Nick Drake Tuck Box (2013)

From pitchfork.com

The posthumous marketing of Nick Drake’s music has been arduous and fitful, a decades-long attempt at setting right what everyone agreed went horribly wrong the first time. His new box set Tuck Box, the latest and possibly final repackaging, includes studio albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and Pink Moon as well as two compilations of rarities.

Nick Drake did not lead a colorful life.  Shy, abstracted, and bad with eye contact, he shuttled quietly from boarding school to prep school to Cambridge and made few friends along the way. The most rebellious act of his youth was a note politely informing his tutor he was leaving school. His musical career was a disaster, but not a funny or entertaining one—his albums were simply ignored and audiences talked obliviously through his live gigs. He moved back home, fell into a deep depression, and one night, either by accident or on purpose, took too many pills. When he died, there was almost nothing to feel good about.

This has proved a difficult predicament for the record labels charged with profiting off his legacy. The posthumous marketing of Nick Drake’s music has been arduous and fitful, a decades-long attempt at setting right what everyone agreed went horribly wrong the first time. First there was 1979’s overpriced Fruit Tree box, which bombed. Then came the slightly more successful 1985 best-of Heaven in a Wild Flower and 1986’s Time of No Reply,  a collection of rare and officially unreleased tracks. His cult profile rose modestly through the 90s, but it wasn’t until 2000, when “Pink Moon” famously found its way into a Cabrio commercial, that Nick Drake’s fortune as a “penniless genius” finally received its uplifting footnote. Since then, there has been a flurry of release activity, all of it packaging the same tiny body of work spanning six years. Nick Drake is finally famous, but it took the record industry 40 years to figure out how to make it happen.

It’s worth revisiting this dubious history while considering Tuck Box, the latest and possibly final repackaging. Alongside his three studio albums—Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and *Pink Moon—*this boxed set includes the 2004 compilation Made to Love Magic, (itself a barely altered repackaging of Time of No Reply) as well as Family Tree, a 2007 collection of Nick Drake’s home recordings with a few short, haunting songs by his mother, the folk singer and poet Molly. There is not a single second of new or unreleased music waiting for you inside this handsomely designed object, in other words; the packaging, which replicates the wooden box that Nick Drake’s mother used to send him cakes in while he was at Marlborough College, is the sole original flourish.

What Tuck Box offers, then, is simply another chance to revisit Nick Drake’s short, sad story. Because Drake died in desolation and obscurity, and because his music grows more influential every year, there will never quite be a bad moment to rediscover him. His three studio albums have settled into cultural totems, albums that anyone hoping to know something about rock history buys sooner or later. Even 40-odd years later, their thumbprint remains unique, a strange and compelling mix of timeless poetic melancholy on the one hand, and cloistered, pampered schoolboy modernity on the other. They sit completely to the left of all rock music, which Drake could care less about; his version of a garage band was a group of boys at his boarding school, one of whom was the grand-nephew of John Maynard Keynes. (Their name was the Perfumed Gardeners.)

Drake was influenced instead by British folk royalty like John Martyn and Bert Jansch, or Ashley Hutchings of the Fairport Convention. When he recorded his debut, 1969’s Five Leaves Left, he must have felt, at least momentarily, that he was joining their ranks. It was Hutchings who had enthusiastically approached Drake in local pub The Roundhouse, offering to pass his information along to the legendary manager Joe Boyd. Drake’s entrance into the business, at least, was effortless and auspicious, and he was joined in the Sound Techniques recording studio by a few of his personal heroes. The warm, rounded upright bass playing is from Danny Thompson, a founding member of the Pentangle. Richard Thompson plays the pearly guitar leads. Listening to “Time Has Told Me”, the first song on his debut album, is to hear to what might very well be the happiest and most fulfilling moment of Nick Drake’s professional life.

Even as a 20-year-old, Drake’s vision for his music was strikingly assured. He was nervous, fumbling, and difficult to engage in conversation in the studio, but he knew what he wanted. He calmly insisted that Boyd and John Wood hire arranger Robert Kirby, a fellow student at Cambridge. Bewildered, they obeyed, and were rewarded with the breathtaking string chart for “Way to Blue”. With its clean lines and grave elegance, “Way to Blue” suggests the philosophy that would distinguish Nick Drake’s music over the years and damn it during his lifetime: in Joe Boyd’s words, it simply  “was not reaching out to you.” Drake was painfully English, and showiness wasn’t really in his nature. But profundity glowed from his music.

This approach extends to his guitar playing, which was so obsessively perfect it almost escapes comprehension. You will never hear a single string buzz. It’s not the sort of virtuosity that quiets a chattering crowd, but once you’ve attuned to the absolute silence, it quickly grows otherworldly. Even on densely packed fingerpicking runs like “Day Is Done”, each note sits in the mix like a stone at the floor of a clear pond. He was a frighteningly flawless player, in a way that served to magnify his incorporeality: There is no surviving video of Nick Drake playing live or talking. He died in 1974, but his physicality is as remote to our modern imagination as Gustav Mahler’s.

His concerns were similarly otherworldly and timeless, informed by a childhood of English Romantic poets. The futility of knowing the mind of another was a persistent theme in his lyrics, which looked right past people to stars, trees, eternity. “Who can know the thoughts of Mary Jane?” Drake muses. “Who can know the reason for her smile?” His music viewed human behavior and its peculiarities with quizzical detachment, even when the case study is Drake himself: “So I’ll leave the ways that are making me be/ What I really don’t want to be,”, he sings on “Time Has Told Me”. Sizing up the enormity of this task, examining how it might be accomplished—these were not really his philosophical concerns. They overwhelmed him or they simply didn’t interest him, but either way, they came to trip him up, as they do us all.

When it was released in the fall of 1969, Five Leaves Left went unnoticed. Island Records had done it no favors. The packaging was insultingly botched; two songs—”Day Is Done” and “Way To Blue”—were switched in the tracklisting and “Three Hours” was mistakenly titled “Sundown”. But Drake was also complicit; he began his first ill-fated tour behind the faltering album, and between songs, he would tune his guitar for minutes on end to stony, uncomfortable silence. He often walked off dejected before finishing his set. He disappeared into dope smoke, a predilection that was slowly hardening into a crutch. He blew off radio sessions and interviews and slowly began retreating into himself. It was under these circumstances that he ventured back into the studio for Bryter Layter, his second full-length.

Ironically, it was initially conceived as his “up” album, a poppy rejoinder to Five Leaves Left. Five Leaves was pastoral, written in the wooded confines of Cambridge. Layter was written in London, and was meant to reflect urbanity. It did, but only from the perspective of Drake’s one bloodshot eye, peering out cautiously at the world. Over woolly saxophone on “At the Chime of a City Clock”, he confesses “I stay indoors beneath the floors and talk with neighbors only/ The games you play make people say you’re either weird or lonely”. Over the peppy horn charts of “Hazey Jane II”, Drake sings lightly of how it feels “when the world it gets so crowded that you can’t look out the window in the morning.” The city, on Bryter Layter, is one long harsh unpleasant noise occurring outside. Nothing good or stimulating seems to happen there.

The music, however, is brighter—this is the Nick Drake you can hear reflected in latter-period Belle and Sebastian. He rehearsed with a band for the first time, including other members of Fairport Convention, and the result is the most fulsome studio recording he ever managed. Some of the arrangement decisions remain bewildering—the gospel backup vocals, jazz-comping guitar and noodling piano crowding the space on “Poor Boy” remain as jarring now as they were when the album was released. On “Fly” and “Northern Sky”, Drake worked with John Cale, and you can hear a more natural dynamic in their collaboration. It’s either a shame or a relief they didn’t work together longer: “Fly” and “Northern Sky” are the two most affecting songs on Bryter, but it’s also likely Cale introduced Drake to heroin.

