British-Brazilan singer-songwriter Liana Flores pairs dream-like vignettes of her intimate world with wistful guitar melodies to get lost in, combining a unique and intoxicating range of stylistic influences from British folk and classic jazz to ‘60s Brazilian bossa nova.
Her latest record, Flower of the soul, is out now.
(Photo Credit: Sequoia Ziff)
In early summer, my dear enormous goldfish had outgrown its tank, so my first love and I decided to move it to the pond in his garden an hour away. My father drove the fish and me there very carefully, but the country roads were twisty and some water slopped out of the tank onto my lap. I hoped my fish in its glass box wasn’t too disturbed by the journey. We got there and delivered that fish gently into its new home and it looked so little again all of a sudden. It swam away from me and for a moment I imagined I could keep it in my pocket for all time. It lived in its new home with a few koi for maybe a month then a heron ate them all.
In a lily pond I lay
All upon a summer’s day
I don’t remember exactly when I found Just Another Diamond Day. I wasn’t yet in the habit of listening to much music then, mainly Broadway musicals. I liked the soaring big voices and drama. Vashti’s music was rural and so gentle-voiced that it’s near painful to listen to. I felt drawn to her instantly and read her Wikipedia. The album had a story, like my musicals; in the late 1960s, a city-weary Londoner (I’d assumed she was a smalltown girl such as I!) goes with her boyfriend on an across-country horse and cart pilgrimage to a hippie commune, writing these sweet songs along the way about simple pleasures, dogs and hay bales and things, but it takes too long and there’s nothing there any more when she finally arrives. She didn’t write it as a folk album, but the subject matter landed it in that category, and it arrived a little late to catch the wave of the ‘60s folk revival so slipped away unnoticed at the time. I felt understood by that too. I’d graduated high school (and the first love) now and had a job typing out rows of numbers from people’s driving licenses into a form. You did a certain amount every hour, and no mistakes. My simple pleasures were conversations at night with my weird friends on Discord (headphones on, in case home was loud), and singing and playing ukulele to my phone and uploading it to YouTube. My classmates had moved to cities for university at this point.
Whisper fairy stories ‘til they’re real
Wonder how the night can make us feel
Loving living more with love to stay
Long past sadness that was in our way
You get a sense listening to Just Another Diamond Day in particular that it’s a dream longing itself into being. A picture of a gentler way of life from someone I imagined to be at times at odds with the pace of the world, like me. I read her book as soon as it came out in 2022 and loved how honest she was about the very unRomantic reality of her (now mythicized) horse and cart journey: She ate boiled nettles with salt, said shit and fuck and witnessed “plain raw killing” of farm cattle; she was met with disapproval everywhere, her boyfriend didn’t do his chores, she wondered what she was even doing and why. But you hear the album and it’s so beautifully concerned with respect for nature and sowing grain and the kindness of strangers met along the way. It’s so modest and sincere that when she interpolates “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” you’re just like, yeah why not.
There’s a gutpunch quality to the gentleness of “Diamond Day.” For me, it comes partially from the maternal feelings it stirs in me, but partially from this: If the way of life it’s describing was just out of reach to Vashti and her boyfriend at the time, it’s closed off more-or-less entirely now to this hyper-capitalist world where wandering for wandering’s sake (particularly by horse and cart) is no longer possible in quite the same way.
Just another diamond day
Just a blade of grass
Her voice is soft as a whisper. There’s a part in her book where she remembers apologizing to some broccoli before she cuts it and you can totally believe that just from listening. But I think that to focus on the fragility of Vashti’s sound is to misconstrue it, perhaps. Or at least to overlook its rootedness in a certain stubborn self-knowledge. The biblical origin of the name Vashti comes from a queen of Persia who refused to appear at the king’s banquet to show her beauty, and was punished with execution. It seems the existence of Vashti Bunyan outside of a commodifiable femininity at the time (awkward on TV; unable to smile on command; sometimes inaudibly quiet onstage; jumpers full of holes) was punished by an industry that didn’t yet know what to do with that. Yet she never changed herself to be more like they wanted. There were the inevitable comparisons with other female artists that she came to resent, but it really made me laugh to read that she was initially marketed as “female Bob Dylan” (because she played a guitar and wrote songs?). She said she couldn’t imagine herself in a glittery ballgown. I admired her stubborn side and thought of her as a true wanderer, and true to herself.
And there’s a sunset brimming over the sky
And there’s a swallow teaching its young how to fly
The years rolled on and I did go to university in the end and started writing songs. The time of daily devotional listening to Diamond Day passed and I got into the more ambivalently domestic outlook of Lookaftering, and into other quiet-voiced singers of bossa nova. But Vashti remained a guide during any number of times of alienation from the world. When I came to record my own music, I tried her voice on a bit too, super English and soft (I’m a little embarrassed by the transparency of her influence when I listen now). I felt as though she wrote a gentle peaceful album partially in reaction to tumultuous reality of her journey, and I wrote a gentle peaceful song, “rises the moon,” because, to be honest (and with love to all my family) life at home with an autistic sibling was noisy sometimes and I didn’t know what else to say or do. Now because of that song, I’ve stumbled into becoming a musician, so in a way Vashti’s impact on my current life is not so much an influence as it is its reason. When a song of hers comes on now, it’s a familiar place to return to. The strings and flutes are how I want to feel. And I think of my fish and hope I’m forgiven.
Don’t make a sound, don’t disturb the ground
The biggest fish you ever saw is around
And the rainbow river gives a rainbow fish
As one small boy goes running proudly to his mother’s call
