Vashti Bunyan / Lookaftering (Expanded Version) / 2005
If I Were
wistful, guarded, quietly anxious
A brief, riddling song built entirely on a hypothetical separation, weighing two possible reactions to loss against each other: devoted pursuit versus casual indifference. Bunyan uses a mirrored structure to test both sides of a breakup, voicing the abandoned partner's imagined self-justification in each case.
conditional love fear of abandonment self-protection through detachment gendered mirroring emotional testing
Who's speaking
The narrator poses a hypothetical to an unnamed partner, then imagines both her own and his possible responses to a departure; the voice shifts between speaker and imagined other, making the perspective deliberately unstable and interior.
What happens
The song opens with a question about departure and loyalty, then plays out two scenarios of response -- ardent pursuit or casual shrugging-off -- before concluding with a rationalized verdict that indifference proves absence of love. The second half repeats the pattern with the pronouns reversed, suggesting the same anxious calculus works both ways.
How it's built
Two nearly symmetrical stanzas, each built as a conditional question followed by two contrasting outcomes and a closing self-soothing conclusion. The repetition with reversed gender pronouns creates a call-and-response mirroring rather than a conventional verse/chorus split; there's no clear bridge, just the doubling itself as the song's central device.
Section by section
First stanza
“go and buy a car”
The initial question about being followed to the ends of the earth sets an almost mythic standard for love, which is immediately undercut by the banal image of indifference expressed through a trivial purchase and a shrug, exposing how easily grand devotion can curdle into apathy.
First stanza closing couplet
The narrator concludes that absence of pursuit is proof of absence of love, a tidy piece of logic that sounds more like self-protection than certainty -- convincing herself the imagined outcome would confirm what she already fears.
Second stanza
“turn and buy a hat”
The mirrored scenario swaps genders and objects but repeats the same structure, suggesting the emotional test is universal rather than particular to one person; the hat replacing the car keeps the same deflating banality.
Second stanza closing couplet
The final verdict echoes the first almost word for word, reinforcing the song's circular, almost ritualistic quality -- as if repeating the logic in both directions makes it more true, when really it just underscores its fragility.
Craft
- parallel structure
- The two stanzas repeat the same syntactic pattern almost exactly, only swapping pronouns, which turns the song into a kind of equation testing whether the logic of love and abandonment holds the same regardless of who leaves.
- hypothetical/conditional mood
- Nearly every line is framed as 'if' or 'would,' keeping the song in a speculative, untested space rather than describing an actual event, which heightens the anxious, rehearsed quality of the lyric.
- symbolic action
- The mundane gestures of buying a car or a hat and shrugging stand in for emotional withdrawal, using trivial consumer acts as shorthand for a lack of feeling.
- circular reasoning as coping mechanism
- The closing lines in each stanza use a kind of self-justifying logic -- treating a partner's failure to chase after them as proof they never loved them -- which reads as a defensive rationalization rather than an objective truth.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as an internal rehearsal of abandonment anxiety, where the narrator tests both roles -- leaving and being left -- to see whether love can be proven by the willingness to chase after someone. The conclusion that indifference equals absence of love is less an objective truth than a defensive story the speaker tells herself to make sense of vulnerability. An alternative reading takes the song more literally as a dialogue between two lovers negotiating trust, with the pronoun swap simply representing two real people in the same relationship comparing what fidelity would look like from each side; but the lack of concrete scene-setting and the abstract, hypothetical language make the interior, self-testing reading feel stronger.
Context
This song appears on Lookaftering (2005), Bunyan's second album, released after a 35-year gap following her 1970 debut. I don't have specific documented context about the writing or recording of this particular song, so any biographical reading beyond what the lyrics themselves suggest should be treated cautiously.
Listen for
- the near-identical repetition of structure between the two stanzas, differing mainly in pronoun and object
- the deliberately mundane images of buying a car or hat used to signify emotional withdrawal
- the shift in vocal delivery, if any, between the hopeful hypothetical opening and the resigned closing couplet of each stanza
- how the melody handles the repeated conditional 'if' phrasing, since it may soften or sharpen the anxious tone
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