On Pink Moon, Nick Drake’s final official album, there is one single overdub: the piano part drifting over the title track. The rest is just Drake, his pristine, eerily perfect playing, his mumbling, and silence. Bryter had also sold poorly and received near-zero notices—the most favourable review compared it to “Classical Gas”. By now, he hardly spoke to anyone; in between takes, John Wood remembers, Drake betrayed neither pleasure or displeasure. He simply sat. Keith Morris, the photographer who shot the album’s photography, remarked that working with Drake was “like working with still life.” The album was recorded in two evenings, by his bewildered crew, who were uncertain of what they were even making. When Drake was finished, he dropped the manila package, almost without a word, at Island Records.

A “pink moon” is a baleful symbol, a sign of impending death or calamity. On “Pink Moon”, it’s “gonna get ye all.” On paper, this sentiment reads like vindictive rage, but on record, it sounds contemplative. Drake’s voice never conveyed palpable anger or sadness; he had a slight, gentle voice and upper-class accent, the product of his upbringing, clipped and clean, and his guitar, as always, rang out with a crystalline purity. His music is so consoling that the darkness at its heart is not always accessible. It’s almost impossible to hear the emotional abandon in Pink Moon, then, without the taste of his first two albums lingering on your mouth. It’s only then that the bone-dry resonance of the guitars registers as slightly alarming, and the backdrop of silence suggests both the purity of Drake’s vision and also something darker: like someone who has dropped out of the world, mumbling prophecies.

On “Place to Be”, he remembers his youth only as a time he “didn’t see the truth hanging from the door”; now, he is “weaker than the palest blue.” “Know” consists of just four lines—”You know that I love you/ You know I don’t care/ You know that I see you/ You know I’m not there.” It sounds like a back-and-forth between Drake and the world at large. There is a stillness to Nick Drake’s music that bewitches anyone who gets near enough, and Pink Moon is its purest expression. It remains the Nick Drake record most people begin with, and for good reason.

The eleven songs on Pink Moon were not Nick Drake’s final recordings, however. In the last year of his life, he would return to the studio, his fingernails long, his hair dirty, his clothes in shambles, to cut beginning tracks for what would have been his fourth album. They went poorly. Joe Boyd recalls that Drake, the flawless technician, was no longer able to play and sing at the same time, so the sessions limped agonizingly while he fumbled through guitar takes and then returned to sing, shakily. These four songs—”Black Eyed Dog”, “Rider on the Wheel”, “Tow the Line”, and “Hanging on a Star”—are the only truly discomfiting records he ever made. On “Black Eyed Dog”, he sang tremulously over some hammered harmonics about growing old and wanting to go home. Within four months, he was dead.

The most consequential material on Made to Love Magic remain these final tracks. The sundry unreleased tracks, such as the hallucinatory “Clothes of Sand” and the odd, jaunty “Mayfair”, are interesting but inessential. The rest of the album is the usual posthumous footnotes tumble: A version of “River Man” recorded when Drake was still at college; a scrapped version of “Three Days” from the tentative early sessions of Five Leaves Left; an early alternate take of “Thoughts of Mary Jane”, with distracted, noodly lead guitar playing from Richard Thompson. There are a handful of performances from Drake’s first-ever public concert, the so-called “work tape” from his college days. They don’t do much to enrich the Nick Drake story.

Family Tree, though, is odder and more interesting. The album, which was only released in 2007, compiles all the known existing home recordings of Nick Drake—music he recorded at his parents’ house for fun or to kill time; rehearsals of Mozart trios with his aunt and uncle (he played clarinet). The 28 tracks consist largely of covers and traditionals, including a run through “All My Trials”, sung with his sister Gabrielle.

Family Tree doesn’t give the world any classic lost Nick Drake music, but it does give the sensation, achieved with a little effort, of what it might have been like to sit in the Drakes’ parlor in Far Leys. You can hear the actual clink of actual tea cups in the background of his cover of Bob Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time”. You get to hear Nick Drake messing about on guitar, which sounds better than anyone else’s. His version of “Cocaine Blues” is enjoyable  both because it’s a looser and bluesier Nick Drake than we’re used to, and also because of his pronunciation of “cocaine,” which suggests a side of finger sandwiches.

Family Tree also includes two of his mother’s haunting, intriguingly wayward songs. “Poor Mum” makes for an odd companion with her son’s “Poor Boy”; “Joy as it flies cannot be caught”, she sings, searchingly, her voice climbing into a breath-catching question mark. There is an unmistakable hint of the fatalism that trailed her son’s music in these recordings, and in “Do You Ever Remember”, she sings lines that could lead directly into “Time Has Told Me”: “Time was ever a vagabond/ Time was always a thief/ Time can steal away happiness/ But time can take away grief.”

This was Nick Drake’s existential dilemma: He would rather ponder time than observe the present, would sooner gaze into the sea than engage with the people around him. School friends recall conversations about spirits and “the little people” as the only times they saw him animated. The rage he directed at his producer Joe Boyd for his failed career on “Hanging on a Star” (“Why leave me hanging on a star/ When you deem me so high”?) was in part the sound of someone realizing that their worldly woes have slowly blotted out their view of the stars, perhaps forever. “I could have been a signpost, could’ve been a clock,” he mused on “One of These Things First”; this is the sentiment of someone who barely assented to the burdens of being a person. For such a soul, there can never be such a thing as a career. There can only be a legacy.

Nick Drake Pink Moon (1972)

From starling.rinet.ru

Background

When you come to think of it, the early 1970s were a heavenly paradise for introspective singer-songwriters – John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band and Joni Mitchell’s Blue are the two records that probably have the largest citation index here, but you could easily throw on Neil Young, Carole King, and a whole swarm of folksy philosophers from the shores of California to the meadows of Surrey. So how did Nick Drake, a guy of quite comparable talent, end up slipping through the cracks at the time, and only re-emerging postmortem, more than a decade later, as the revered hero of grim-faced proto-hipsters all around the world? His first two albums, Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, featured intelligent, elegantly written, lushly arranged compositions, and could have been hits in an era when the average population seemed open to new sounds and ideas. Nor is the frequent portrait of Nick as somebody who got unjustly screwed by just about everyone (his management, his label, the press, the critics, the public, etc.) is really any more true than similar stories of people who found success all the same.

The thing with Nick Drake is that he was really one of those few people who truly “weren’t born for these times”. The shyness and reclusiveness for which he is so famous – and which pretty much made him into the stereotypical “indie hermit” – also come out very distinctively on all his songs, and, most importantly, he never ever gave the slightest impression of singing for anybody. His vocal modulation and his way of picking those cluster chords always focus on quietness, subtlety, even immobility, in a “don’t-mind-me-really” sort of manner, which was simply not the way you did it in the early 1970s, when the typical male singer-songwriter usually had to belt it out, like Lennon or Van Morrison, or at least croon it in an easily understandable way, like James Taylor, without putting on such a depressive-romantic face. If there was any equivalent to Nick Drake at the time, really, it would probably have to be J. J. Cale on the other side of the ocean – with an entirely different musical paradigm, of course, but a comparable lack of ego. The biggest difference between the two, though, was that J. J. seemingly didn’t give a damn about whether his records would sell or not, whereas Drake actually did care, at least according to some accounts. But that’s the way it goes with depressed types – if there’s no fresh reason around to get depressed about, they’ll always end up inventing one for themselves, I guess.Some basic facts

The recording of Nick’s third and last album was somewhat of an act of defiance. He considered his previous effort, Bryter Layter, spoiled by excessive instrumental overdubs, blaming producer Joe Boyd, and recorded Pink Moon in two nighttime sessions, using his trusted musical engineer John Wood as producer. The only musician throughout is Nick himself, singing, playing acoustic guitar, and piano (on the title track only). Although Island Records at the time wanted him to concentrate more on the promotion of Bryter Layter, they did not say no to the new album, and seem to have actively invested in its promotion as well – to little avail, as the small, 28-minute collection of quiet acoustic ditties predictably sold even less than its predecessors, despite some positive reviews.

