Vashti Bunyan

Songwriter Vashti Bunyan is best known for her 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day, whose marvellously delicate folk songs highlight the natural world and all the little creatures in it. Though the Joe Boyd-produced effort initially met with little fanfare, Bunyan eventually gained acclaim for her feathery voice and rustic vision as the album gained cult status over the coming years. Jennifer Vashti Bunyan was born in 1945 and grew up in London. She was studying fine art at Oxford University in 1964 when a Rolling Stones concert inspired her to pick up the guitar. She released a handful of singles (including her 1965 debut, “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind”, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards), but they didn’t catch on. So in 1968 she and her boyfriend moved cross-country via horse-drawn cart to an artist commune on Scotland’s Isle of Skye—where the rugged atmosphere revitalised her vivid lyrics and hushed singing style. Bunyan didn’t release music for decades after her first album, but a reissue of Diamond Day in 2000 helped guide the burgeoning psych-folk movement and led to collaborations with Devendra Banhart and Animal Collective. A well-received follow-up, Lookaftering, came in 2005, and nine years after that, Bunyan released what she has said would be her last album, the shimmering and understated Heartleap.