[Cover photo credit to Christopher Fernandez]

Singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan has announced Lookaftering – Expanded Edition, a reissue of her influential second album, which will arrive on February 7, 2025 via DiCristina Records in the U.S.

Marking the occasion of 20 years since the first release, and coinciding with Bunyan’s 80th birthday, the new expanded edition features the original studio album along with a second LP / disc of demos, an alternate take, and a live performance version.

This edition also comes with reflective sleeve notes from Bunyan, producer Max Richter, Devendra Banhart, and FatCat’s Dave Howell, as well as a 16-page lyric booklet featuring a collection of paintings by Vashti’s daughter Whyn Lewis.

Originally recorded between 2001 and 2005, the demos were created by Vashti Bunyan at home, accompanying herself on electric and acoustic guitar, and experimenting with synth instrumentation, including accordion, piano, strings, pipe organ, harmonium, recorders. The collection of demos offers a more stripped back sound compared to the finished album, and the live version of Lately recorded at an early “comeback” gig in L.A. in 2006, orchestrated as on the record, is also included.

Devendra Banhart said:

Lookaftering is a quiet prayer for a world left behind, a remembrance of a world that could have been but never was, a Lookforwarding to a world that may yet still be… As ethereal and haunted as these eleven songs may be, they are also rooted in the earthly magic of wisdom born from experience. Something so rare and honest it’s nearly otherworldly in its total human-ness.

Speaking of the reissue, Vasht Bunyani says of the booklet:

…the beautiful photograph of Max in the studio playing wine glasses with his young daughter’s violin bow, brings it all back to me – how very fortunate I have been.