With time, the critical status of Pink Moon has, however, skyrocketed to unprecedented heights. Beginning with the college rock days of the 1980s (and you can certainly hear Michael Stipe’s heavy debt to Drake in general and this album in particular) and culminating in the alternative days of the 1990s, Pink Moon became a cult favorite and one of those records that you absolutely had to have as a diagnostic symbol of classy taste. The crashing wave of Nick Drake fanaticism seems to have somewhat dissipated in strength by the 21st century, but it left all of his albums behind as solidified classics of the singer-songwriter genre, even if this may have come at the cost of an image distortion: too often, Drake is being put in the same bag as Syd Barrett, or even Jim Morrison – the bleak, permanently depressed, suicidal, unjustly misunderstood hero, with Pink Moon as his most brutally raw and honest artistic statement. Is that really right? I don’t think so.

For the defense

28 minutes of (almost) nothing but Nick Drake and his guitar would be tedious if these two characters did not have charisma, but, luckily for us, they do. Due to its sparse sound, Pink Moon is the best location to appreciate all the breathy warmth of the man’s voice, which has a certain elegiac nobility to it regardless of what it is he’s singing. Contrary to generic descriptions, I have never truly felt that his songs were “depressed”; “melancholic” is a more accurate description, but even that one does not truly cut it. There’s a certain Zen-like calm to the way he sings them, only very slightly draped with a thin cloak of two emotions – worry and tenderness. The way he delivers lines like “take a look and see me on the ground / For I am the parasite of this town” suggests a certain impressionistic wisdom on his part, an exposition of philosophical allegories from a friendly guru rather than a painful confession of somebody wallowing in his own misery. Likewise, the guitar playing is always soft and a little muffled; almost no sharp “pinging” of the strings, and a total avoidance of keys and chord changes that suggest any pain or suffering.

I mean, we might just as well get this whole crap out of the way, considering how the album both starts and ends on uplifting notes. I have not the slightest idea what ʻPink Moonʼ is supposed to say – you coul argue that “pink moon gonna get you all” is not a very optimistic line, but even if that is some sort of a threat, it’s kind of a merry threat addressed to the protagonist’s opponents (“none of you stand so tall”) rather than himself, and he seems just a bit delighted, really, that a pink moon is gonna get all of ’em, and those few of us that “get it” are invited to join in a little reclusive celebration of the fact. Then, twenty minutes later when the album comes to a close, ʻFrom The Morningʼ comes to tell us that “a day once dawned, and it was beautiful” and to invite us to “go play the game that you learnt from the morning”, and if that song ain’t totally uplifting to you, one of us must be suffering from illusions.

The longest song on the album, ʻThings Behind The Sunʼ, is not really a confession, either: it’s a half-Dylan, half-New Age sermon, delivered continuously (almost in one breath) and sincerely, with a melodic structure that would probably have been much appreciated by the likes of David Crosby. Only somewhere really, really deep below the surface (in the faintest overtones of Nick’s voice, in the relentless plough-on race of the main chord sequence) can you feel a premonition that the sermon is probably going to be wasted, but that is really because Nick is singing it all to himself – I mean, it’s a song that’s supposed to be addressed to somebody else but is really re-addressed to the protagonist because nobody else was available at the time. The whole album, really, is an album with an intended audience, but the only audience the nighttime performer has is his own nose, so he has to imagine that his nose is the audience, and this certainly results in a whiff of confusion and worry.

It has always been tough for me to choose a favorite tune from this album: the songs rarely go for catchiness (probably the single catchiest bit on the album is the looping blues riff on ʻKnowʼ, and even that one was probably chosen for a “nagging” effect rather than anything else), the mood rarely strains from the one I’ve already attempted to describe, and besides, there are so few songs anyway that making picks is almost impossible even technically. To make distinctions, you have to rely on boring objective criteria – like ʻThingsʼ being the longest (and so, perhaps, the most intentionally important?) of them all, or ʻPlace To Beʼ formally being the most “autobiographical” of them all, although I still wouldn’t recommend to take stuff like “And I was strong, strong in the sun… Now I’m weaker than the palest blue”, or any of the lyrical allusions to Nick’s earlier tunes too seriously: if he wants to convince us that there’s a significant difference in attitude and feeling between Five Leaves Left and Pink Moon, he’s gotta try much, much harder.

Overall, this is primarily a mood piece – twenty-eight minutes of calm, quiet prettiness, certainly implying a nice level of philosophical depth, but most importantly, spreading around a unique charismatic aura, like a rare stick of musical incense; and its uniqueness is in how it manages to avoid sliding into cliches of acoustic folk (everything from excessive sentimentality to excessive pomp and preachiness) and just “tell it like it is” while still sounding artsy and steeped in elegant flourishes. Really, that’s all there is, and there’s not supposed to be anything else to it. A lovely record with a lovely spirit of introspection, tenderness, and mystery, and not a lot of specially-individually memorable moments.

For the prosecution

Although I have never understood the point of the brief minimalistic instrumental ʻHornʼ, I must admit that it no longer truly bothers me now that I have learned to regard the whole album as one piece – if you are presented with a 28-minute suite, bickering about little moody interludes really makes no sense. Still, I have always been somewhat disappointed by the near-total lack of “stunners” on Pink Moon – I realize that the humble, reserved nature of these songs is sort of the album’s main point, but sometimes I can’t help sympathizing with some of the original reviewers who complained about the lack of complex arrangements and stated that just Nick and his guitar aren’t really enough to bring out all the best in these songs. The fact is, it is really very hard to make a properly appealing acoustic album with no other means, and twice as hard to make a properly appealing acoustic album that has to succeed by sounding as if the artist’s not even trying to grab your attention. As a result, Pink Moon is a mood piece that is guaranteed to connect (and maybe even hit hard) with some people, but if it does not connect with you fairly soon, there’s very little you could cling on to in order to get an incentive for repeated listening. But I guess that’s kind of inevitable when the artist’s masterplan is made that way from the beginning.

Conclusion

If there’s one record whose legend has become almost insanely larger than the record itself, it should be Pink Moon. Consciously or unconsciously, first in the hipster community and then even in a much wider circle of music listeners, it has become a symbol of all that “unkept-depressed-loner-smoking-drinking-coffee-2 A.M.-alone-with-my-spleen” crap where you tend to imagine yourself as the single most miserable living being on the planet, and only Nick Drake is able to understand and alleviate your pain and all that jazz. But what if the record would have sold more than its handful of copies? What if Nick Drake had not overdosed on prescription drugs two years later? What if he’d overcome his depression and gone on to become a disco dancer? What if he’d made a guest appearance on Live 8, singing backing vocals to ʻLiving On A Prayerʼ with Bon Jovi?.. My guess is that, perhaps, in that case the public at large would have a better chance at seeing Pink Moon for what it really is – a tasteful, nuanced philosophical piece, a worthy and unique representative of the acoustic singer-songwriter approach, but hardly deserving of such insane veneration as is paid nowadays to the album by people with an unrestricted fetish for “misunderstood loners”. Sure, Nick Drake was a loner, but it does seem to me, at times, that these days he is actually being far more misunderstood than he used to when he was still alive.

