Nick Drake

Forgotten while you’re here Remembered for a while
A much updated ruin
From a much outdated style

– “Fruit Tree”

Everything Nick Drake left behind lingers with Romanticism, the big R Romanticism that speaks to something transcendent, pastoral, tragic. Possessed of elegant skill and sensitive insight; born to a casually beautiful introvert, whose playful and intellectual charm rapidly spiraled into depression and the sullen mystery of reclusiveness; Drake remains cloaked in an obscurity that can only be approached through the endless retracing of his music.

When he died from an overdose of antidepressants at 26 in 1974, at his parents’ home in England, Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus sat on his bedside table. Drake’s now such a manifestation of myths upon which cultural canons are built that fans searching for any biographical landmarks of the actual songwriter are left feeling, like one contemporary reviewer of Drake’s final LP Pink Moon, that “sometimes I don’t believe there is a Nick Drake.”

Into these long shadows arrives Nick Drake: Remembered for a While, an ambitious new tome orchestrated by his sister, actress Gabrielle Drake. The gorgeous 440-page, hardbound volume collects nearly every scrap and trace of Drake that might be retrieved or recalled, from letters and family journals to press clippings, photos, and essays by everyone from his childhood friends to psychiatrists.

Pages of handwritten lyrics unfold alongside Chris Healey’s deconstruction of every song, while Pete Paphides attempts some order with an interspersed biography drawing frequently on songwriter Robin Frederick’s excellent musical analysis. The book’s design lays out exquisitely, down to its end papers replicating the pattern of the blanket Drake wore in his now-famous first photo shoot with Julian Lloyd. If it all feels decadently excessive, that’s because it is.

Billed as “The Authorized Companion to the Music of Nick Drake,” it undoubtedly succeeds. Because the life of Nick Drake remains dwarfed by the arresting aura of his music. What little exists directly from Drake sheds scant insight. He only gave one terse interview during his career, and no later writings beyond lyric fragments have been discovered. So while the book humanizes Drake and his descent into severe depression, any understanding of his emotional or psychological state only leads back to what can be gleaned from his songs.

Even then, despite the comprehensiveness of everything collected in Remembered for a While, Drake remains a void, an object of projection. That biographical black hole allows his music to float untethered. Meaning is discovered anew by each succeeding generation, a legacy thriving ever stronger 40 years after his death.

Know that I love you
Know I don’t care
Know that I see you
Know I’m not there

– “Know”

Drake’s life unfurls remarkably unremarkable. Born to an upper-middle-class family, he received a typical midcentury English boarding school education. Aside from a few pivotal, pre-Cambridge months abroad in France where his songwriting began to flourish, no grand adventures, great loves, or other extraordinarily impacting artistic fodder fills his brief timeline. Even anecdotes of the young songwriter from friends are noticeably mundane beyond his emerging talent.

Drake dropped out of Cambridge, but while there he became friends with Robert Kirby, his arranger whose unique combination of classical and contemporary expertise established a trust and realized the sound of Drake’s first two LPs. He also drew the attention of Joe Boyd, whose production company Witchseason served as a linchpin for the British folk scene, and eventually signed to Island Records. Even with Boyd’s backing, Drake’s 1969 debut, Five Leaves Left, was released to almost no attention.

Nevertheless, from the beginning, his craft inspired passionate championing, especially among contemporaries like John Martyn and Richard and Linda Thompson, who were all close friends and protective of the shy songwriter. Not that this brought him a wider audience. On the rare occasions he did perform – the book includes a chronology of public shows that fits easily on a single, generously spaced page – Drake became increasingly awkward and withdrawn, even to audiences still mesmerized by his picking and hushed singing.

Exponentially more ambitious in its arrangements, 1970’s Bryter Layter drifted into obscurity even faster, Drake quickly withdrawing publicly by retreating to his parents’ home. Despite this psychological struggle, he returned to the studio that fall, eschewing accompaniment to record solo. The resulting Pink Moon, released February 1972, arrived raw and unvarnished, vulnerable in a way Drake had never been heard. