The romanticized resilience of Vashti Bunyan’s ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ @ 50
The bucolic beauty of this masterpiece reminds us that there's nothing freaky about survival.
There’s a practical, non-messianic reason why keeping the faith is so helpful at this time of year, after the winter solstice has passed but before the frost melts.
If we press on and pay close attention, we can see the sun stick around a bit longer and absorb more Vitamin D to chase away the dark thoughts of seasonal affective disorder. On difficult days, that extra sunlight can’t come fast enough.
The grass will grow again — and indeed, some still may be frozen under all that frost — but when we forget to trust that which we cannot see, faith will have to do. And when faith is in short supply, maybe we’re better off processing what we do see, bleak though it may seem , with mindfulness and depth.
The measure of a year — even this ugly, unprecedented one — depends on cycles. When we experience those cycles along a negative trajectory, they can become spirals. But when we keep the faith that such cycles are natural and inevitably come full circle, they become easier to navigate.
Good art seems to ebb and flow in cycles through our cultural consciousness, too. We may celebrate these cycles in weird ways — sometimes through arena tour victory laps, sometimes through 50th Anniversary box sets.
But the commercial function of art anniversaries can prevent any work that hasn’t seen its target audience expand or diversify in the years since its release from getting the promotional push necessary to remind new generations of its worth.
English songwriter Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day turns 50 this month, an album of bucolic beauty and rural resilience that prompted its status as a coveted cult classic along with Bunyan’s unwitting, dubious reputation as “godmother of freak folk” in the gap years after she had a child, left the music industry, and didn’t make another record for three decades.
As Just Another Diamond Day’s visually evocative, immerse slice of life vignettes immerse us in the daily travails of Bunyan’s time spent traveling toward the Scottish Hebrides in a horse-drawn buggy, her subsequent self-imposed exile from song reminds us why a half-century later, during this time when so many have so little, her story provides evidence of the profound power in perseverance — sometimes against the trends of your present moment — to find faith in a life lived deliberately.
Bunyan released her first single in 1965, the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards-panned “Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind,” after being represented by The Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. Though she wanted to be a commercial pop singer, the single didn’t perform all that well.
Bunyan realized the orchestral pop arrangements didn’t suit her, and wanted to record her own acoustic songs with some orchestral arrangements embedded in them instead. In 1967, leaving South London in a horse and buggy with her then boyfriend Robert Lewis for Donovan’s commune on the isle of Skye in Scotland’s Hebrides, she would get her chance and write those songs that would become the masterful Just Another Diamond Day.
“When my mother died, and my father was very disapproving of my hippy ways, it seemed to be the only thing to do,” Bunyan told ClashMusic in 2010. “ Just disappear out of conventional life. So that’s what I did.”
Now enshrined in myth, Bunyan described this trip from an industrialized London to a more natural setting as an education. “Travelling [sp] so slowly the contrasts happened very slowly,” she said, “and being out in the weather you don’t realise [sp] you are getting cold – it happens so slowly that you adjust.”
Sometimes when we’re immersed in a new and unfamiliar experience, faith isn’t required because natural survival tendencies kick in. Vashti speaks to nature’s power to show the way on Just Another Diamond Day’s “Glow Worms,” when “Glow worms show the path we have to tread.” Later on, she counts the waves, the gulls and the miles on “Where I Like to Stand,” taking in every bit of scenery and imagining the men she sees in boats counting the hours.
Bunyan attributes her knack for writing scenes of bucolic, natural imagery to a sense of romanticism for country life she internalized growing up in London, but it’s reasonable to think that her training as a visual artist — she attended Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art before getting expelled for focusing on music — crept into her writing style.
There’s a specific parallel between Bunyan’s writing style and the Romanticism art movement at the end of the 18th century, when work depicted nature in an exaggerated, idealized aesthetic in order to express sentiments of wonder, awe and other human feelings. A century later, the Hudson River School movement led to art that pushed a romanticized aesthetic where humans lived in peaceful coexistence with nature.
Bunyan does this on Just Another Diamond Day through song. It’s perhaps no more evident than on “Come Wind, Come Rain”:
Come wind, come rain, we're off again
Our muddy boots plod down the lane
The snow has snowed, now the grass has growed
And it's time that we were on the road
She’s internalizing the natural cycle here, then applying it to her own journey. She’s moved past the state of purely taking it all in on “Where I Like to Stand,” by this point, and has internalized nature’s cyclicality enough to listen and act upon it.
With her chorus, “Hey, ho, the wind and the rain,” Bunyan also evokes Feste the Clown from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a renegade fool who leaves the household of Countess Olivia on his whim in the year after Olivia’s father dies, until his roaming gets him in trouble with her.
As Just Another Diamond Day progresses, Bunyan becomes better at internalizing the natural world in her life, and in her relationship. On standout “I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind,” she imagines her partner’s headspace as a physical plane to explore, his solitude as a tangible structure she can run and jump on in order to stir some change in her partner.
It’s one of the most beautifully-written songs ever about trying to relate to someone you love while they’re suffering from depression because it acknowledges that the darkness is a tangible, natural thing that can be changed.
As the penultimate song on Just Another Diamond Day, it seems to mark the end of their relationship, too — “Winter is Blue” closes the song cycle with words on loss that she still acknowledges are made fleeting by time:
Why must I stay here
Rain comes I'm sitting here
Watching love moving
Away into yesterday
Just Another Diamond Day, which also showcased a stunning cross-section of Bunyan’s talented friends, including Fairport Convention’s Dave Swarbrick and Incredible String Band’s Simon Nicol), was warmly received upon its release in December, 1970. But poor album sales and her first child were enough reason for Bunyan to quit music, even going so far as to stop playing in private.
It would be another several cycles, 30 years in fact, before the obscene prices that original pressings of Just Another Diamond Day fetched online prompted a reissue in 2000. Bunyan returned with 2005’s Lookaftering and 2014’s Heartleap as a reluctant legend, with contemporary artists like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart citing Just Another Diamond Day as a cornerstone influence on their songwriting style, which has been unfortunately dubbed “freak folk.” All artists saddled with this term have rejected it, Bunyan included.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that there’s nothing freakish about painting a romanticized world with the raw materials you’ve given. Sometimes what we need to get us through a trying cycle is hidden in nature all along. And other times, when we can’t see it, we must create it ourselves out of wind and rain.