Nick Drake The Biography by Patrick Humphries (1998)

From amazon.com

I was very disappointed in this book – and while some of that disappointment is with the style of writing Mr. Humphries employs here, there’s more to it than that.

Writing a biography is a tricky proposition at best. In the case of an artist like Nick Drake – reclusive and withdrawn, with only one interview given during his brief lifetime – it’s a task even more daunting than one would usually expect. Humphries has written bios of other musicians – Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson, Tom Waits, &c – and has evidently built a career and reputation in this area. I’m sure that he felt drawn to the music of Nick Drake in some ways, rather than simply choosing an artist about whom to write in the hope of selling tons of books – there are innumerable choices that would have garnered him greater sales – but without the cooperation of two critical people in Nick’s life (his sister Gabrielle and his manager/producer Joe Boyd), given the nature of his subject, the project was more or less doomed from the start.

Humphries mentions in his forward that Joe and Gabrielle `had decided not to cooperate’ – and since Joe’s Warlock Music is the publisher of all of Nick’s songs, this also meant that Humphries would be unable to quote from Nick’s lyrics. He was thus reduced to quoting Gabrielle and Joe from previously available sources. Molly and Rodney Drake, Nick’s parents, were deceased, so no direct conversations between them and the author were possible either.

The only other sources left for him upon which to draw were the remembrances of various friends of Nick and written articles about the man and his music. What emerges from all of this is inevitably a choppy picture of the man – not unsympathetic, but jarring and incomplete. Many parts of the book are simply strings of quotes strung together – and too many of the gaps have been filled in by well-meaning but ultimately tedious anecdotes about the music scene of the 60s and 70s in general.

Referring to the musicians and bands emerging from the public school scene in the UK of the time, Humphries mentions Genesis coming out of Charterhouse to begin their `windy, wuthering road’ to success – a reference to their `Wind and wuthering’ album of the late 70s. He’s trying a little too hard here for my tastes, I’m afraid.

Another irritating practice of Humphries is that he contradicts himself in too many places to mention. He can’t seem to settle on his own opinion. On p. 93, he says `Five Leaves Left is an astonishingly assured and mature debut’ – on p. 94, he says `Lyrically the songs on Five Leaves Left are largely unremarkable’. Huh? On p. 89, he speaks warmly of how well Robert Kirby (Nick’s school chum and string arranger on his first two albums) worked with Nick’s songs: `…his arrangements remain an integral part of the distinctive sound of Nick’s debut album’ – then, again from p. 94: `…perhaps the arrangements are a tad lush’. This sort of `playing both sides’ persists throughout the book. These are not instances of Humphries quoting the opinions of others (at least they are not presented in that way) – these are his own words.

The publisher, Bloomsbury, must also be taken to task, for their (lack of) editing – there are several errors in the book that have nothing to do with writing style, but everything (apparently) to do with allowing one’s computer spell-check program to act as an editor. This point may seem to be a bit picky, but in context of my other problems with the book, it merely added to my inability to appreciate it.

There’s another review below that wisely suggests that those interested in Nick allow his music to speak for him – and this is of course the closest we can come to him, for his music came from his heart and soul. Over the years since his death, it has become much more widely appreciated than it was in his lifetime – sadly this is the case in too many who die before their time. There is beauty in that music. Humphries speaks in several places of the darkness of Nick’s lyrics (but, being unable to quote from them, gives no examples), that his depression was a result of an adolescent never coming into maturity, unable to cope with the world – and many of the songs were dark, without a doubt.

There were, however, many moments of light and beauty. One only has to listen to the first track on his debut album (`Time has told me’ from Five Leaves Left) – to me, the song is one that speaks of hope and patience, of learning and recognizing the important things that are worth waiting for. That sounds like maturity and good judgment to me. Nick may well have been a troubled soul – but he was not without happiness, and he obviously understood and appreciated things that a person stuck in adolescence would not.

Near the end of the book, when Humphries is writing of the release of Nick’s final four songs, and some additional material – early home recordings and alternate takes – he quotes both Nick’s parents and Joe Boyd as saying that they were trying to make sure that anything they released reflected only well on Nick, that they were concerned with how he was represented, that he deserved that consideration. I think that he deserves better than this bio – that might seem harsh, but there’s simply too much contradiction and padding here. Rather than a 270+page book, this could have been edited down to a decent magazine article. There are a lot of facts here, but very little understanding. If you have the opportunity to view it, check out the fine documentary A Skin Too Few – it’s a much more satisfying portrait of this gentle man.

Nick Drake – Darker Than The Deepest Sea: The Search For Nick Drake by Trevor Dann (2007)

From amazon.co.uk

Review This second biography of the musician Nick Drake (1948-1974) uncovers new turf by conducting the first interview with Sophia Ryde (to whom, it is revealed, Drake wrote a letter left by his bedside when he died) and drawing upon a 2004 Belgian radio interview with Drake’s sister and friends. Trevor Dann went up to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, four years after Drake and thus has the advantage of being able to draw upon his near-contemporary recollections.

Dann’s narration of Drake’s childhood and early adult experiences is evenly paced and open-minded. With both of Drake’s parents having died, Dann speculates openly on the atmosphere at home in Tanworth-in-Arden, concluding that “childhood in a posh family in a quiet, isolated village could indeed be a torment”. Nick is painted as an aloof, somewhat supercilious figure, “the apple of his mother’s eye”, who was tall, articulate, academically unmotivated and, as he got older, near-schizophrenic as a result of excessive cannabis consumption. Stories of sex are conspicuous by their absence: Nick seemed to “float above the carnal world of student sex”, Dann states. Both Linda Thompson and Robin Frederick deny that their relationships with him were consummated. Rumours that Drake’s bulging jeans on the front cover of his first album betray an erection brought on by the male photographer are humorously handled by Dann, who states that this might rather be “…well, bollocks”.

His handling of Drake’s three albums – Five Leaves Left (1970), Bryter Layter (1970) and Pink Moon (1972) – is hampered by scant analysis of his lyrics, and is rather too influenced by Joe Boyd’s and Robert Kirby’s recollections. He does suggest that the proliferation of the word “ride” in later songs (e.g. Free Ride, Rider on the wheel) was a play on Sophia Ryde’s name and that the “ban on feeling free” in River Man and “Do you curse where you come from?” in Hazey Jane I indicate a stifling and depression-inducing family atmosphere. Dann comments that Nick’s sister Gabrielle did not seem to know him well and that all those who met him seemed to have the impression of a spectral, but nevertheless unmistakable presence. Luckily, Dann doesn’t make the mistake of assuming he has access to Drake’s ‘inner truth’, himself admitting that Nick seems “always elusive, never predictable; capable of warmth and affection, but never quite reliable enough to form a staunch friendship or be a dependable workmate”. The person who understood Drake best would appear to be John Martyn, who wrote the track ‘Solid Air’ about him.

