“Once I had a child/He was wilder than moonlight/He could do it all/Like he’d been here before,” sings Vashti Bunyan on “Here Before”, the second track on Lookaftering. It’s a simple enough melody, the verse continuing: “Once I had a child/She was smiling like sunshine/She could see it all/Like she’d been here before.” But the song is captivating. Bunyan’s vocals, whisper-like yet self-assured, sit atop gently plucked strings. They are soon joined by other, layered vocals – twinkling in the background like murmurs in a crowd – and a glockenspiel, which provides glimmers of sweetness.
If you know Bunyan’s story, the song holds an extra prescience. It is at once an ode to her children – a third child, born 13 years later, is the subject of the next verse and a nod to their influence on her musical rebirth. When Bunyan released Lookaftering in 2005 – a new reissue marks 20 years of this sublime record – she had herself “been here before”, having written and released songs decades earlier. But the experience hadn’t been easy, and so she had stepped away.
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