The folk album that “eased the angst” of Aldous Harding
Tracing the lineage of folk music is a vastly different beast than tracing the lineage of rock or pop music. As much as we love those genres, they go back about 70 years, and then their lineage begins flowing into blues, jazz, country, and, that word again, folk music. Folk is something else altogether. It’s not even really a genre in the sense of the word today; it’s more of an act. The communal act of singing together is something that completely transcends genre. Seeing who inspired who is an act of historical research rather than merely reading a few interviews.
One of the vanishingly few upsides of the way music is today is that we can see who inspired who more directly than ever. Lifting up names from the past that didn’t get their deserved time in the spotlight. This can be comparatively recent, like the 1990s slowcore band Duster, which got a resurgence on TikTok that made them bigger than they ever were in their prime. Or it can happen to artists from earlier periods, like Vashti Bunyan.
Until the early 2000s, Bunyan was in near total obscurity. A singer who, after impressing family friend and Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham with her voice, released a few singles and a studio album in 1970 called Just Another Diamond Day. These records failed to reach anything resembling an audience, and she backed out of the industry to start a family shortly after their release. Little did she know a cult following began building around those records within a few years.
By the 1990s, the few copies of her album that remained in circulation were going for thousands of pounds on auction. Those that weren’t were safely in the hands of the up-and-coming freak folk movement, which led to a re-release of the album in 2000.
Finally, the world of folk music had caught up to a talent as far ahead of the game as Bunyan had been in the late 1960s. The likes of Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsome weren’t just singing her praises; they were collaborating with her on the new music she was making for the first time in decades.
Among the biggest fans of Bunyan’s work was the New Zealand folk singer Hannah Topp, otherwise known as Aldous Harding. When creating a list of her favourite songs for NPR, she put the classic album’s pseudo-title track ‘Diamond Day’ right at the top of it. When a snippet of the song played on the show, she remarked, “Actually, just hearing that little bit made me a bit teary because I haven’t listened to it for so long.”
She goes on to talk about what the record meant to her as a teenager, talking about the album as a whole as “the record that I put on to ease my angst when I was 18 or 19 — to escape into [a world that was] slightly softer.” We all need those records like that, and Just Another Diamond Day, with its calming, idyllic visions of pastoral life, is a record to truly get lost in when things get tough. A balm for the hard times we’re living in that never stops soothing, no matter where we find ourselves.