In spite of the bubbling adoration to be found within the Drake cult, Trevor Dann is not afraid of quoting unflattering opinions (one recalls his job was to “get [Nick] out of his stinky bed in his grotty flat in Notting Hill…He was a complete pain in the arse”). Nevertheless, there are two key flaws to this well-written and otherwise delightful biography: Why does Dann not discuss what exactly was in the letter found by Nick’s bed? Even if Ryde refused to show it to him (presuming she still has it in her possession), it seems remarkable that Dann doesn’t flesh out his scoop more. Secondly, he closes his book with speculations that Drake’s depression and overdose of antidepressants at 26 point to child abuse, claiming that eight of Nick’s songs “fit the child abuse template”. Having meticulously presented his account of Drake’s life up to now, it does seem a shame that Dann chooses to leave the reader at the close in a wilderness of unsubstantiated speculation.

Review Dann’s book is a fine book in that it provides additional information to what is already known and is not simply a rehash of everything else already said – with the detail of Sophia Ryde’s letter thrown in. Dann tells us that ‘Sophia’ rhymes with ‘higher’ and it is this type of helpful ‘anorak’-style information that gives the book its page-turning hook. Dann lists every address that Nick ever lived at – complete with house number – in Burma, Tanworth-in-Arden and London; there is even a potted history of his father’s career in Burma and a brief summary of the career of Rodney’s father.

There are reproductions of old school and Cambridge college reports – complete with lists of exams passed and at what grade – interviews with his masters and room mates and reproductions of furious exchanges of letters – when Nick dropped out – between father Rodney and Fitzwilliam. There are new interviews with Linda Thompson, Chris Blackwell, Jeremy Mason, Richard Charkin, et al. There is no direct interview with Sophia apart from a mention of the track, Free Ride, and her reaction to it + plus a reference to the alleged ‘suicide note’ addressed to her. The extra details are commendable and the writing original. Not an easy achievement on a topic that has been worked to death with little scope for new material.

On the reservations side, there are unsubtantiated claims that Nick was a rather heavy heroin user, suffered from schizophrenia and also, various ‘digs’ at his character. The source of the heroin user claim is not revealed, so presumably, it could come from either of three sources: John Cale, keyboardist, ex-Velvet Underground who provided the backing music to ‘Northern Sky’, obliquely refers to it, the late Scott Appel – who gets a mention in the book – but as far as can be seen, Scott in his attempt to ‘reveal the truth’ is possibly blurring Nick with himself, e.g., the ‘speedballs’ and ‘demerol’, etc., these sound very ‘American’ in description.

If the source is his actress sister, Gabrielle Drake, and this is possible, because the letter she read out in the film ‘A Skin Too Few’ is reproduced here, there is clearly approval by Nick Drake’s Estate for at least some of the content Dann’s. Many details possibly could only have come from Gabrielle, in which case, the claims are probably more substantial than if they were merely speculation based on hearsay. Dann’s view that Nick Drake had schizophrenia caused by too much cannabis use is, he says, based on recent research, however even more recent research suggests that there is actually no link between cannabis use and mental illness, after all.

The latter part of the book has a brief track by track analysis of Nick’s work.

All in all, the book is in easy to read print, which makes it a rather short book, but is better than expected, over all. It has lilac end papers and a cover which is a photgraph taken by the late Keith Morris. It supplements Patrick Humprhies in-depth biography well, although the title ‘in search of’, with rock writer Peter Guralnick’s leit motif of a ‘quest’ to ‘find’ a mysterious long-gone figure, probably sits better with Humphries’ book. A good analogy would be that Dann’s book is the equivalent of the sensationalist Life & Death of Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman to Jacqueline Rose’s learned The Haunting of Sylvia Plath in that you get a better sense of Nick Drake’s true character from the cautious Humphries’ biography, but the ‘squalid facts’ from Dann with no punches pulled nor pussyfooting around the family’s possible sensibilties.

In addition, there are some new and interesting photographs included.

Nick Drake Time Of No Reply (1987)

From starling.rinet.ru

Oh, I do like this one. Outtakes from sessions for all the three albums, plus a few alternate takes… mmm, yummy. Amazingly, they really sound way more polished and completed than much of the Pink Moon stuff, real songs that have been rejected for reasons only Nick would be able to clarify had he lived. Predictably, this is also the most ‘diverse’ of his albums, although granted, that’s not saying much.

There’s even a blues cover on here for Jesus’ sake, and it rules! Robin Frederick’s ‘Been Smoking Too Long’ is taken in the exact same muddy production style you’d hear on an early John Lee Hooker or even Robert Johnson record, with low-treble guitar and vocals that seem to be coming from the underground… what a MAH-vel. Of course, Nick couldn’t be mistaken for an old bluesman a thousand leagues away, but that doesn’t really matter as he manages to get the soul of the blues perfectly.

And on the other hand, you get some really strange stuff like ‘I Was Born To Love Magic’ that starts almost as a complaintive medieval ode and then suddenly changes into near-Hollywood glee midway through and then even incorporates a certain Easternish feel; definitely one of Nick’s best, and maybe the only song in his catalog to betray him as a child of the psychedelic era. (The word ‘magic’, anyone? Lovin’ Spoonful?).

And, of course, the powerful title track, which may or may not be the best one on here, but it sure as hell can count as one of Nick’s most convincing anthems ever. Where for Mr Dylan the times they were a-changin’, for Mr Drake time had no reply, as he just stands there with his completely isolated and misunderstood self and nobody in the world gives a damn. No wonder Drake never had any commercial success – a commercially successful priest of self-isolationism would be a mockery, much more so than a public-happy guitar-waving Bruce Springsteen. Beautiful song.

Another total marvel is ‘Clothes Of Sand’, another in a line of Drake’s chill-sending mystical tales with no clear interpretation. One of those neat vocal hooks when he goes ‘clothes of sand have covered your face, given you meaning but taken my place’… it’s hard to tell exactly what kind of emotional impact this line gives one, but one thing is obvious, the protagonist of the song is not at all similar to Drake’s ideal of ‘hazey Jane’, and the very idea of sporting ‘clothes of sand’ doesn’t seem like a particularly attractive one – so the song should be taken as a mighty condemnation epic, I guess.

And then you fall upon something timid, lightweight and innocent like the pretty jazzy ‘Mayfair’, just a little slushy romantic waltzing that can charm you into total oblivion for a couple minutes. And this interspersed with a home demo of ‘Strange Meeting II’, another lost love song with mystical overtones that’s totally involving yet I guess was left off the actual albums because Nick thought it too immature.

True enough, as good as the song is, in this case the lyrics are WAY too clear and metaphor-free to qualify along with Nick’s best, but any songwriter of lesser stature would sure kill for these lines.
And then there are all the outtakes of already known tunes – there’s ‘Fly’, which actually sounds cleaner and clearer than on Bryter Layter, and a slightly electrified version of ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’ with Richard Thompson adding sharp but economic licks, and ‘Man In A Shed’, one of the best songs on Five Leaves Left. And none of the weaker songs off that album.

And finally, the record closes with four tracks recorded by Nick in February 1974, just before his untimely death, which don’t show any progression – stylistically, there’s not much departure from Pink Moon – but which are nevertheless interesting. Particularly the scary ‘Black-Eyed Dog’, with its haunting refrain (‘a black eyed dog he called at my door, a black eyed dog he called for more’), which certainly can seem creepy in the light of Nick’s unexpected death. One of those minimalistic, yet sharp-hittin’ folk tunes that really make you appreciate the genre. A bit unusual approach for Nick, too, what with the changed vocal intonations (impersonating an old beggar here, I guess?), and with some marvelous acoustic guitarwork.

