So are understated and sensitive which is why I resisted him for so long. But one night I was working at home and started playing the long list of unordered single songs I had amassed over years and typed away, enjoying the familiarity. At one point I realised the song I was hearing wasn't familiar. It just felt familiar. A high crooning voice that drew chalk lines of minor key scales before a sudden change to the major and, somehow, a cry of despair turned to charm. I clicked on the player and saw it was Way to Blue by Nick Drake. Huh? Where the bjongereeze did I get that? I had memories of a friend particularly recommending him and trying him out but left the experience with a shrug: just another shy boy with songs written on vellum. But this was going through me like x-rays. I found the album it was from, Napstered it and played the whole thing a few times. Weeks later, gorging myself on the story I took delighted delivery of a box set of the three main albums and a DVD of the documentary and was very happy.
Time Has Told Me begins with a two chord progression on the acoustic in a laid back waltz time. Drake comes in with a weary edge as though he is explaining something yet again, his patience only maintained by the admission that he is talking to himself whether it's I or you. Know your limits and leave anything that leads you into falsehood. It's more poetic than that but for his opening statement to the world, Drake is keeping it relatively straight. A piano enters and then a bass and from the second verse a sumptuous electric guitar that sounds almost like a lap steel. Between them the instruments lock into a pleasing rhythm with a country lilt. It's no wonder as Drake's confident and elegant playing at the centre gives plenty of foundation for the piano to wander a little, Danny Thompson (of Pentangle) with his jazz tinged bass playfully strengthens the harmonic structure and the ever tasteful Richard Thompson (Fairport Convention) works magic from his electric. The song rolls in tidal drifts, the powerful ease of it belying its gravity.
River Man is eerie. Betty tries to pray the sky away but returns from despair with thoughts of natural beauty which ease her pain so she stays for more ... pain? As for the narrator he has his own plan for Lilac Time (funeral flowers) and questions he has for the River Man. I take the latter to be Charon, ferryman on the River Styx that bears the dead to the underworld. The thing is that the people considering suicide in this song seem blase about it as though they have crossed the barrier and walk through their days looking for an opportunity. Drake's sonorous croon approaches a howl and frequently lowers close to a whisper, the way one might sing a diary entry. The melody is gorgeous in a minor mode and moves like a jazz-tinged dirge. Drake's guitar plays a similar 5/4 pulse to Take Five. The confidence of it makes it feel simple but it isn't easy keeping that up for real. He does have Danny Thompson's bass snaking around it for comfort and the swelling warmth of the strings which, themselves whisper and cry in turn. Strings are often brought into arrangements to brighten them but these seem to cast shadows like clouds. The River Man's answers are only imagined but perhaps it is he who sings the final line, "Oh, how they come and go. Oh, how they come and go....," into the fade. The sadness of it gives way to a kind of creepy nodding.
If River Man is creepy Three Hours is spooky. Two sole travellers in search of some kind of life. Any will do, whether master or slave, anything except more solitude. Jeremy's heading down to a cave and Giacomo down to the sea. An awfully big adventure or just happenstance, we don't know but that short time period starts getting oppressive. A melancholy guitar introduction on a modal base is joined by congas and double bass and a kind of urgency builds. Drake's vocal is lightly jazzy ending the verses in a whisper. And then in the third verse, the one that has no named characters the music stops and begins again with a splintered playing of the guitar arpeggios as the bass snakes behind him. "Three hours is needed to leave from them all. "Three hours to wonder and three hours to fall." This smooths out into a sweeter instrumental on solo guitar which slows to the introduction again, the bass returns, then the congas and the beginning of the story resumes as the first verse is repeated with Jeremy finding his cave in search of a master, in search of a slave. A slow landing procedure brings us back to earth and we leave, wondering where we've just gone.
Way To Blue, my ah-ha moment for Drake, begins with thick chords on the strings which will be the sole accompaniment to the vocal. It sounds too melodramatic but then Drake's vocal enters. Each verse begins with a couplet of questions before shifting to the major for the refrain about showing all you may know. The resolution is directed at the other in the dialogue (which might just be Nick, himself) asking if they know the way to blue. Some questions ask about the power of nature and others are more metaphysical. And with each moment in a major mode we are surprised at the charm. It's like he's telling us not to be alarmed at his depth and its darkness, reassuring us he's not in danger. But then the minor cooing returns with a refrain that includes the title about knowing the way to blue (which could be a construct of heaven or the more common musical sense of melancholy). A middle eight in the major which seems to suggest hope but that very word is used strangely: "hoping like the blind." A final verse sheds no more light on the meditation and the song ends quietly with a chord on the strings playing out the bar.
