NEXT she plans to write her life story, of how 35 years went by between her cult 1970 debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, in her mystic days on a Scottish hippy commune, and its belated follow-up, 2005’s Lookaftering.

By comparison, Heartleap has turned up with almost the indecent haste of two buses after a dearth, and it sure makes the heart leap that Vashti Bunyan has completed another folk record of such delicate beauty, gentle, drifting melodies and vocals so still as night that she recorded them when no one else could over-hear.

It is a record for private listening, rather than sharing, recorded, produced and engineered by Vashti in her Edinburgh home, as she reflects on “the people I’ve met and known in my life”. Heartleap differs not in sentiment from the past – nature is still a thing of wonder – but in embracing digital technology.

She uses it as if working with a needle and thread, stitching a quilt, one designed to last as she says this will be her last record.