folk voice coach. He gave up on me very very quickly, because I just don’t have that kind of voice.

I can’t sing loudly. If I try, it doesn’t work. I don’t know where it comes from. Well, some of it maybe comes from my father who loved choral music and I always wanted to be a choirboy. Of course, that never happened!

What was your voice like when you returned to making music in the early 2000s? Was it out of shape? Did it sound differently?

I hadn’t sung in all of 30 years — hardly ever. I never sang to my children; I left music behind altogether.

But after Just Another Diamond Day was reissued in 2000, I was contacted by a band called Piano Magic, who asked me if I would sing on their next album. I said yes  and turned up at the studio in London with no idea as to what was going to happen — if I could sing or if I couldn’t.

And there I was standing in front of a microphone for the first time in 30 years and my voice came out and it was exactly the same. I don’t know if it was because I hadn’t used it all during that time, or if it’s like putting something in a cupboard and finding it again, but it just sounded the same. 

When I came out of the studio, I was literally walking on air. I remember phoning my daughter and saying, ‘I want to make an album. I want to make another album. I want to do some writing. I want to do some more.’ 

So I did. I released my second album, Lookaftering, in 2006, and I think my voice on that project was probably not as strong as it is now because I was so uncertain. I think I’ve probably got a stronger voice now than I’ve ever had. I think my voice at the beginning was a lot higher than it was by the time I finished Heartleap seven years later. 

But I have no control over it whatsoever. Even when I’m singing live, the half-hour before I go onstage, I’m absolutely beside myself with nerves. Because I still don’t know if my voice is going to work or not. I have no confidence in it whatsoever. 

I’m glad you brought up performing, because was that something you did before releasing your second and third albums?

Before Lookaftering and Heartleap, I’d never performed live. I hardly ever did shows when I was young because I was much more interested in recording and writing than I was in performing. 

When I returned to music, I went through at least five years of saying no to every offer. I’d neglected it all for so long that I was scared. But then I realized I had been given this amazing opportunity to get on with doing the things that I should have done when I was younger, and I changed my mind. I decided to say yes to everything to see what would happen. And eventually, I wasn’t so scared as I was in the beginning. It was Devendra Banhart who really encouraged me and said, ‘You’ve just got to do it because if you do, you get used to it and you won’t be scared anymore.’ And he was right. 

I know that you’ve since been on a few worldwide tours, and I think it’s so cool that you were touring in your 60s.

I thought so, too. I’m so lucky to have been accepted by people who were the same kind of age I was when I was starting out and who understood what I’d done back then and still understand what I am doing. I just feel incredibly fortunate.

Do you ever think that maybe Just Another Diamond Day was released in the wrong decade? Why else do you think it was a flop? Maybe because there wasn’t enough promotion?

Well, from the time I wrote the songs to the time they were recorded was about a year, and then there was another year until it was released. And back at the end of the ‘60s into the ‘70s, with the changes that were going on and the different kinds of music that were being made, it got lost really.

If it had come out when I first was making those songs in ‘68, I might have had a small window of opportunity then. But it was too late.

And then quite ironically, it became too early the second time around. It took all of those decades really for it to find its way. 

Also, I guess I didn’t do too much promotion. At that time, if you didn’t go out on the road, if you didn’t do live performances, it was very difficult for anybody to promote you. And I had chosen not to do that, so really it was nobody else’s fault but mine. 

There’s also many more avenues through which music can be heard today. In recent years, your songs have appeared in commercials, TV shows, and covers. None of those opportunities were really available to you back then. 

They sure weren’t. Back in the day, you were completely at the mercy of your record label and the radio or whether you got any plays on it. There were very few radio stations in this country at that time that would play that kind of music. Unless you had a huge machine behind you, it was easy to get lost. 

One thing I never realized until I started listening to your music was how much drums can really transform a song. Because there’s no drums on any of your albums. And I didn’t realize how unnecessary drums were until then. 

Oh, I know! It’s a bit of a bugbear of mine, really.

I sometimes listen to a song of somebody's and I think it’s a beautiful song with a wonderful melody, but then wonder why can’t they just get rid of those drums? They don’t need to be there. It’d be really beautiful without them. Because sometimes I think people think they have to be there. And I really don’t think so. Not on everything. I get very bored with them.

I did try drums when I first starting working with Max Richter on Lookaftering. We put a bit of drums and a bit of bass behind one of the songs, and I was just like ‘No. It isn't necessary.’ The percussion or the rhythm or the pace of the song was all there in the instrumentation and the vocals, and it didn’t really need underlining in any way. It would only disturb them.

My oldest son always goes on about it to me, asking me ‘Why can’t you put drums in there? Or some bass?’ But I just tell him no. I’ve tried it and it just doesn’t work. 

Heartleap, your third and most recent album, came out in 2014, almost a decade after you released Lookaftering. Why did it take so long?

