Vashti Bunyan's Winter Is Blue is a pretty dark song lyrically. The first two verses go like this-
'Winter is blue/ Living is gone/ Some are just sleeping/ In spring they'll go on/ Our love is dead/ Nothing is crying/ Love will not find even/ One more new morning'
Later on she sings, 'Winter is blue/ Everything's leaving/ Fires are now burning/ And life has no reason'. This version of the song came out decades after it was recorded. Vashti recorded it for Andrew Loog- Oldham's Immediate label but it was left in the vaults until 2007. The bleakness of the lyrics are countered by the sweetness of the arrangement, the finger picked guitar (said to be Jimmy Page) and strings, the sort of sound Loog-Oldham created for Marianne Faithful and tried to replicate with Vashti. It was re- recorded for Vashti's 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day, the album that sold so few copies on release that she packed up and left, moving to Ireland and then Scotland before being rediscovered in 2000 and giving her a second musical life, three decades after she abandoned the first.
Winter Is Blue (Immediate Version)
This one minute thirty seconds long clip from the 1967 documentary Tonight Let's All Make Love In London shows Vashti at the mic in the studio and Andrew with Glyn Johns at the desk.
In 2020 The Avalanches returned with several singles that led to their third album, We Will Always Love You, a vast, widescreen, genre hopping double album. It included this sumptuous pop- soul song, Reflecting Light, singer Sananda Maitreya sharing the vocal space with a sample of Vashti (from her 1970 song Glow Worms), the two voices coming together for the line 'dreamers moving slowly through the reflecting light'. On Reflecting Light is as much a sound collage as a song, the synths, samples and soft padding drums conjuring up something genuinely cosmic.
2 comments:
Beautiful, both of them.
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