Day is Done begins with the acoustic guitar playing through the descending progression in straightforward fashion. Drake comes in with the strings and seven stanzas of near identical melody (the sixth has an extra line and the seventh is a reprise of the first as with Three Hours) and the development of really just one notion: time is the enemy. But this is Nick Drake and nothing is ever going to be quite as it seems. The linearity of the thought expresses the kind of fleeting pace of time against our boldest claims is perhaps a more realistic take on the the old Guy Lombardo chestnut, Enjoy Yourself, It's Later than You Think. Why bother? Well, if you can spend seven verses saying the same thing with such varying invention than the antedote is surely creativity itself. Nick is no longer with us but this song is.
Cello Song starts with a complex guitar figure joined by double bass and percussion and then the cello of the title with its strange modal figure. Nick comes in with a breathy croon about finding his place in the world around him and then finding that, for all its definition, it's not the happiest it could be, asking his conversant if they would lift him from it. This, like River Man, is a track where the dead string sound which Drake maintained for the whole of his career comes to his aid, allowing the fragility of his vocal a sprightly rhythmic base. The fade suggests the situation will only continue, despite the hope hinted at in the final lines.
Thoughts of Mary Jane begins with a kind of pastoral sweetness made cloying with a lightly tripping flute. Is this a song about cannabis? Could be a song about a girl. Could be both. What might collapse under a mountain of twee is saved by Drake's winsome vocal. For almost the entire album so far he has sounded haunted and melancholy, reporting from the edge of the abyss. Here, he is lying back in the mild English sunshine and breathing in the long grass. I'm not going to take that away from him.
Man in a Shed is next with some luscious acoustic playing and finger vibrato we enter the descending figure in rhythm, taken up by the bass and joined by a jaunty piano. We're in an uncharacteristic major key setting and Drake comes in with a tale about the man of the title and his leaky shed from which he spies a beautiful girl who rejects him. But he pleas that she might know and grow to love him with a little imagination and understanding, revealing to the listener that he has been addressing her in the third person (the man is me and the girl is you) but instead of sounding like a stalker it comes across as the breakthrough by a shy boy finding the courage to be candid and flying on the confidence it brings him. I used to hate the apparent tweeness of this one and would skip it the way you duck into a corridor to avoid a chirpy workmate. To write this, though, I had to listen to the whole thing and live in it and, when you do that, the shed starts looking pretty comfy. The song ends on a good natured noodle-out between the acoustic and the piano. But then I always just wonder if this is not protesting too much on Nick's part. It does sound like the only part he's imagined is the last verse.
Fruit Tree's intriguing guitar figure settles into a rich arrangement of strings, bass and reeds around a descending minor progression beneath Drake's soft minor key meditation on fame and the damage of time and memory. A surprising verse with new melodic material (safe in the womb) resolves, again surprisingly in the refrain the ends the first verse ("a much updated ruin...") The first verse repeats with only guitar and bass and muted strings slowly crawling in. And then a coda follows an instrumental in the reeds of the initial verse melody. The coda, ("fruit tree, fruit tree ...") adds further melodies and an imprecation to the power of works beyond lifespan. This song is often cited as a kind of self aware resignation by Drake or even a prophecy of his own downward spiral. Really, though, it fits perfectly into the mood and tenor of the rest of the album, if a little more stridently emphatic.
Saturday Sun begins with a warm piano piece, loungey bass and brushed drums. The song has the feel of a long weekend breakfast with the paper and the thought of things done and baulked at through hesitation. Vibes coo tremulously to the end, a kind of lilting regret but one the might be palliated with tea, toast and marmalade.
I tarred Nick Drake with the singer/songwriter brush before I'd heard a note of him. Then when I did hear some, the guitar playing was fiddly and flashy. Was that voice vulnerable or precious? Nope not for me. He might have had talent but it was only a rung or two over the dreck of old buskers who only ever seemed to know American Pie and The Needle and the Damage Done in public but at parties would bring out a spongey notebook full of faintly biro-ed poems about the butterfly of my jealousy. Well, I was young and punk and kept the black flag flying. The nightmare landscapes of Ian Curtis were about as vulnerable as I wanted to get. So, it took a while but I did come to realise that I resented singer/songwriters like Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen or Donovan (and a host of uncomfortably more local ones) because I had been a big fat failure at being one myself. I wrote songs (highly derivative and self-embarrassing even then) and execrable free verse (featuring myself tormented by armed goddesses) and at least one play in which a talented but misunderstood young man rails against the apathy and stupor of everyone around him. I stopped all that, eventually, and when I did I lost a lot of other barriers whose shelf life should end in adolescence. That means that singer/songwriter is just a job description and the rest is a spectrum of skill.
And skill is what Drake has and in such mass that talent is the only fitting word for it. And there's something else: those other ones I mentioned, regardless of how well I now consider them, all spring from a recognisable tradition, you can hear the folk den here or the poetry reading there but Nick Drake only steps there a few times. The greater of these songs do not sound like anyone else. Well, not from the time. Even though the melodic construction couldn't be more different I hear Elizabethan songwright John Dowland here but nothing of Dylan or Bert Jansch. Drake would often retune his guitar to play the kind of figures he designed for his songs and they are the first things you'll come up against. Then it will be some of the tough rhythmic figures and then how to sing at the same time.
