1970: Vashti Bunyan, Just Another Diamond Day

By Jane Lai

Escaping New York City for the first time since lockdown, New England had the confidence of an unfitted shirt — that is, everything looked good. The Dunkin’ drive-thru glowed in prosaic glory. Mud puddles seemed brighter at rest stops. I revisited Vashti Bunyan’s 1970 freak-folk album Just Another Diamond Day driving to Maine. It was Fall, and I drank a Coke for the first time in a year.

In Maine, my friends Ian, Emily, and Rachel welcomed in the sobriety of cold morning air; water glistened like a crowded chandelier as we spooned avocados for breakfast by the lake. We wrote country songs about what each of us preferred and sharply hated and sipped seltzers on rocking chairs. Long-legged spiders peeked through a porch chair every hour or so. I listened to “Timothy Grub” through cheap headphones.

I admire Vashti’s music because it’s like folklore; unbelievable until you see it (or, I suppose, hear it) yourself. Reminiscent of Connie Converse’s 50’s folk-venerated one-takes at a friend’s birthday party, the album’s scalene structures work. Its appeal rests in the uneven, sparing movements of the tracks, and Vashti doesn’t try too hard to resolve her songs as congruent. 

For instance, before she starts singing in “Timothy Grub,” it sounds like she’s sanding wood for half a second. Moments a radiator hiss or a crumbled breath, unintentional, fold into her other songs. And it’s most clear in tracks where a solo instrument or voice starts the dialogue; a half-coated string buzzes intrusively, or a hollow tap echoes off an acoustic guitar, adding to the emotional architecture. Vashti distills and casts a memory at the same time.

Her voice never quite fills up. This isn’t a result of carelessness, but, rather, a careful consideration of her reservoir, where she’s gingerly calculating what to let through and what to preserve. To collage the bucolic life that she knows well, her songs demand to be naturally immersed into an atmosphere — like pasta soaking in salt from a crushed tomato. Sitting in a small room you can hear the turn of a thick page or a rigid pen hitting paper. Tranquility can always exist in noise.

Small Town Pennsylvania 

“Catch one leaf and fortune will surround you evermore” – Rose Hip November

A few years prior, I went to a Told Slant show at Everybody Hits Philadelphia, a batting cage-turned-venue by night. Huge white poles propped the warehouse up, sheltering a space filled with long picnic tables and lights that tinted the arena a stark yellow. A paper mâché baseball dangled from the ceiling. 

I met Liana and Ian at that show. At the time, they lived in a small conservative town that no one ever wanted to leave. Locals congregated at Walmart on Friday nights and waited patiently for the corn festival each August. There was exactly one of everything.

That night, we listened to Felix Walworth of Told Slant’s mellow voice boom through a crowd. Felix donned a muscle tank and carried an electric guitar. Everyone sat on the floor, and it was so still you could hear each time someone scratched their head.

Like much of Vashti’s work, her lips also hovered the mic closely. The intent, I’d imagine, is to inch as close to the audience as possible. In “Glow Worms,” she sings, “Holding moments in the depth of care,” repeating this line twice. The second time, the words linger. Her music builds its own no-excess small town; one that is sustained on diner eggs; farms that rest on overcast days; lamb’s ear flowers; and a main street that inexplicably wears 15 churches. It’s an anomaly compared to the suburbs I was raised in, but no less loyal in its community participation. That night led me to love a town where I stuck out like a sore thumb. But I kept going back because I felt safe in the limited options.

Everybody Hits no longer exists, but I remember peering down from the cutout in the second-floor window. You could see it all — the empty cages, plastered with fake grass and rolling baseballs which faced the urgency of a dancing crowd. It was all trapped beneath a ceiling that never seemed to end. 

Piano

“There have been numerous times in my life where Vashti’s album was the only music saved to my phone,” my friend Jordan told me over email. “Because the album is a bit of a travelogue, my memories connected to it are mostly related to times of big life changes.” Jordan, who heads the band Mutual Benefit, made his own gorgeous rendition of Vashti’s album a few years ago. I’ve always admired his music because he’s able to cradle detail so generously.

“Back when I was utterly lost, I remember taking a twenty-hour solo Amtrak ride through rural Texas,” Jordan continued. “Listening bleary-eyed in the twilight hours I was struck by the way Vashti’s lyrics could create a tapestry out of little observations of flux.”