Must say, though, that the other three songs fail to impress me all that much – in fact, I think they represent the weakest material on the record, kinda like the weak hookless material on Pink Moon. Which begs for a terrifying question, of course: maybe by 1974 Nick Drake was just totally drained artistically? Having said everything he really wanted to say on his first two albums and just a couple more things on the third one? Which would, of course, logically lead to the assumption that his death was suicide over frustration. Whatever. Nobody knows, and nobody will ever know.

In the meantime, just remember that this album is a worthy, if not actually equal, companion, to the regular studio albums, and I’d violently recommend it over Pink Moon, even. It rounds out Nick’s output almost perfectly, and actually, remember that songs that the artist did not want to have released during his lifetime often say just as much about the artist’s personality as those he wanted to have released.

Nick Drake Five Leaves Left (1969)

From starling.rinet.ru

I guess I went through the usual initiation ceremony most Nick Drake addicts go through – the first listen to the man’s debut didn’t make a single impression. Maybe occasional interesting tidbits, moments and smidgeons. The guy’s humility and lack of a pretentious “I’m wiser than the world, see me prove that” atmosphere was nice, but I kinda failed to see what good qualities Nick had to counteract that perspective. His guitar picking is nice and professional, but it’s obvious he’s not about the guitar; if you wanna hear some really weird quasi-folk acoustic picking, check out Tyrannosaurus Rex instead. His dim, inobtrusive baritone leaves you with a friendly feeling but equally fails to impress on his own. The melodies are dang near non-existent as far as instrumental work goes and are very hard to spot as far as vocals go, besides, several songs actually share more or less the same vocal melody. And the lyrics, solid and thoughtful as they are, just can’t compensate for everything else. Besides, the man hasn’t got even a tiny streak of humour.

That’s the first Nick Drake listen for you. The only good thing about that initial experience is that deep down inside you are left with the urge to listen to this for the second time, because somehow you feel that you don’t like the album because you don’t get it, not because you already got it. And then it starts growing. And in the end the record comes out as the minor folksy masterpiece it is. Too bad I can’t remember a single song of it even if I’m way through my eighth or ninth listen. But enough ME. It’s a Nick Drake record. It’s almost purely acoustic, although occasionally Nick is backed by Richard Thompson of Fairport Convention playing modest electric licks in the background. Danny Thompson contributes bass, Paul Harris joins in on occasional piano, and Robert Kirby arranges all the strings on the album, which also form an essential part of the experience (of course, there will always be dorks saying that the strings actually spoil the experience, but it’s not my fault if somebody’s been fed up with Fifties’ Hollywood movies, nor is it Robert Kirby’s who actually arranges everything in good taste).

And it’s a ‘mood piece’, of course. So much a mood piece that sometimes I fail to notice the pause between tracks; only a slight shift in Nick’s intonation, a different hook or a different twitch in arrangement indicates that we’re on to the next part. As a ‘mood piece’, it, of course, shows Drake’s stylistic limitations – the man obviously doesn’t want and probably can’t shift to anything different – but since the songs themselves are pretty short, it’s no big problem. What is the mood, then, actually? Some call it depressing and bleak; I prefer to simply call it BLUE. Or GRAY, if you wish. Autumnal, as many have said. These songs are mostly minor in their essence, but it isn’t as if they’re written from the point of view of a bitter, thoroughly depressed person. It’s more like a position of a sceptical philosopher, contemplating his own and everybody else’s frailty and weakness in this mysterious and dangerous world. In other words, it’s a THINKING man’s album rather than a simply FEELING man’s album – not that there’s anything wrong with either.

It would be pretty hard to pick out highlights on the album; the only song that doesn’t do anything for me is the rather pointless ‘Cello Song’ which has no special hook as far as I’m concerned. The other nine all have something. ‘Time Has Told Me’ is a love song without any apparent ‘hidden message’, but there does seem to be some kind of concealed ‘menace’ in the ‘leave the ways that are making you be what you really don’t want to be’ chorus, the kind of strange attention-drawing trick that transforms a basic love ballad into an enigma. ‘River Man’, in stark contrast to its rather ‘upbeat’ predecessor, is somewhat creepy with its mystical allusions… somebody just shoot the dork who complained about the orchestration on Amazon.com, it’s the friggin’ best part of the song, with the gloomy cellos and the shimmering violins perfectly playing off each other to illustrate the ‘dark’ and the ‘bright’ of the song. ‘Three Hours’ gets us back to stark folkish territory with medieval overtones and even stranger poetic allusions – the ‘in search of a master, in search of a slave’ bit looks almost like something taken off a Leonard Cohen album. (Which actually reminds me that it would be quite an interesting matter to draw a more detailed comparison between the two. Anybody looking for a fresh topic on a music-related essay? Fresh topics for a penny!).

Anyway, it’s useless to go through all the other songs in a row, so let me just concentrate on the two last ones – ‘Fruit Tree’ is quite glorious, and wasn’t it written as a prediction? I mean, Nick Drake is obviously recognized better today than he was during his lifetime. Or will be recognized (or should be recognized), anyway. Fabulous oboe part, too. And I’m also quite partial as to what concerns the closing number, the jazzy piano-based ‘Saturday Sun’, which has – can you imagine? – a bit of a McCartneyesque feel to it, I guess. But maybe not. The vibraphone part is celestial.

Obviously, the most seductive thing about this all is how dang IN-OB-TRUSIVE it is. No loudness, no abrasiveness, and no rhythmic catchiness either. And Nick sings it all like he’s just standing out there at the window, like on the front cover, nonchalantly whistling away his little observations to no-one in particular. Married with his talent, this makes up for an album that’s so drastically subtle it’s in danger of being unnoticed…. which, come to think of it, it was. Maybe Nick Drake should have hired Mike Bloomfield or the Band to ensure his popularity. Then again, maybe he shouldn’t. What works well for ones works shittily for others.

Nick Drake Five Leaves Left (1969)

From sputnikmusic.com

It’s a little belief of mine that what’s wrong with the modern world can be summed up in just one small word: cliché. No matter where we turn to in an attempt to avoid the hackneyed, overdone phrases that make up a huge amount of our lives, we hear them: a musician who’s going to be forgotten within a year is a genius, a world leader who makes a decision we disagree with is the new Hitler, and some whining singer is the spokesman for Generation X. Just out of interest, what the hell is Generation X, anyway? I gather that I’m a part of it, but I can’t say that I either know or care what it is. But anyway, I digress. My point is this. As a way of expressing our views on life, cliché is horrible, and yet it’s growing all the time, undermining things that should be expressed in strong terms. Having said all that though, I’m going to have to use a phrase here which is used in pretty much every description of Nick Drake that you’re ever going to read. Here we go.

There are few artists who have been more underrated than Nick Drake, who have then gone on to influence so many people.

There. I said it. It’s the ultimate cliché surrounding Nick Drake, and yet it’s completely impossible to mention him without using it at least once. Why? Because it is undeniably completely true. The list of artists that Nick Drake has inspired is massive, ranging from Elliott Smith to Iron & Wine, to a huge number of singer/songwriters that exist in the outer ranges of popular music. And yet this is a man that could leave the master tapes of his final album, Pink Moon on the front desk of his record label before waiting days before anyone even noticed that he’d left them there. There’s something faintly incompatible about those two statements, don’t you think?