There were lots of reasons. The main one was that I am very slow at writing. And then do you know who Robert Kirby was? He did all the arrangements for Nick Drake's songs; he was a string arranger mostly. And he arranged three of the songs on Just Another Diamond Day and I loved what he did. 

I didn’t see him again for so many years, but then we were both invited to a show, a tribute to Nick Drake, arranged by Joe Boyd. And it was so lovely to see him again and I told him I was writing these songs but I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. And he was like, ‘Let me hear them. Maybe we can think of something to do.’ So I went down to London and I played him the songs. And he loved them and had all these ideas. It was exactly what I wanted to do and I was so excited to work with him. 

(Fat Cat Records)

Then, two weeks later, his wife called me to say that the maestro has died. And I just could not believe it. I was so upset because he was an amazing man. He was just a lovely, funny, irreverent, fun person who was so clever and so good at what he did. And I was just devastated. 

It took me another couple years to even think about what I was going to do. And then I decided, rather than try and find somebody else, I wanted to try and do something of what he might have done, so that’s when I started doing the arrangements and recording it all myself. And I decided I just needed to do it all by myself.

I'd been so well looked after by Max Richter for Lookaftering — he had just done everything for me and taught me so much — but I just thought I needed to try and figure out if I could do it myself. That’s why it took so long, because I am so very slow. 

Did Lookaftering’s title come from the fact that Max Richter looked after you so much, as you said?

No. It came about when we were mastering the album and the person who was mastering it turned around and looked at me and was like, ‘So what’s the title?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ 

And then we went through a few things, and I was like, ‘Well, there’s this phrase my family uses for taking care of people or things or animals or whatever: look-aftering.’ And everybody in the room said ‘Yes! That's it!’ So that’s what it became. 

And then after that I thought, ‘Oh, that’s such a stupid name. I never should have said that. I'm really daft to have done that.’

So I called the guys at Fat Cat Records and said ‘I’ve changed my mind’ and they said ‘Too late.’ They liked it so it went on the album. I often think I should have called it this, or I should have called it that, but its Lookaftering forever now. 

What about Heartleap? Is there a story behind that title?

Yes, the cover of that album is a painting done by my daughter, as was the Lookaftering one of the rabbit. She painted the Heartleap one about five or six years ago and it was on my laptop as a desktop background for a long, long time because it was just one of my favorite things she's ever done.

And I was looking at it one day and this song came to me all in a rush. I asked her if she would mind if I called my song “Heartleap” and eventually the album was called Heartleap, too. She was very good about it and said ‘Yes, of course.’ So it was sort of a collaborative effort. 

When you released Heartleap, I read that there was a note in the press release that mentioned it would be your last album?

That was because when we were mastering the album in London, when we got to the end of the last song, this wonderful woman who mastered it — she had done Lookaftering as well — she turned to me and said, ‘So when we do the next one, we're going to do this and this and this.’ And I said, ‘I’m never doing this again!’

Because it had been such hard work. Those few months getting it finished had been really intense, and I think to have it finished, it was like falling off a cliff. And I decided I’m never doing this again.

David Cawley from Fat Cat Records was there, so he put it in his press release that “Vashti is adamant that this is her last album.” 

I didn’t really think anything of it until I realized that practically every interview or article about the record would mention that this was my last album. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, OK then. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.’ It’s amazing how you can say one thing and it gets picked up and that’s it. You can't really take it back. 

Well, I think that’s what happens when you're that famous. Because you are famous, Vashti. 

Well, 30 years without doing anything at all is still very much in my head. And it’s always a surprise to me that anybody has ever heard my name at all. It’s especially a surprise if somebody knows the music.

That’s still with me and I don’t feel at all remotely famous. 

I guess that helps keep you humble. 

I don’t know. I was playing in Moscow a few years ago by myself and there were these young girls in the front row who were singing along with the songs from Just Another Diamond Day.

And I was like ‘How did that happen? That these young girls in Moscow know all the words?’ It also happened in Tallinn in Estonia. People knew the words to the songs and I was like, ‘But how did that happen?’ So it’s very heartwarming. 

So what’s your life like now when you're not playing music?

I’m managing crises with six kids who are all grown up. Sometimes it really is a full-time job. My daughter has a little boy who I look after from time to time. She lives just down the road, which is great. And there’s also an awful lot of work involved in putting together the shows — a lot of boring administrative stuff. 

The rest of the time, I do a little bit of recording, but not much. Though what I’m really supposed to be doing — and finding very difficult — is write.

I’m trying to write a book about all of the stuff I’m talking to you about. I hope I can manage to do it. I’ve been promising my kids for about 20 years that I would. That’s why I first got a computer: to start writing. And that is my goal now. 

(Fat Cat Records)

Your eyes are hungry for more. Keep reading…