 A year ago, it was late Fall when I sat in a red barn house in Western Massachusetts, tinkering on a yellowed piano in the living room. I was on a weekend tour with my bandmates. It was an early morning where the sky was fogged bleak. The glittering dust, like upgraded dandruff, reflected the whites of the space. I met a woman who watered plants at Walmart, but I only got her first name. Months later, I forgot her first name. I wrote songs with the piano’s sostenuto pedal so I wouldn’t wake the house. 

After years of abandonment, the piano produced a robust reverb. A tuned instrument will always sound the same, but as keys change, the sounds seem to swell. And perhaps it’s an unpopular opinion that out-of-tune pianos age like a fine wine. Maybe it’s because the appeal of staying beautiful is purely subjective. 

An untouched piano, much like a memory, survives as a vestige. Vashti’s music is a quiet reminder that the distortion of dust or the weight of a yellowed key still exists, even if you aren’t present to hear it.

The next morning, my friends and I ate poached eggs and self-serve coffee at a diner. It was November, and we sat by the door because we didn’t want to wait for a table.

Park

“I’ve lived here eight years and always wanted to record the bells in the playground,” Jordan told my friend Brooke and me. We sat at a chess table in a Brooklyn park. It was the second day of spring — a communal joy accented with Whitney Houston and the rumbling of children riding new skates. He sipped his coffee. “But I didn’t want to seem like I was doing anything illegal.”

New York City nearly a decade ago was Foxes in Fiction singing in bodegas before people even knew who they were. It was reading during slightly awful Monday night bands, which in some cases produced more silence than noise. That is, depending on how much you’ve invested. It was always hectic, etched with something new at every corner.

Though this past year without touring paved space for proactive maintenance; for Jordan, it offered time to care for his plants and build a bulk foods section in the kitchen with his girlfriend. It was time, for him, to build physical and mental spaces that didn’t always exist in such mobile communities. And that newness, potted in the stillness of maintenance, wasn’t spun into a pool of constant growth. Like a metaphorical apostrophe, there was enough pause for things that mattered.

Much like Vashti, Jordan didn’t see himself as a performer until he was perceived as one. He saw eye-level amongst friends, strangers, and people he admired. In his customer service-Tumblr days, a band asked him to play a few small shows out on the West Coast. It was the first time Jordan shared his music and from there on, Mutual Benefit picked up. While gaining popularity in the indie folk scene, he never tried to be a buzz band. When we were planning a small New England tour together right before lockdown, he asked, “will these shows be mostly in small community spaces?” (The answer was yes.)

Vashti’s music similarly neutralizes the division between artist and admirer. She’s able to direct a feeling without stating it, like the intuition a pair of twins may share. It’s a sensation that’s hard to understand. But it’s supposed to be difficult, I suppose, because it’s overwhelmingly personal. The people who came to Jordan’s shows when the buzz waned were people who really connected with the music.

Through his music, Jordan rebuilt his twenties not in the form of chronological movement, but, rather, through seemingly unrelated details. He recounted his homes — the attic of a frat house in Ohio; the floors of a Boston living room; the upstairs of Silent Barn in Brooklyn. A man built a tent with a picnic table and slept under it. As bands rumbled through the venue each night, he learned to sleep through noise. Once, he was sandwiched between two bodybuilders on a plane. The armrests were taken, and they were both watching The Joker two minutes apart.

When Jordan attended an artist’s residency in Northern Ireland, he stopped by an afternoon tea shop during one of their popular storytelling hours. There, the owner shared a tale of a woman who transformed into a wolf. The plot was predictable, but what differed was he didn’t ask permission to elaborate on a description. There was no consciousness of time. Most of us are often scared to take up too much space. Or we fear boring someone to death.

It's funny, though, because before Jordan began, he asked us, “Is this okay? This story is pretty tangential.”

After he finished, he said, “It’s about taking just a little bit more time to build a world,” referencing both the Irish storyteller and Vashti. Stunned, I didn’t have anything insightful to say except, “You’re right, it simply is about taking a bit more time to build a world.”

Jane Lai is a musician and as of recent, a music writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been featured in The Alternative, WXPN, and Ears To Feed. She wants her time and energy to go back to music communities that deserve it most. You can contact her on Instagram for press write-ups.