While Pink Moon is the album that most often gets associated with Nick Drake, partially because of its softly mournful nature, and partially because of the context that its in, there’s a case for saying that either of his two previous albums are better. Bryter Later was his most complex composition, as well as having a more upbeat atmosphere throughout. This album, Drake’s debut, strikes the middle ground between Bryter Later and Pink Moon to perfection, with Drake’s compellingly plaintive singing being very much the centre of the album, but there still being room for instruments other than Drake’s acoustic guitar. Indeed, one of the most notable features of the album is Danny Thompson’s work on the bass. Although he never comes close to overshadowing Drake as such, his playing on songs such as Cello Song adds another mood to the music, making this an album that one can constantly return to, finding new sounds to enjoy every time.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me though, every time I hear this album, is how underrated a guitarist Nick Drake is. Most clearly shown on Three Hours, where Drake plays a beautifully weaving guitar line that somehow has a deep inner energy over Rocky Dzidzornu’s flat sounding drums, Drake really comes into his own as a guitarist, showing an ability on the acoustic guitar that few folk singers could match. Another thing that Three Hours adds to the album, more so than either of Drake’s other albums is a longer song that rivals his briefer musical sketches. Pink Moon is famous for its brevity at under 30 minutes, and while Five Leaves Left is still less than 40 minutes long, the six minutes of Three Hours seems to pass as if in a dream. Although that sounds as if it ought to have a negative connotation, I tend to find that music which does that can often be the best music out there. For example, take a look at Drake’s singing. The possessor of a deeply soothing voice, a lot of the time the listener can’t make out what he’s saying unless you really listen out for the lyrics. On Three Hours the only lyrics you’ll be able to make out if you’re busy doing something else are, In search of a master
In search of a slave. Wonderful, isn’t it? In those 2 brief sentences, Drake’s juxtaposed two completely opposing images, and even though you don’t know the context they’re in, he still makes it sound deeply consequential. That’s a gift. I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in a higher power beyond the human mind, but I’m at a loss to explain where that sort of musical skill comes from, as surely no training can provide it.

Where I’d say that this album stands out above Pink Moon in fact is the variety on offer here.Way To Blue may be the best example of this, as it’s an extraordinary combination of Drake singing over an absolute wall of strings, which provide the sort of backing music that you’d expect to hear at your funeral. I’ve already mentioned Drake’s ability as a lyricist and as a guitarist, but Way To Blue may be the best example on this album of his actual singing voice. In the absence of any other accompaniment beyond the drama given by a string section, Drake is forced to carry the song entirely by himself, and he does it in such an outstandingly evocative way that the question which immediately crosses the listener’s mind is how he managed to survive to make two more albums, given the inner conflict which seems so evident here. People often talk of making art as a form of self-therapy, as an alternative to seeing a psychiatrist to talk about how you remember Daddy hiding your teddy bear or something like that. Although Drake’s psychological problems got worse towards the end of his life, he had always suffered from depression. The bleakness of his outlook is reflected not only in his lyrics (although verses such as

When the day is done
Hope so much your race will be all run
Then you find you jumped the gun
Have to go back where you began
When the day is done.

make Leonard Cohen look like a delightfully well adjusted individual), but also through all of the elements to his music discussed so far, whether it’s his voice, his guitar playing, or a combination of everything. It’s not a painful listen at all, in fact it’s deeply relaxing, but there’s that unease at the heart of the album, like a man is looking forward to see his death, and just sitting back to wait for it to happen.

Although pretty much every song here could get a mention as being an album highlight, one that really stands out is Cello Song. Featuring the return of the soft drumming, Drake’s guitar work is at its best here again, creating a wistfully intimate atmosphere from the beginning, which is then carried on throughout the near 5 minutes of the song. While Cello Song is arguably the best Nick Drake song which absolutely epitomises his sound, The Thoughts Of Mary Jane is another song which stands out even on this album, largely as a consequence of a single flute, constantly present throughout the whole song, adding a layer of supernatural beauty to the song that 99% of musicians who’ve walked this planet simply couldn’t equal. Now I think of it, The Thoughts Of Mary Jane is quite possibly Drake’s best song. At less than 3 minutes, it’s small enough to be listened to again and again, and has enough elements, in the flute, string section, Drake’s voice, and stunningly oblique lyrics, to keep you listening every time.

Since I’ve set a limit for myself of less than 2 sides of paper for my reviews these days, looking at individual songs is going to have to end there. Well, apart from Man In A Shed, which you’re going to have to look at yourself (think upbeat piano meets semi-ironic love song) that is. It’s hard knowing how to rate Drake’s back catalogue though. Due to producing a mere three albums, he’s probably the only artist who I can honestly say never made anything but a 5 star album. That feels faintly ridiculous, but in all honesty, so does the whole Nick Drake story. How a talent so prodigious could be so shy as to basically never play live shows can be nothing but a cruel joke of fate, made yet worse by the fact that this Drake was dead before he was 27. That’s what annoys me most about cliché. The fact that when the truly remarkable does happen, people instinctively distrust accounts of it, putting rumours of the extraordinary down to human nature to exaggerate. Thankfully as Nick Drake’s popularity grows, it seems that we’ve finally realised what we missed during his lifetime, that he was pretty much one of a kind. As Drake himself sings on Fruit Tree,

Don’t you worry
They’ll stand and stare when you’re gone.

It would be beyond arrogance for me even to insinuate that I could summarise Drake’s life better than the man himself did, other than to point out that he managed it before he was even dead.

Nick Drake – Bryter Layter (1970)

From Sputnikmusic.com

Nick Drake was without a doubt an underestimated genius. Underestimated not by others, but by himself. He was a man of recluse and low self-confidence. He always thought he wasn’t talented musically, and it puzzles many how he could even think of himself as un-talented, nevermind actually believing it.

One would have no idea that he thought of himself like that after listening to Bryter Layter. This was probably his most orchestrated album, containing not only his soft-spoken voice, guitar and violin but also drumming, bass, piano and a brass instrument here and there (Such as the saxophone in At the Chime of a City Clock) even going so far to include a xylophone during the song Northern Sky. He definitely went all out on this album and it really shows.

Even with the use of so many wonderfully arranged instruments, it still seems simplistic enough to be a nice calming listen, but while retaining enough depth so not to come off as boring or repetitive. But when it comes down to it, what do people end up listening to? That’s right, his sweet gentleman tone of voice and his amazing finger picked guitar playing.

Songs like One of These Things First are easily a prime example of this, when ever you listen to it, you’ll initially be in awe of the majestic piano but by the end your attention always wanders back to Drake’s soothing voice and melodic guitar playing. Not only does his voice leave such as an impression, the lyrics he sings always have a very nice message.

Take Hazey Jane I for example, a song the seems like it’s about a woman so infatuated with a man that she passes by on so many other things in life she could be enjoying. But for some reason these songs never come off as being too depressing, unlike a lot of his other work. Again, this is probably contributed to the fact that the other instruments he experimented with on this album give it more of an upbeat feeling, no matter what the subject matter is.

However, these lyrics and messages are vital, mainly because one of the only let downs on the album (and it’s not really THAT big of a let down) is the title track, Bryter Layter. This instrumental track, clocking in at 3 minutes and 22 seconds sounds slightly dated and sounds like a cheesy intermission tune. Compared to the brilliant songs before and after (Hazey Jane I and Fly respectively) it comes of as being a little bit of a filler track, but it’s intended purpose was probably just for him to experiment on an instrumental song, and just try something out of the ordinary.

Even more out of the ordinary is the 6 minute song, Poor Boy. Easily one of the most epic songs in all of Nick Drake’s relatively short career it truly is a masterpiece. Using choir vocals in the chorus, and his own voice during the verses. It also features such wonderful arrangements for saxophone, piano and guitar.

