Several years ago, Vashti Bunyan rediscovered her voice, picking up the guitar again after decades of silence. She had been more or less subsumed by daily life for 30 years -- children, a house, animals, men who all required Lookaftering, and as she puts it in "Wayward": "Days going by in clouds of flour and white washing / life getting lost in a world without end." Still, encouraged by audience and critical reception to the reissued Just Another Diamond Day, Bunyan began writing songs once more. She went back to the subjects that had interested her in the late 1960s, setting aside Diamond Day's story-telling third-person perspective and writing about love, relationships and personal freedom. With her legendary first album now earning its first modest royalties, she invested in music software that hadn't even been dreamed of when Diamond Day was recorded. She holed up in her Scottish home, where she adorned Lookaftering's fragile melodies with flourishes of orchestration. Then, working with post-classical composer Max Richter, she translated her ideas into reality, working with a string quartet, oboe, glockenspiel, piano and half a dozen of psychedelic folk's most prominent artists: Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Kevin Barker, Adem and Otto Hauser (Espers).

The result is an album that's transparently pure yet densely instrumented, with songs ranging from "Here Before"'s nearly bare magic to "Turning Backs"' cinematic sweep. The sounds are lullaby sweet, particularly on the harp and Rhodes-lit "If I Were", but tangled up with memory and longing. The layered, lovely "Here Before" weaves vocals and picked guitars into a pattern that seems familiar, in a race-memory sort of way. Its pared-back lyrics trace the mystery of children, their completeness, their individuality, with caressing lightness. "Once I had a child, he was wilder than moonlight, he could do it all, like he'd been here before... Once I had a child, she was smiling like sunshine, she could see it all, like she'd been here before," Bunyan sings, gently, sadly, in round-like choruses with herself, and it distills every kind of emotion -- pride, love, regret, nostalgia -- that people have about their children.

Bunyan's collaborations with younger peers feel very natural, her voice melting into Joanna Newsom's harp figures on "Against the Sky" and "If I Were". "Wayward", one of the disc's most beautiful songs, pulls in a whole Golden Apple's worth of contributors, with a mid-song meltdown of instruments, including Devendra Banhart's acoustic guitar, Kevin Barker and Otto Hauser's electrics, Adem's autoharp and Max Richter's piano and Hammond. The song never capsizes, and no matter who is playing or how well, Bunyan's breathy, unforgettable vocals are always its center. Her voice, as has often been remarked, sounds almost exactly as it did in the 1960s -- as pure, as sure, as airily melodic as it was on Diamond Day. There are very few artists who could pick up where they left off after ten years, or even five. To do this after half a lifetime is extraordinary.

Lookaftering's final cut is one that Bunyan didn't even know was being recorded at the time. She is humming "Wayward" in a thoughtful way, accompanied only by guitar, clearly just enjoying and meditating on the melody she has made, with no inkling of an audience. It is a lovely moment, capturing one of pop's great lost talents rediscovering herself and liking what she finds.