“Lookaftering” is Vashti Bunyan’s own, made-up word, one that she and her family use when caring for each other, for friends, or addressing issues and tasks. It’s also the title of the singer / songwriter’s 2005 album. With the its reissue, in a deluxe expanded edition, the verb now also suggests a sense of nostalgia and tending to the past. 

The LP is at its most unadorned on songs such as Brother, where Bunyan remembers her lost sibling and sings of returning to their childhood home. Scaling the trees that they used to climb. Producer Max Richter adding only piano. Hidden airs Bunyan’s belief in the transient nature of attraction, and her doubts in love at first sight, while Richter provides support on recorder. On the closing Wayward Hum he plays a gentle glockenspiel solo.

While the pieces are centred around Bunyan’s spellbinding voice and Richter’s sensitive accompaniment, the project picked up guest players, almost through chance. Joanna Newsom was performing locally, so Richter reached out.  The Californian harpist then taking the time to contribute to 2 tracks, Against The Sky and If I Were. The former, full of words of love and images of natural beauty, has Richter on wine glasses and Mellotron, while on the latter, where Bunyan’s questions test loyalty and the depths of feelings, he opts for Fender Rhodes. Marcelo de Oliviera assists on acoustic guitar.

On Wayward – lyrically concerned with trading wanderlust for family and domesticity – Bunyan shares 6-string duties with Texan troubadour Devendra Banhart, who brings a country-fied twang of bent pedal steel notes. Kevin Barker and Otto Hauser of San Franciscan band Vetiver also both help out on electric guitar, while Richter creates ripples of piano and Hammond organ. Fridge’s Adem Ilhan adds autoharp.

Ilhan also appears on Here Before, where he switches to harmonium, as a multi-tracked Bunyan ponders her children’s past lives. Immortalising her son and daughter as individuals “smiling like sunshine” and “wilder than moonlight”. Richter’s glass harmonica giving the tune a magical music box, enchanted edge.

Members of Richter’s orchestral ensemble score several of the songs, on cello, viola and violin. The dramatic, cinematic Same But Different, or Lately, where Rebecca Wood’s oboe summon the colours, the blue sky and rich greens, of high summer.

Feet Of Clay finds Bunyan self-depreciatingly admonishing a lover for being foolish enough to fall for her, while the strings strike up a waltz. This piece is of particular interest since Robert Kirby plays French horn. Over three decades earlier, Kirby contributed orchestral arrangements to Vashti’s 1970 debut, Just Another Diamond Day.

Kirby’s trumpet graces Turning Backs, a song that watches lovers and seasons come and go. The assembled musicians – including Wood on a double-reeded Cor Anglais and Mice Parade’s Adam Pierce on dulcimer – raising waves, classical crescendos, a la Wim Mertens’ Struggle For Pleasure.

The expanded edition of Lookaftering includes demo versions, alternate takes and live performances. A lot of those demos, dating from 2001 to 2005 were recorded by Bunyan alone, accompanying herself on acoustic and electric guitar, plus a variety of keys that range from piano to a harmonium / squeezebox-like synth. The sound is, of course, stripped back compared to that of the finished album, and perhaps more autumnal. Bunyan’s voice, rich with reverb, and mic’d so closely that you can hear her drawing breath. A live version of Lately, from an early “comeback” gig held in L.A., in 2006, feels looser, but still pitch perfect.

Listening to the demos and the final versions side-by-side while reading the sleeve notes is a wonderful experience. Learning, and hearing how the songs and the long-player evolved. Bunyan and Richter explaining how all the artists involved, who’d been touched by Bunyan’s then super hard to find and cult `70s debut, jumped at the opportunity to join in. Richter says, “It felt like a community project; a family of people coming together.” Plus, the image of the Grammy-nominated composer creating arrangements with wine glasses in his spare room is priceless.

The expanded edition of Vashti Bunyan’s Lookaftering can be ordered directly from FatCat Records.