Leonard Cohen joked that as a guitar player he had one chop (a rapid finger-style arpeggio) Drake has many and they cross from virtuosity into the realm of solid arrangement, the songs, as he imagined them, depend on them. Add to this lyrics of creditable poetry. If you think Drake's voice is too uppercrust and privileged to sing anything of gravity and so don't get to the words, make an effort. You will find some of the most eerie observations of human behaviour you have ever encountered in those lines. The sense of drifting people who have resolved a dark and certain question in River Man will sadden and chill you the more you think about it. Three Hours with its muffled desperation and open melodic lines is disturbing. Even the jolly jaunt of Man in a Shed drips with melancholy. John Dowland's world with its suspended time, flowing tears and even multilingual puns on his own name (Semper Dowland Semper Dolens/Always Dowland Always Sad) broached the philosophy of life and death as keenly as the great bards of his time, impressed kings and courts, was sung angelically over perfectly arranged lute parts. Drake's spookiness finds its roots here rather than his own time and comparisons to anyone contemporary to him fall away like confetti.
Five Leaves Left is a title that refers to cigarette papers and might seem self-dismissive but anyone who's ever smoked will know that means that something you might assume to continue not only runs out but you get a reminder to buy more papers or smoking or time itself. And it isn't just smoking, it's rollies, richer tobacco in pouches that you smoke when you can't afford tailors in packs or want to affect a kind of independent look. It's not what you'd call artisanal but it reminds me that after an adulthood of shaving with plastic handles and expensive blade cartridges I've switched to single-blade safety razors for cost and environmental reasons (and with a little extra skill one blade shaves as cleany as four at once). The title and the cover art with the young songwriter standing, slim and beautiful, in an old room and gazing out a window, surrounded by solid green as though placed on a pool table, his name in stylised cursive and the title in sans serif. Flip it and its dominated by a lonely looking Drake leaning on a wall as a middleaged man is caught in mid leap while running. Story of his life.
That was a short life, too. After a triumphant support spot for Fairport Convention Drake embarked on a UK tour, playing small venues of people who pierced his delicate skin with conversations about any kind of bullshit and grew restless as he fiddled with his guitar tuning. He wouldn't say a word to them and they just spoke to each other or heckled the endless non musical twangs between numbers. Inside, he seethed, swelled with resentment at all the trivial minded bastards of the world who should have been hanging on each syllable but instead moaned about losing out in the football pools or the pain of their bunions. In the ecstasies of composition or facing the half circle of string players as he recorded in the studio he knew he was a god of song. Here, he was just a singer/songwriter with a guitar that he had to keep tuning and then wouldn't sing up so anyone could hear him and obviously couldn't care less about involving them by at least announcing the titles. To those audiences, the ones he reviled and swore never to attempt to please again, he looked just the way I had imagined him, feeble, precious and undeserving.
This album, unsupported by its label and subverted by his aversion to performance, sank. All of them did, through the next one Bryter Later with its test pattern orchestrations and Pink Moon which plays like a long whispered suicide note, they seeped through the boards to the last drop and stayed there until someone who actually listened to them passed them on and, play by play, Nick rose again, this time gigantic. Well, no, he was dead by then.
I can't end there. But I don't need to and shouldn't. I'll end on influences because it's just too easy talking about how melancholy Nick Drake was. Being my own vintage I can recall people trying to tell me that they can hear epilepsy in Ian Curtis' vocals. And here, after the fact, we are given an image of Drake striding the street with a long legged gait, shivering in his shed of introversion, dark clouds of string chords moving above, and we try to find a Bert Jansch here or a Richard Thompson there. But really, we don't have to seek so far afield. Look up the name Molly Drake and listen to every song you can find of hers. It's piano rather than intimidating guitar prowess but it's otherwise all there, a mastery of long melodic phrases, an appreciation of the silences between lines and a sense of melancholy that some can see in the brightest of days and happiest of times. Nick Drake's biggest influence was his Mum. In celebrating him we celebrate her and the bond that no ear can deny.
Listening notes:
I've never herd this on vinyl and wouldn't bother pursuing it. I listened exclusively to the official download as 24 bit 44.1 kHz flac files. The stereo field is full, the detail extends to tape his and the guitars are crisp and the double bass dynamic and clean. The strings and orchestral instruments are spread across the stereo field without gimmickry and retain their warmth. And Drake's voice is front and centre and given an impressive level of detail. In fact, it's identical to the mastering in the Fruit Tree box set (do we really hear a difference between 16 and 24 bit audio in our loungerooms?)
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