14 Apr 2008, Written by Paul M Davis in music, 0 Comments

Cool As Folk: Vashti Bunyan and Bert Jansch

It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t happen in real life so much as in sepia-toned biopics that take a wide berth with the truth: Deep into the ’60s, a withdrawn songwriter is discovered by the Rolling Stones, and releases a critically acclaimed debut CD. Despite a positive reaction, the album languishes on store shelves, and the record label quickly forgets about the young singer. Despairing and already sick of the machinations of the music industry, the songwriter buys a horse and cart and abandons her music, moving to the British countryside with her boyfriend. Thirty years later, her obscure debut 1970 album, Just Another Diamond Day, is embraced by a young generation of like-minded musicians, who are inspired by her spare and meditative transmissions as they broadcast across a decades-wide gulf. Through their encouragement, the songwriter is coaxed from her long retirement to write, perform and release her second album.

If you were to find such a tale too artfully romantic to believe, you’d be forgiven. But in the case of ethereal folk singer/songwriter Vashti Bunyan, it rings true. And though there is ripe territory to be romanticized in Bunyan’s story–enough to trump any Behind the Music episode for sheer dramatic potential–the songwriter is as bluntly direct in person as she is soft-spoken and mysterious musically. When she disappeared in 1968, Bunyan put the music behind her completely and began a new life, having internalized the indifferent–yet ultimately mistaken–response of the industry and the record-buying public.

“It never occurred to me I’d do anything with music again–I thought I was no good,” says Bunyan. “I didn’t play at all after that–I just assumed I was wrong in the first place to try, and it never occurred to me to try and find that part of my mind.”

Considering the homespun, earthy appeal of her music, it may be perversely fitting that it was through the Internet that Bunyan discovered the impact her music had made. “In [the '60s] it was harder to deal with no feedback, but now with the Internet there’s much more feedback between the artist and the audience,” explains Bunyan. “At the time all I had to go by was sales and so I thought no one liked what I was doing. But over the years, here and there I found reference to the album on the Internet.”

Discovering online recognition for an album that had long attained cult status, Bunyan set about rereleasing Just Another Diamond Day, which quickly found a even wider audience via Internet word-of-mouth. “This time,” Bunyan explains, “my first album reached much more sympathetic ears and I started writing songs for the first time in 30 years.”

It just so happens that at the same time, a loose collective of young upstarts were developing an audience, performing music that owed much to Bunyan’s sparse, intimate and weightless folk airs. Soon, these musicians were calling, and she began collaborating with some of the most accomplished artists in the recent “freak-folk” revival, including Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and the Animal Collective. Writing and recording once again, Bunyan set to work on her second album in 35 years, Lookaftering. Despite the decades separating Bunyan from her previous musical efforts, she found that her approach had changed little. “Quite strangely, the first songs I started writing were very similar to the first songs I wrote when I was 17 or 18,” says Bunyan. “I expected it to feel a little strange, but it doesn’t.”

Say what you will about Devendra Banhart and his sometimes-maligned freak-folk ilk: those kids know their obscurant folk history, and they pay homage to their forebears at every opportunity. Perhaps one of the most notable ’60s folk performers to be restored to prominence by Banhart’s midas touch, hippie fingerpicker par excellence Bert Jansch has enjoyed the fruits of the past few years’ reinvigorated interest in the eccentric, homemade folk sound of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

The thing about these latter-day reappraisals is that they come at the oddest of times: Jansch has long been a hero to guitar players who valued intricacy and songcraft over flash and fireworks. A literate finger-style player who came of age listening to the likes of Big Bill Broonzy and Davy Graham, Jansch has influenced countless players since the release of his 1965 self-titled album, including ’70s icons like Jimmy Page, Neil Young and Nick Drake and Britpop titans such as Suede’s Bernard Butler. Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr has been an avowed Janschian for years, as has Brit chanteuse Beth Orton, yet it’s only in the past handful of years that the Jansch appreciation train has reached critical mass. Once relegated to cutout bins and self-releasing albums, Jansch teamed up with tastemaking American indie label Drag City for his most recent release, The Black Swan.

For the likes of Jansch and Bunyan, however, these are just another step in creative journeys have that has ebbed and flowed but never stalled for lack of creativity or production.

Jansch is the archetypically articulate yet self-effacing Brit; he regards this late-career visitation by fickle Fame with the sort of bemusement unique to his countrymen. When asked why he thinks people have rediscovered his music now, Jansch hazards a modest guess. “I always think the younger generation latches onto stuff their parents were into,” he says. “It comes around in cycles, people discover the music, and then the parents get enthused again.”

Fellow Brit Bunyan is similarly humble. Instead of playing den mother or entitled older artist, she treated her collaborations with her freak-folk offspring as equal partnerships. “In terms of musical development I’m at the same stage as them–I’ve just picked up where I left when I was first writing and recording. People have asked me if I feel entitled to the [younger generation] and I don’t really–I just wish they had been around when I was playing before,” she notes. “It’s strange that there is this gap of years between us.”

Jansch hooked up with Banhart as an extension of a recording project he was working on at his home studio, where Jansch does all his recording, preferring the freedom to “constantly update my equipment and record when I fancy it.” He began searching for a professional producer and approached Noel Georgson of Banhart’s band. Jansch ended up playing as a member of Banhart’s band in 2005, when he came to the United States to perform at the Bridge School Benefit, run by one of Jansch’s most venerable and vocal acolytes. Indeed, Neil Young perhaps best summed up the unapologetic fandom that Jansch inspires in his famous and virtuosic followers, once declaring that “as much of a great guitar player as Jimi [Hendrix] was, Bert Jansch is the same thing for acoustic guitar … and my favorite.”

Despite their roots in the rolling hills of Merry Olde England, Bunyan and Jansch share a spiritual kinship with the Bay Area particularly–Jansch has been a standard-bearer for the nascent freak-folk scene there in recent years, but as is evidenced by Neil Young’s devotion, that regional appreciation is nothing new. For Bunyan, the Bay Area has stood as a idealized nexus of creative output for decades. In the cultural history of the region, Bunyan sees a kindred musical spirit that eluded her in mid-’60s England. “I’ve often thought I should have gone to San Francisco in 1968,” says Bunyan, with a slight twinge of regret in her voice. “I think things might have turned out much differently.”

Portions of this piece previously appeared in Metro Santa Cruz and Metro Silicon Valley.

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Paul M Davis is a Chicago-based freelance writer obsessed with the media, class and arcade-style video golf. He is also the editor of Is Greater Than. His personal site can be found at www.paulmdavis.com and he Tumbls at Eventual Ghost.

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