Written by: Dave Cantrell
You’ve come through storms, you’ve suffered lulls. A long public silence nearly swallowed you whole. Life happened as it happens to all, there were kids and dust-ups, lovers and break-ups. Death filtered in through the blinds along with the dusty morning sunlight, a mundane near-invisible presence that when seen at the right angle had the paradoxical effect of accentuating life’s possibilities. Love brightens, sorrows deepen, the contrasts sharpen and nothing isn’t beautiful even if it’s in a terrible way. Intuition is in our senses and if attuned the artist’s heart, her very tissue, absorbs the flux and flow of life entire and in a sort of zen fugue state of suspension, simultaneously hyper-alert and lost in a trance, she brings form to it, gives it salience and wit and body, accomplished by virtue of an inveterate sense of craft, with all its experimentation, creative cul-de-sacs, and tripped-over delights. Discovery, in short, is born.
If any artist exemplifies the practical mysticism just described it’s Vashti Bunyan, the British-born, now Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter whose third – and final – album Heartleap was issued October 8th of DeCristina. That it’s the artist’s third album in forty-three years is both material and inconsequential. Yes the now well-known story – considered cult classic debut (Just Another Diamond Day) ‘rediscovered’ during the heady new wyrd folk revival rush of the late 20th C. and reissued in 2000, championed by the then-omnipresent Devendra Banhart (among many others) who indeed helped provide a guiding impetus for a new record that led to 2005’s triumphant Lookaftering – backdrops any conversation regarding Ms Bunyan. The mystery of a long disappearance can’t help but intrigue, especially as concerns an artist of such obvious gifts, and in fact the relatively lengthy interim between that comeback album and this one adds still more dramatic grist that will be cited as necessary here but in essence, in the end, it’s the work itself that will be left standing on its own while all the incidental, biographical chaff falls away, and, with a willowy fierceness, Heartleap stands tall indeed.
Recorded mostly at home in her own studio, augmented by sessions in California, New York, and London, the album, like a songwriter’s scrapbook, pulls together ten tracks written over a span of seven years. Though to some extent due to the artist’s determination to capture these pieces precisely as she heard and assembled them rather than repeating Lookaftering‘s reliance on the accompaniment and production of others (“I wanted to try and emerge from the shelter…stand out in the open,” she’s said), the stretched-out gestation had as much to do with the untimely passing of Just Another Diamond Day‘s arranger Robert Kirby, with whom Bunyan had just reconnected and made plans for what would become Heartleap. Stopped in her mortal tracks for a couple of years, the spark eventually flickered back to life with an even greater intensity, the white blue flame of devotion to the aim of finishing this record never greater, Kirby’s spirit animate behind her. The results, beyond what might have been reasonably anticipated, glow with a quiet incandescence.
First piece “Across the Water,” accented by the plucked honesty of a kalimba, visited by an improvised warmth of strings and gracefully negotiating an existential arc between the blurring footfall of days and our transverse across it, is as delicate as it is fearless, Bunyan’s words, as ever, direct yet artful (“Lived on wit / got away with it“), the simpler always more profound when one is caught up in a ruminative swirl, a subtle dictum that more or less serves as the operative crux of this artist’s work.
Even when, as she often does, Ms Bunyan swerves into the outwardly allusive passage – let’s take the hobo dust on her boots in second track “Holy Smoke” – the language is decidedly concise, there’s an almost Protestant economy to it that would find its flinty-but-sagacious echo in the north woods of the northeastern United States. Helps that the track itself is gentle and self-kept, seemingly following in its own emanations, gliding by with the aid of the sparkling, spare guitar work or Gareth Dickson and Andy Cabic, its falling-snow pace softly shadowed by the backing vox of Cabric and Banhart (his only appearance this time) and a brightly soughing string arrangement.
Direct or oblique, the fact is that the literal as metaphorical (or, of course, the other way around), another distinctly Vashtian gift, is on uninhibited display on Heartleap. “All the songs are based on real stories or real people” she has said, which is frequently true – and stated as such – by many the singer-songwriter but Bunyan’s work, here and previously but most lucidly on this final effort, mines the richness of a life lived and fully felt as few artists can. The tip-toeing piano and sumptuous regret of strings on “Mother,” the stunningly unadorned heartbreak – and heartbreaking resilience – of “The Boy,” so implicitly honest it’s staggering, “Gunpowder”‘s emotional Pentimento effect while recalling a gone relationship, pinballing nimbly between the too-common poles of wistful bitterness and a futility of recalled effort that over the years has settled into self-blame – to pick but three – all illustrate the remarkable acuity Bunyan brings to complex entanglements, which, in reality, all our lives are filled with. That perspective in “Gunpowder?” We’ve all felt that – rueful, doubting, reflective – but few of us have the gifts or courage to convert it into the succinct poetry of sound and word as found on this record. Nor do most of us, it should be hastily added, have the voice.
Singing with an utmost clarity of heart, Bunyan’s voice here permeates, blends into its environment as if it’s one of the elements, floating grounded whispered knowing and never less than utterly present. It’s a harp-like instrument, the lissome centerpiece that controls proceedings with the authority of its delicacy, if you will. Whether shimmering with a deftly reeds-blowing-in-the-wind vibrato as on the prayerful but clear-eyed “Blue Shed” – all the better to underline the track’s cloistered feel, one of three where it’s just Vashti alone with minimal instrumentation – or weaving in multiple strands of rippling harmony through a pool of strings recorder and a tripling of acoustics on “Jellyfish,’ the vocals glistening, shifting in their layers and movement, enough to suggest the titled creature (unnamed in the lyrics) while embedding themselves with grace in the track’s eddy of sound, all glissandoed tones and mournful hope, the voice invites us in to an intimate, unvarnished place, we are there breathing in the room with her.
That willingness to proceed quietly unbridled, with very little in the way of ameliorative filters placed between the singer’s emotions and us listening (the title track, closing the album, Bunyan alone with naught but bare if shining synths and her guitar, may as well be a case of us eavesdropping on her heart’s internal process as it unfurls in front of us), speaks nearly as much to this artist’s inherent fearlessness as it does the, well, artistry with which that fearlessness is shaped into her material, which is significant. When, as that title track, still glowing, fades into the woodwork, one pauses to recall that nearly every aspect of this recording is a product of Ms Bunyan’s ultimately victorious struggle to capture what her instincts led her to capture, that it was her – after all those ‘wilderness’ years, after the tragedy-jolted hiatus that followed Lookaftering and nearly laid this project to an unfulfilled rest – that shepherded this album to completion almost single-handedly, the stature of the achievement grows by (Heart)leaps and bounds. Once that’s acknowledged, though, it’s the stark, hypnotizing beauty of the work itself that draws us fully in.
Vashti Bunyan’s songs, in both lyric and structure, in their luminous wholeness, invite us to something like an expertly-curated butterfly exhibit where we’re reflexively led to imagine the speculative, gracefully erratic flights of the creatures rather than the pinned marvels presented in front of us. Much the same as the album’s cover, taken from a painting by Whyn Lewis, Bunyan’s daughter, where it’s not only the animal’s innate spirit that pulls at us but what spurred it to escape in the first place and what spurred it to turn its head. Every moment in this life springs inside its own complexity and it’s from that subtle if somewhat overwhelming truth that Vashti Bunyan’s work has striven to emanate. She’s reached again on Heartleap, and landed as strong as ever, stronger.