Vashti Bunyan
'Heartleap'
Release Date: 6th October 2014
Formats: LP / CD / Dig
Nine years after 'Lookaftering', her last album of new material, legendary
British singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan returns with a breathtaking new LP.
Recorded largely in her home studio, 'Heartleap' is a unique and entrancing
collection of ten songs forming what Vashti is adamant will be her final
album.
Vashti's third album follows her rediscovery - after thirty years in the
wilderness - with the 2000 re-release of 'Just Another Diamond Day' (a bona
fide cult classic that made # 53 in the Observer Music monthly's 'top 100
British albums of all time'), and the critical success of 2005's
'Lookaftering'. 'Heartleap' has a classic sound and sees her break free from
previous frustrations to deliver an album where - for the first time - she
herself has been in control of the whole process, from writing and arranging
to playing and recording. Working predominantly from a studio set up in her
Edinburgh home, the record was slowly pieced together, and reveals an artist
at her peak, capturing her songs within fluid settings that masterfully
marry content and form.
Both 'JADD' and 'Lookaftering' saw Vashti's songs arranged and framed by
others. Joe Boyd's production and Robert Kirby's arranging of the former
remain timelessly classy, whilst Max Richter's bold production of the
latter was enhanced by contributions from a raft of supporting artists
(including Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Vetiver and Adem), all eagerly
adding their colours. Vashti is justly proud of 'Lookaftering', but
'Heartleap' is a strong and more personal record, standing solely on the
merits and patient endeavour of its author rather than being buoyed by and
filtered through the cachet and collaborative creativity of a powerful
supporting cast. It is ultimately a less mediated record, one that Vashti
feels is far closer to the vision she set out to realise.
The vast majority of 'Heartleap' was recorded and edited by Vashti, who
"wanted it to be more akin to my very first recordings, pre-'Diamond Day'. I
wanted to see what I could do without using the ideas of others. It would
have been much easier had I recorded it with an engineer - I would not have
had to spend so much time on editing - but that's been the interesting part.
If I'd taken these songs and gone into a studio with them they might have
turned out very differently, perhaps more 'produced' - but not as near to
how I hear them for myself."
Recording her vocals when no one else was around to overhear - freed Vashti
up to deliver more confident performances. Equally, working without the
induced pressures of studio deadlines enabled her to craft it slowly and
lovingly in her own time, weaving together tracks out of numerous takes.
Predominantly guitar or piano led - with additional instrumentation building
throughout - the songs have no underpinning bass-line or percussion, giving
each instrument and voice the chance to pace itself.
Where the synthetic instrumentation on Vashti's 'Lookaftering' demos was
rejected in favour of recording the warmth and organic nature of real
acoustic instruments, 'Heartleap' retains those electronic voices, alongside
studio-recorded string and recorder arrangements - the two mixed in a
delicate balance between the synthesized and the organic. Freely admitting
that she can't actually play the piano, Vashti built the keyboard parts from
single notes and multiple one-handed takes. No-one else would have made it
or played it that way and it's that voice, her own voice, that helps lend
the record its power and marks it out as distinctive.
"The whole point of the album was finally to learn a way that would enable
me to record the music that is in my head, by myself. I neither read nor
write music, nor can I play piano with more than one hand at a time, but I
have loved being able to work it all out for myself and make it sound the
way I wanted. I've built these songs over years. The album wouldn't have
happened any other way. Sometimes when I replace the arrangements with real
instruments they don't work in the same way. The extended notes of the
clarinet on the song 'Heartleap' for instance could not be played on a real
clarinet. I can't 'play' a musician playing their instrument - I can't make
them play each note as I want it, but with a keyboard and a music program I
am the player."
Concise as ever, Vashti's lyrics open out a series of locket-like miniatures
- stories of family and friends, lives and loves, memories, dreams and
realities; of differences in perception and the gaps between people /
meanings / understandings; of coping, getting by, surviving. "All the songs
are based on real stories or real people, 'Mother' especially. 'Blue Shed'
was written when the house was still full of young people slamming doors and
yelling. (I do miss them now). 'Gunpowder ' is about an ex-partner with whom
communication can still be difficult." There is no vast sweep or ambitious
stabbing at the grandiose in her lyric writing, yet in their honesty these
close-focused articulations draw you in and resonate with heartfelt emotions
and universal truths.
