The title of this hermetic British folksinger’s first album in 35 years — just the second in a career that began with a 1965 near-hit written by the Glimmer Twins — will no doubt seem quaint to some. Bunyan’s coinage, however, is a far cry from the faux-naif expressionism of the neo-psych sprites who coaxed her out of retirement. In her guileless yet knowing hands, “lookaftering” is another word for mindfulness — a term for caring for the loved ones and land she’s tended ever since she vanished into the mists of England’s Outer Hebrides in 1969.
In Bunyan’s case, the outgrowth of this attunement is wonder, the expression of which could hardly be better suited to her numinous plainsong and warble. Hers isn’t the wonder of being blown away by something the way that, say, Moses was by the burning bush, but rather that of contemplative awe. Bunyan’s is wonder inspired by something or someone calling her out of herself and into a mutual indwelling that illuminates what binds and separates all things. Hers is wonder, as she puts it in one sublime track, born of the realization that everything is the “same, but different.”
Emanating from the enchanting likes of dulcimer, harp, Mellotron and glockenspiel, the music that envelopes Bunyan’s pastoral musings doesn’t so much produce sounds as channel and shape those that are already coursing through the flora and fauna. The same is true of the album’s twilit closer, “Wayward Hum”, in which Bunyan’s wordless murmuring testifies to how no human pronouncement can adequately convey wonder.