What's That Song in the Reebok 'Migration' Ad Campaign?

'Train Song,' by Vashti Bunyan

The National Football League certainly has its share of freaks of nature. But freak folk isn't exactly the first style of music that comes to mind when we think of HGH-addled behemoths in high-tech armor.

Yet here's an impossibly wispy, nearly 40-year-old recording by Vashti Bunyan, sometimes called the "Godmother of Freak Folk," providing the soundtrack for Reebok's "Join the Migration" ads. In the commercials, NFL players are portrayed as migratory animals, drawn back to the arena after their off-season breaks in warmer climates. "Don't even know what I'll find when I get to you," quavers Bunyan, once a contemporary of Donovan, the Stones, Nick Drake and the rest of foppish London. She sounds as though she might shatter. No great success in her day despite cheerleading by such well-connected blokes as Andrew Loog Oldham and Joe Boyd, she dropped out of music and raised a family and a barnyard of animals in Scotland. Until her recent rediscovery, she had no idea her music had become a cult favorite of psych-folkies such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. In the U.K., her song 'Diamond Day' was used in a mobile phone ad, which might explain how her music made its circuitous route to the American sporting goods market.

Maybe it's not such a strange pairing after all. It's not hard to imagine the New York Giants pumping up for the New England Patriots by listening to Vashti's 'I'd Like to Walk Around in Your Mind.'

Listen to the song!

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