The luminous musical arrangements act with the lyrics illustratively -
'Jellyfish' ripples and floats from side to side, "and is soft apart from
the vibraphone which is quite harsh - like the dream it's about. The kalimba
and the tumbling guitars in Across the Water are to give the song the sound
of waves on shingle, and the piano on 'Mother' is to sound a little like the
old un-tuned upright piano I overheard my mother playing sometimes, 'briefly
unbound' from her duties as wife and mother."
Recording in studios in California, New York and London - but mostly alone
in her own studio - it took in total seven years to put together these ten
songs. The first was written in 2007, the last just two months before
mastering. A hiatus in recording came with the untimely passing of Robert
Kirby in 2009. Robert had arranged three songs on 'Just Another Diamond Day'
and the pair had just reconnected and planned to work on new arrangements
together - just weeks before he died. It would be another two years before
she took the decision that she must arrange the music herself, with Robert
always in mind. The subsequent three years saw her gradually picking the
thread back up and working with renewed purpose. Slowly more songs found
their way out of her. Gems like 'The Boy' - which she'd sat on, fretted over
and intended to ditch - were prised from oblivion. Seven became ten and
those around her finally began to really believe that an end was in sight.
The right final mix frustratingly eluded her until the album magically came
together in a week in May 2014 - when it was balanced and mastered
beautifully at the hands of mixing engineer Martin Korth - and mastering
genius Mandy Parnell at her Black Saloon studios in London.
The album's striking cover artwork is once again taken from a painting by
Vashti's daughter, Whyn Lewis, and forms a neat companion to her hare
painting featured on 'Lookaftering', giving the impression (besides both
album's titles being portmanteaus) of a pair of bookends. Whyn describes
this painting (titled 'Hart's Leap') as being "about getting away
unscathed... about confidence and self-assuredness, and wisdom. The deer is
leaping forward while looking backwards - and it has a little grin. It is
said that deer make a large bound of joy when they know they are escaping.
The deer is linked with the deerhound shown on the deer's collar - what it
has been escaping from. The deerhound in this case really is just allegory
for the thing that chases or hounds you. Life is most appreciated when it is
challenged."
One of the final songs to be written, the gorgeously gauzy, autobiographical
title track came to Vashti all of a sudden in March this year, as she was
gazing at Whyn's painting. Recorded straight off, with only minor changes
made in the final mix, it closes the album perfectly. A bittersweet song, it
cryptically catalogues and a whole life's worth of loving, losing, letting
go, getting through; of heartbreaks and happiness and the lulls in between -
through a minimal, modular, repetitive structure with recourse to just a
handful of compound word variations - surges and tugs between head and
heart. Simultaneously aching and hopeful, it looks back with both pain and
joy, with resigned acceptance. If it truly is to be the final word on a
final album, then it is an utterly fitting and devastatingly beautiful one.
Like the deer on the cover painting, 'Heartleap' moves gracefully,
enchantingly. Overcoming adversity through sheer willpower, its very
existence is a dazzling triumph.
'Heartleap' will be released on FatCat in UK / Europe on October 6th and in
North America via DiCristina on oct 7th.
Vashti will play a run of UK tour dates in smaller settings with guitarist
Gareth Dickson (her first since 2010) in support of the album, with more
dates to be added in early 2015.
UK Tour Dates
07 Oct - MAC, Birmingham, UK - tickets <http://macbirmingham.co.uk/>
08 Oct - St. Pancras Church, London, UK - tickets
<http://www.songkick.com/concerts/20871843-vashti-bunyan-at-st-pancras-old-c
hurch>
09 Oct - St. Pancras Church, London, UK - tickets
<http://www.songkick.com/concerts/20872063-vashti-bunyan-at-st-pancras-old-c
hurch>
11 Oct - The Band Room, Farndale, UK - tickets
<http://www.thebandroom.co.uk/>
12 Oct - St. Philip's Church, Manchester, UK - tickets
<http://www.songkick.com/concerts/20902398-vashti-bunyan-at-st-phillips-chur
ch>
Tracklisting:
1. Across The Water
2. Holy Smoke
3. Mother
4. Jellyfish
5. Shell
6. The Boy
7. Gunpowder
8. Blue Shed
9. Here
10. Heartleap