Sunday is really the perfect way to close out an album, a calm flute melody played over a brilliant sounding guitar and later on, an organ. It just puts the whole album in perspective, despite it not being as powerful as the other songs on the album.

Quick Recap:
Pros- Amazing orchestration, brilliant lyeics and he has such a wonderful voice.

Cons- The instrumental tracks are nothing really to get excited about, when I listen to this album I usually skip Bryter Layter and rarely bother waiting through Sunday.

Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left (1969)

From BBC Music

Twenty years ago Nick Drake was a distinctly word-of-mouth proposition whose slim back catalogue was shared by a select few. Nowadays, thanks to championing by the likes of Paul Weller, as well as a series of books and TV and radio documentaries (cf: Radio 2’s effort hosted by Brad Pitt!), Nick’s a household name. This may account for the recent avalanche of ‘sensitive’ singer songwriters but it’s hard not to be still floored by the beauty of his first album.

Discovered by Fairport Convention’s Ashley Hutchings and signed to Joe Boyd’s Witchseason production company Drake was pigeonholed as a ‘folk’ artist. Five Leaves Left, recorded on a shoestring in 1969, boasted a cast of players who had paid their dues forging the new genre of folk rock (ie: Fairport’s Richard Thompson and Pentangle’s Danny Thompson); but this was a whole different kettle of
Englishness, with more than a hint of jazz about it. Sung in the semi-whispered tones that betrayed no hint of ersatz rurality, these cryptic songs of reflection and emotional ‘otherness’ were propelled by the one thing that had attracted Boyd to Drake: His idiosyncratic open-tuned picking style “Cello Song”.

Drake is often painted as a retiring man, yet he was often extremely vocal over his muse. He and Boyd initially fought over Drake’s wish for a stripped back approach (which he eventually found on his last masterpiece, Pink Moon). In the end old college friend, Robert Kirby, provided orchestration that beautifully captured the yearning ‘autumnal’ element in the songs “Way To Blue” and “Day Is Done”.

What’s more, the string arrangement by Harry Robinson on “River Man” – possibly Drake’s finest song – succinctly turned his Delius-meets-folk-jazz opus into something that no one had ever heard before. It’s a key text for Drake fans, containing the return to nature matched against the infidelities of city life: A theme he would return to again and again, while the album title’s sly reference to smoker’s delights (as well as “Thoughts Of Mary Jane”) showed that Drake was no stranger to the standard musician’s indulgences.

Widely ignored upon its release, with hindsight it’s easy to see how such ignorance conspired to make Drake a bitter man. Yet ultimately all we can do is bask in the unique vision captured here and be grateful that, for a short period, Nick Drake was able to share it with us all.

Nick Drake: Pink Moon (1971)

From Popmatters.com

“Nick was in some strange way out of time. When you were with him, you always had a sad feeling of him being born in the wrong century. If he would have lived in the 17th century, at the Elizabethan Court, together with composers like Dowland or William Byrd, he would have been alright. Nick was elegant, honest, a lost romantic — and at the same time so cool. In brief: the perfect Elizabethan.”
— Robert Kirby, arranger, and friend of Nick Drake)

Nick Drake is the classic example of the tortured rock ‘n’ roll poet who wasn’t appreciated in his own time and died far too young. A modern day version of the 19th century poet Keats, Drake offered a humble view of the world seen through his own eyes, one of simple, heartbreaking beauty, but chronic depression overwhelmed him, and whether his death at the age of 26 from an overdose of his antidepressant medication was intentional or not, it only adds to the mystique, something that almost always ensures a cult following in the years to come (see Jeff Buckley for a more recent example). The three studio albums Drake recorded between 1969 and 1972 were commercial busts during his lifetime, but in the years that have passed, his fanbase has grown exponentially. His popularity has surged especially in recent years; younger artists like Belle & Sebastian and Mojave 3 wouldn’t be around if not for Nick Drake, and a certain automobile manufacturer used one of Drake’s most famous songs in an advertising campaign, to great effect.

Drake’s first two albums, 1969’s Five Leaves Left and 1970’s Bryter Later, were beautiful, lushly produced records, full of florid songs that were exquisitely recorded, with Drake sounding like a more introspective version of Donovan. However, the albums did not sell well, which fueled Drake’s growing depression. In 1971, after visits with psychiatrists, medication, some extended periods of inactivity, and worst of all, no new songs to speak of, he left his home in London for Spain. When he returned, he contacted producer John Wood, saying he wanted to record a new album. When they met at a studio that night at midnight, Drake sat down, and played his eleven new songs in sequence, in one sitting. A few days later, the album was finished, and that record, entitled Pink Moon, would go on to rank as Drake’s masterpiece.

One of the greatest “dark night of the soul” albums in the history of pop music, Pink Moon is astonishingly short, 28 and a half minutes, to be exact, and is one of the most musically stripped-down and emotionally naked albums ever recorded. Just Drake’s acoustic guitar, his entrancing, velvety voice, and some foreboding, gutwrenching lyrics that only hint at his state of mind at the time. That blend of simple, honest beauty with a hint of dread is perfectly exemplified on the album’s title track which serves as the opener. Over his gentle, yet insistently strummed guitar and minimal, plaintive piano notes (that tiny bit of piano was the only overdub on the entire album), Drake lays all his cards on the table, singing, “Saw it written and I saw it say/Pink moon is on its way/And none of you stand so tall/Pink moon gonna get ye all.”

The rest of the album is just as straightforward. “Place to Be” is still sad enough to melt the hearts of female college English majors even today, but is emotional without getting too weepy, poetic without becoming pretentious (“Now I’m weaker than the palest blue/Oh, so weak in this need for you”). The instrumental “Horn” is so gorgeous, Drake doesn’t need words to convey what he’s feeling, while the devastating “Know” needs just four simple lines to bring tears to your eyes (“Know that I love you/Know I don’t care/Know that I see you/Know I’m not there”). Drake’s deft guitar playing shines on “Free Ride”, a song with one of the more memorable pop hooks on the album. Meanwhile, “Things Behind the Sun” offers words of warning over a pastoral melody: “Don’t be too wise/For down below they never grow/They’re always tired and charms are hired/From out of their eyes.”

Drake’s naked honesty is at its most tortured on “Parasite”, in which Drake sings one of the most gorgeously miserable, vivid depictions of the sensitive, self-loathing outcast. He plucks his guitar strings mournfully, deliberately, as he sings verses that are almost uncomfortably blunt: “Changing a rope for a size too small/People all get hung.” When he delivers the song’s payoff line, it’s soul-crushing: “Take a look you may see me in the dirt/For I am the parasite who hangs from your skirt.”

As Pink Moon closes with the hopeful strains of “From the Morning”, it’s like seeing the first rays of sunlight glow on the horizon after the saddest night of your life, as Drake sings, almost optimistically, “So look see the days/The endless colored ways/And go play the game you learnt/From the morning.” Unfortunately, Drake saw no way out of his depression, and two years later, he was dead. Pink Moon is the sound of a tremendously gifted artist making one last, desperate stab at a creative act, and the record he has left behind is something special. It may not have the best songs of his career (such as Five Leaves Left’s “Cello Song” and Bryter Later’s “Northern Sky”), but it’s easily his greatest album as a whole. Drake may be long gone, but as Keats once wrote, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness.” Everyone needs this album in their CD collections for those dark, lonesome nights.