Vashti Bunyan

When Vashti Bunyan dueted with Devendra Banhart on Rejoicing in the Hands, curious listeners dashed online to dig up some info on this mysterious woman with the ethereal voice. In no time, the grapevine was aflutter with fact and legend about the British singer/songwriter, who’d disappeared from an earlier folk movement even as her lone album, the sylvan Just Another Diamond Day, was released in 1970. The LP, produced by Joe Boyd (Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake), with backing by ISB’s Robin Williamson and two members of Fairport, along with string arrangements by Robert Kirby, went on to generate a tiny but fervent cult, with vinyl copies fetching up to $1,000.

At Banhart’s urging, indie label DiCristina re-released Diamond Day last fall, (following the LP’s first appearance on CD three years earlier in the U.K.), initiating a younger and larger cult. “I could never in my wildest of dreams have predicted that I would have anything to do with music ever again—let alone write and record another album,” Bunyan admits. The title of the just-completed Lookaftering, produced and co-arranged by renowned composer/programmer Max Richter, “refers to the years between and what I have been doing, but is also about looking back.”

Banhart flatly states that Lookaftering is even better than Bunyan’s cult classic. “It's a different color,” he says, “made from the same pigment but with time to refine the pigment.”