Wayward

Just Another Life to Live

By: Vashti Bunyan

Narrated by: Vashti Bunyan

Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

In 1968, Vashti Bunyan gave up everything and everybody she knew in London to take to the road with a horse, wagon, dog, guitar and her then partner.

They made the long journey up to the Outer Hebrides in an odyssey of discovery and heartbreak, full of the joy of freedom and the trudge of everyday reality, sleeping in the woods, fighting freezing winters and homelessness.

Along the way, Vashti wrote the songs that would lead to the recording of her 1970's album Just Another Diamond Day, the lilting lyrics and guitar conveying innocent wonder at the world around her, whilst disguising a deeper turmoil under the surface.

From an unconventional childhood in post-war London, to a fledgling career in mid-sixties pop - recording a single written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards - to the despair and failure to make any headway with her own songs, she rejected the music world altogether and left it all behind. After retreating to a musical wilderness for thirty years, the rediscovery of her recordings in 2000 brought Vashti a second chance to write, record and perform once more.

One of the great hippie myths of the 1960s, Wayward, Just Another Life to Live, rewrites the narrative of a barefoot girl on the road to describe a life lived at full tilt from the first, revealing what it means to change course and her emotional struggle, learning to take back control of her own life.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Vashti Bunyan (P)2022 Orion Publishing Group

Critic reviews

This is a magical and transporting memoir, relating how Bunyan ducked out of the London music scene, instead choosing to make her way - by foot and wagon - to the Outer Hebrides. Her mesmerising viewpoint and lyrical outlook on life will be familiar to anyone who, like me, loves her music, but Wayward proves that Bunyan has lived the best possible life, on her own idiosyncratic terms (Maggie O'Farrell)

A gorgeous account of outsiderness and survival; a map of how to live outside the boundaries and of striving for an authentic artistic life. A quietly defiant and moving work (Sinéad Gleeson)

Vashti Bunyan possesses one of the purest voices English music has ever produced, and now that unique otherness translates to literature. Wayward is an epic in miniature, a mythical tale with echoes of her ancestor John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, made all the more magical by the fact it actually happened. I loved - and lived - every sentence (Benjamin Myers)

If you’d like to walk around in her mind a while

This is a perfect thing, and I cried all the way through it, as I’ve cried at the beauty of her lyrics through the years. What luck, to have some context for songs like “Mother,” and “Timothy Grub,” and “Against the Sky.” Her reading voice is also pleasant to listen to, and I’ll listen again I’m sure. Very grateful for this work.

Wonderful

It is special to hear Vashti Bunyan’s memoir read by Vashti herself. Her voice and pacing is very relaxing. I hope she is well wherever she is right now.