The title tune from Vashti Bunyan's debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, finds the folk-pop singer quietly contemplating the small pleasures of a simple life.
Prior to recording the album, Bunyan had given up on her career after releasing a series of failed singles. She and her then-boyfriend, Robert Lewis, set off on a six month horse-and-cart journey to the Isle of Skye in Scotland, where the singer Donovan was renting his property as a sort of commune for musicians, writers, and other creative types.
During a break from their trip in the winter of 1968, they met a Dutch couple who offered to set up a Christmas tour for Bunyan in Holland. Shy about performing and uninterested in continuing her singing career, Bunyan was reluctant to take them up on the offer, but she needed the money. What followed was a string of disappointing gigs for children who couldn't understand English and loud pub-goers who drowned out her gentle singing with their loud chatter.
But it wasn't all for nothing. After the disheartening tour, she took a train back through Belgium, and the scenery outside her window inspired a new mindset, along with the song "Diamond Day." She recalled in her autobiography, Wayward: Just Another To Live:
"The flat, neat fields ploughed by fat, short-legged horses, the haystacks in perfect rows, the seeds being sown. I felt I could be happy with that. A blade of grass, a grain of wheat - and a word."
Despite abandoning her recording career, Bunyan continued writing songs as a way to keep her spirits up on her arduous journey. Thanks to a bit of criticism from her boyfriend, the nature-inspired tunes like "Diamond Day" were different from her previous lovelorn numbers like "
Train Song" and "
I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind."
She told the Songfacts Podcast in 2023:
"My partner at the time said, 'Why don't you stop writing these miserable little love songs and write about the wonderful world around you?' And that's kind of what I did."
When Bunyan returned to London to resume her horse-and-cart travels, she met producer Joe Boyd, who showed interest in turning her traveling songs into an album. Returning to the recording studio was the last thing she wanted to do, but she agreed to give it a shot. Joined by members of Fairport Convention (Dave Swarbrick and Simon Nicol) and The Incredible String Band (Robin Williamson), along with guitarist Mike Crowther, pianist/organist Christopher Sykes, and string arranger Robert Kirby, Bunyan cut her debut album at London's Sound Techniques studio in November 1969. Her friend John James, a fingerstyle guitarist, also played the organ and a keyboard instrument called a dulcitone on a few tracks.
Unfortunately, only a few hundred copies were released and it quickly faded into obscurity. Not even Bunyan was a fan. She told Songfacts: "I didn't like it myself. I thought it was too folky, too fay, too gentle, and I abandoned it completely for 30 years."
By the 1990s, the album was gaining traction in the alternative-folk community and the few copies floating around were going for thousands of dollars. In 2000, it was reissued on CD and Bunyan was shocked at the response.
"A totally different generation understood it in a way that my contemporaries never had," she said. "This time I could read lovely things said about it, and it was an extraordinary experience for me to have people say good things about my music because nothing had ever been said about it."
The album's resurgence inspired Bunyan to get back into the studio and record two more albums, Lookaftering and Heartleap. She also collaborated with contemporary folk-pop artists like Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective, and Devendra Banhart - all of whom cited Bunyan as a major influence on their own music.
This was used in the movies Away We Go (2009) and Babyteeth (2019).
