Vashti Bunyan / Just Another Diamond Day / 1970
I'd Like to Walk Around In Your Mind
wistful, whimsical, quietly yearning
A quiet, whimsical song about wanting intimate access to someone's inner life while wishing to remain undetected in it. Bunyan frames desire as trespass — playful, curious, faintly proprietary — but resolves the tension by imagining herself leaving no trace at all.
longing for intimacy the limits of knowing another person playful invasiveness withdrawal and self-effacement tension between possession and gentleness
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a specific 'you' directly, voicing a desire to enter and affect that person's mind and mood. The tone is intimate but oddly tentative — she admits to wanting to disturb and rearrange the other person, then undercuts this by wishing to vanish unnoticed, suggesting a narrator who doubts her own right to intrude even as she longs to.
What happens
The song moves from bold, almost mischievous declarations of wanting to inhabit and unsettle the addressee's thoughts, through a description of that person's guarded, peace-seeking nature, to the speaker's wish to break through that calm with warmth and disruption. It ends with a retreat: rather than claiming credit or presence, she imagines quietly withdrawing, leaving only a faint decorative trace.
How it's built
The song unfolds as a loose sequence of couplets rather than a strict verse-chorus form, each pair advancing the same central wish in slightly different imagery. There's no traditional chorus; instead the repeated 'I'd like to' phrasing acts as a structural anchor, building cumulative intention until the final stanza breaks the pattern with a shift to renunciation, functioning as a quiet volta.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated conditional opening across stanzas creates a rhythm of accumulating wishes, mimicking the speaker's inner rehearsal of what she might do if allowed into the other person's mind.
- metaphor of trespass
- Physical verbs like walking, running, and jumping are applied to abstract mental and emotional territory, turning intimacy into a kind of playful invasion of private space.
- volta
- The final stanza reverses the poem's momentum: after building toward disruption and connection, the speaker chooses invisibility, undercutting the assertiveness of everything before it.
- pastoral imagery
- The closing image of trailing leaves evokes a natural, almost mythic exit, aligning the speaker with a fleeting, elemental presence rather than a person seeking credit or reciprocation.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a meditation on the impossibility and perhaps the ethical hesitation of truly knowing another person: the speaker wants full access to someone's interior world but ultimately values their peace over her own presence, choosing to disappear rather than assert herself. An alternative reading takes the desire more literally as romantic or erotic longing — wanting to 'rearrange' someone's feelings toward her — with the final retreat read not as selflessness but as shyness or fear of rejection, an inability to stay and see the effect of her wish.
Context
This song appears on Bunyan's 1970 debut, an album recorded in a gentle folk-pastoral style associated with her journey and the countercultural communities she moved through at the time. I don't have specific documented context on the song's origin or dedication, so this reading rests on the text itself rather than known biography.
Listen for
- the soft, unhurried vocal delivery that mirrors the song's tentative desire
- the shift in tone between the assertive early verses and the withdrawing final stanza
- the contrast between verbs of disturbance and the imagery of peace and tranquility
- the way the melody likely settles rather than climaxes at the song's end, reinforcing the choice to vanish
About Vashti Bunyan
Jennifer Vashti Bunyan is an English singer-songwriter. She began her career in the mid-1960s and released a debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, in 1970.
b. 1945 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue