Post by petrolino on Mar 13, 2021 20:11:20 GMT
Nick Drake : (Still) Finding A Place To Be
'When The Day Is Done' - Elton John
From the lilting, collapsible melodies of 'Time Has Told Me', and the creation of dizzy drone effects on 'River Man', through a combination of clipped jazz progressions and piano freestylings on 'Man In A Shed', and raw folkslinger acoustics on 'Fruit Tree', Nick Drake's debut album, 'Five Leaves Left' {Released : 3 July 1969, Island Records}, still sounds as fresh as a daisy. It closes with the relaxing lounge jazz of 'Saturday Sun', in which Drake rechannels visions of Saturday morning's blue skies, as they slowly give way to a typical English Sunday's seance on a wet afternoon. 'Five Leaves Left' became the folk album of choice for rock 'n' roll tokers in the future.
“We swapped phone numbers, and as quick as possible I called Joe Boyd and said, ‘You’ve got to go and see this guy, he’s terrific. He’s very different.’”
- Ashley Hutchings, 'Nick Drake Remembered ...'
“My first impression was that he was a genius. It was that simple.”
- Joe Boyd on Nick Drake
- Ashley Hutchings, 'Nick Drake Remembered ...'
“My first impression was that he was a genius. It was that simple.”
- Joe Boyd on Nick Drake
Nick Drake
'Way To Blue' - Nick Drake
Nick Drake's third and final studio album is the minimalistic song suite 'Pink Moon' {Released : 25 February 1972, Island Records}. It's comparatively harsh and at times abrasive, and it feels more stripped down than it is due to the mood the music creates. The songs are sometimes shorter. Beck recorded a cover version of the song 'Parasite' that accentuates the beauty of Drake's original record.
"Forty years ago, in July 1974, Nick Drake visited Sound Techniques for the last time. The sun was certainly shining, but the material he now approached originated in worse weather. Drake’s work always seemed to have a seasonal logic. His 1969 debut, Five Leaves Left, was crisp, autumnal, and ordered as a school’s Michaelmas term. The looser Bryter Layter (1970) suggested an urban pastoral idyll, grass browning in a summer park. On 1972’s Pink Moon, the branches of Drake’s music were still starkly beautiful, but bare. Believing he had enough material to begin a new album, he now entered Sound Techniques again.
“Nick came to see me in the winter,” remembers Joe Boyd. “It was a dark, cold time. He was very distressed, and I was very distressed at how distressed he was. I said, ‘Well, let’s start recording again.’ Then I had to go back to California, and there was a gap. When I returned, we went back into the studio, in the summer.”
Over what Boyd remembers as two consecutive nights, he and John Wood worked with Drake on four songs, among them “Hanging On A Star” and “Black Eyed Dog”, a piece recounting a haunting by an unshakeable foe, delivered in an eerie falsetto reminiscent of Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman”.
“With Pink Moon, some songs on that were very dark,” says Richard Thompson, the Fairport guitarist who guested on Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter. “But this was a degree further off the edge.”
“John [Martyn] brought it back from Island, and said, ‘This is the latest from Nick…’” remembers Beverley Martyn, one of Drake’s closest friends. “Nobody had heard anything as real as that. It was him stripped bare.”
“The impetus to go in the studio had been because he was so unhappy and so disturbed,” says Joe Boyd. “I was viewing it first and foremost as therapy, because he always loved being in the studio. I didn’t hear the lyrics until he overdubbed them on the guitar parts.”
And when he did?
“It was terrifying. It was really alarming,” says Boyd. “But it was tremendous. It was quite extraordinary.”
It was a painful revelation. But, even in the grip of a fatal depression, Nick Drake was as in control of the direction of his music as he had been for the previous eight years. As distressing as it was for his friends to hear, he still knew precisely what it was that he had to do."
“Nick came to see me in the winter,” remembers Joe Boyd. “It was a dark, cold time. He was very distressed, and I was very distressed at how distressed he was. I said, ‘Well, let’s start recording again.’ Then I had to go back to California, and there was a gap. When I returned, we went back into the studio, in the summer.”
Over what Boyd remembers as two consecutive nights, he and John Wood worked with Drake on four songs, among them “Hanging On A Star” and “Black Eyed Dog”, a piece recounting a haunting by an unshakeable foe, delivered in an eerie falsetto reminiscent of Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman”.
“With Pink Moon, some songs on that were very dark,” says Richard Thompson, the Fairport guitarist who guested on Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter. “But this was a degree further off the edge.”
“John [Martyn] brought it back from Island, and said, ‘This is the latest from Nick…’” remembers Beverley Martyn, one of Drake’s closest friends. “Nobody had heard anything as real as that. It was him stripped bare.”
“The impetus to go in the studio had been because he was so unhappy and so disturbed,” says Joe Boyd. “I was viewing it first and foremost as therapy, because he always loved being in the studio. I didn’t hear the lyrics until he overdubbed them on the guitar parts.”
And when he did?
“It was terrifying. It was really alarming,” says Boyd. “But it was tremendous. It was quite extraordinary.”
It was a painful revelation. But, even in the grip of a fatal depression, Nick Drake was as in control of the direction of his music as he had been for the previous eight years. As distressing as it was for his friends to hear, he still knew precisely what it was that he had to do."
