Wine and Cheese: Sibylle Baier and Vashti Bunyan
Two artists who released folk music in the early 1970s and gained popularity decades later make for a breathtaking listening experience.
It’s your dream collab. The artists you add back-to-back to the queue. The pairing you can’t get enough of. You know they sound good together, but why? Welcome to Wine and Cheese, a series investigating the why and telling you all about it.
Written by William Golden
Photos courtesy of Orange Twin and Fat Cat Records
Sometimes, classics never see the light of day. Artists pour their heart and soul into a project, but choose not to release it to a large audience or pursue a different career path instead. Sibylle Baier and Vashti Bunyan are two artists who recorded folk music in the ‘70s that did not gain popularity until the 21st century. Through their music, the listener is sucked into a world of melancholy, wonder, and bliss.
Sibylle Baier’s story is an enigmatic one. A friend of Baier’s took her on a road trip to the Alps and Genoa, which is recounted in the first song she wrote, “Remember the Day.” Baier recorded songs from 1970 to 1973 on a reel-to-reel recorder in the living room of her house in Germany. She gave cassettes containing her music to friends, but it remained unheard by the general public for more than three decades. Baier’s son Robby compiled his mother’s music and gave a copy to J Mascis, lead singer of Dinosaur Jr and head of the label Orange Twin. The result was the 2006 release of Colour Green. One of her close friends (and dedicatee of the song “Wim”) was Wim Wenders, the legendary filmmaker who featured Baier in his 1974 movie “Alice in the Cities.” While shooting a documentary, Wenders saw a copy of Colour Green in a Chicago record store. He regained contact with Baier, and she recorded the song “Let Us Know” for his 2008 film “Palermo Shooting.” To this day, it remains the only song she has publicly released since Colour Green.
Unlike Baier, who had no intentions of distributing her music to a wide audience, Vashti Bunyan seemed like she might be the next breakout star. While in London, she was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham, who also managed the Rolling Stones. She signed to Decca Records and released the melancholic “I’d Like To Walk Around in Your Mind,” a song penned by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, in 1967. It failed to take off, and Bunyan decided to travel with her partner to a commune started by the singer Donovan on an archipelago off the west coast of Scotland known as the Hebrides. They traveled by horse-and-buggy, and by the time they arrived a year and a half later, it had fallen apart. During the trip, Bunyan wrote music that turned into the album Just Another Diamond Day, which was released in 1970 but largely ignored by contemporaries. She stopped recording music to live in Scotland and take care of her family.
Decades later, she entered her name on an online search engine, and found that she had developed a fanbase, with her albums fetching high prices in online auctions. Pleased at the positive reception, she reissued Just Another Diamond Day in 2000. Among her new fans included artists from the burgeoning “freak folk” movement, including Devendra Barnhart, Joanna Newsom, and Animal Collective, the latter of whom collaborated with her on the EP Prospect Hummer. She started writing music again, and Barnhart and Newsom appeared on her 2005 album Lookaftering, which was followed by 2014’s Heartleap.
Both artists were inspired to make some of their earliest music by going on trips through the countryside, which is reflected in their lyrical content. Many of Bunyan’s lyrics focus on the beauty of nature, such as the beautiful image of “Dawntime mist begins reflecting light” on “Glow Worms,” or the “laughing stream / Down in a valley that is pine tree tall” described in the lush song “Rainbow River.” Baier laments “When I pass through the leg high grass, I shall die / Under the jasmine I shall die / In the elder tree” on her song “I Lost Something in the Hills.” In their music, nature is integral to life and death.
Baier’s voice is lower in register and sounds clear yet world-weary, while Bunyan’s voice from the same period hits higher notes and has a more childlike tone. Except for the final song on the album, “Give Me a Smile,” which features shimmering strings, Colour Green has no accompaniment besides Baier’s acoustic guitar. In contrast, Bunyan’s music contains a variety of woodwinds, strings, and keyboards, with classical composer Max Richter adding electronic sounds on Lookaftering. However, the quality that really connects the artists is the complex mix of emotions that surrounds the music. Baier and Bunyan’s songs are colored by a tinge of sorrow, with the focus of much of their music being longing for what has been lost and regret about past relationships.
Through their decisions to give up a career in music to pursue raising a family and gaining minor cult followings decades later, Baier and Bunyan are connected through more than just their musical styles. Ultimately, however, their stunning, ethereal songs are the reason these two artists should be listened to together, preferably in the majesty of the outdoors.