Wayward Hum

Last night we saw Vashti Bunyan at the Bowery Ballroom and it was lovely and flowery in the very best way possible. The folk songstress is an obscure legend and I think this is her first US appearance in something like thirty years.

She is so charming and modest and radiant. Yes, radiant is the right word. She prefaced each song with a bashful explanation, like, "I wrote Feet of Clay in 1963, he he he." Because she must have thought that we, a room full of New York twenty-somethings, would think that was ancient.

All of her songs were written for her beautiful children, the beautiful man she spends her life with or the beautiful man who once broke her heart. She even wrote quite a few songs about the 700 mile, horse-drawn wagon journey she took in 1968, from London to the Scottish isle of Hebrides. That was really beautiful.

David Byrne was in the audience, not more than five feet away from us, solo, with a bicycle helmet in one hand. So for part of the show, I watched a legend watch a legend, but I made sure not to stare.