- John Robinson, Uncut
Molly Drake, Gabrielle Drake, Rodney Drake & Nick Drake
'Road' - Nick Drake
'Bryter Layter' {Released : 5 March 1971, Island Records} is sometimes referred to as Drake's magnum pop opus, a work of musical flair and cinematic scope. It has punch, verve and sparkling arrangements, inducing effervescent playing that leaps off the vinyl. I think of it as Nick Drake with a spring in his step. I feel I can understand the disappointment that apparently came with its failure at a commercial level.
"I was torn between this and Five Leaves Left, which is more acoustic. But Bryter Layter just has great pop songs. Great playing as well. It's a shame that he never caught people's attention at the time. I think he was disappointed that he didn't get the acclaim. He's such a one-off, just the sound of his voice and the tunes are very unique.
Did you ever hear the record that they put out of his mum singing? It was funny. I always think with Nick Drake that it's like, 'Where the f*ck did that come from?' It's a little bit folk, but it isn't really folk, there's a bit of Donovan in there, but there isn't really. And then I heard a home recording of his mum singing on the piano and thought, 'Ah, that's it...' It must be something in the genes.
[On working with Robert Kirby] : F*cking great fun. He was just so funny. Lots of very drunken nights with him. He immediately had his own sound as well. His way of thinking of arrangements and his use of different instruments was totally unique. Whatever you hear of his stuff, you always recognise his sound. A larger-than-life character and a really funny fella."
[On working with Robert Kirby] : F*cking great fun. He was just so funny. Lots of very drunken nights with him. He immediately had his own sound as well. His way of thinking of arrangements and his use of different instruments was totally unique. Whatever you hear of his stuff, you always recognise his sound. A larger-than-life character and a really funny fella."
- Paul Weller, The Quietus
"This is gonna sound really dumb, but there is so much music in my head that I can’t really listen to anything else. I have a Nick Drake cd in my car that I play while I’m running errands at home, but my kids tell me they’re going to mutiny if I play it one more time."
- Kristin Hersh, Brightest Young Things
Nick Drake in the country
'Hazey Jane I' ~ Nick Drake
Nick Drake ~ 'Hazey Jane II'
Nick Drake ~ 'Poor Boy'
Various recordings have been unearthed since Drake's death in 1974, some of which are collected on compilation albums like 'Time Of No Reply' and 'Family Tree'. There's a lot of demos, home recordings and unfinished pieces swimming around online.
“I used to find him incredibly frustrating, obstinate and difficult, but I cannot remember ever not loving him or not admiring him.”
- Gabrielle Drake remembers her brother Nick Drake
Gabrielle Drake in space
'Blossom' - Nick Drake
One of the interesting things about Nick Drake is when highly trained guitarists play his work for instructional videos, the songs often sound virtually unrecognisable. They say there's a variety of reasons for this, such as tunings, his unusual handwork, his use of dynamics and expression. The same is true of guitarist Kristin Hersh whose work when covered always sounds completely different.
Both of Drake's parents were accomplished musicians who composed songs at the piano. Some of his mother Molly Drake's piano compositions have been released posthumously (she died in 1993) and these display similar shifts in mood. Like her son, and like Hersh, she wrote songs that seemed to teeter somewhere between the states of happiness and sadness. Perhaps it's this unusual dynamic that caused 'Bryter Layter' to fail commercially; even at his most upbeat, Drake could sound downbeat, and vice versa. He shied away from public performing and resisted giving interviews, which probably didn't help either. He wasn't long for this world.
TRIVIA : Filmmaker Wes Anderson invited Kristin Hersh to record a cover of Drake's song 'Fly' for American Laundromat and she was happy to oblige.
“My son Wyatt and I call them “our teammates” – those souls who are on the same page. Nick Drake is one, for sure, but they don’t always play music. Or they do, I guess, but I’m not sure music is necessarily sound, if that makes any sense. But you’re right, it’s a haunting and a saving. It helps when you don’t feel like you were meant to be born on this planet. I guess we all feel like that sometimes. Wyatt and I feel like that most of the time.”
- Kristin Hersh, Louder Than War
"If I could find making music a fairly natural connection with something else, then I might move on to something else."
- Attributed to Nick Drake
Nick Drake & Molly Drake
'Three Hours' - Nick Drake
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CODA
“My first thought was to compare him to Bert Jansch, Robin Williamson, John Martyn, and John Renbourn. There was that whole genre of complex, fingerpicked guitar playing in Britain, Davey Graham being the grandfather of all of them. You could hear that Nick’s playing was related to that, but it was so different. It didn’t really have a folksiness about it. It was much more urbane and sophisticated. The main thing that impressed me about Nick, was his perfection.”
- Joe Boyd, Acoustic Guitar
"That impeccability is especially evident on Pink Moon, the album that Nick Drake recorded with only guitar and voice (and a bit of piano). Musicians have been grappling for decades with the often-complex puzzles of guitar tunings, counter-intuitive fingerpicking patterns, and asymmetric vocal lines that Drake created on the record."
- Derk Richardson, Acoustic Guitar
Excerpt from Rodney Drake's diary (shared by Juliana Hatfield on Twitter)
'Time Has Told Me' - Krystle Warren
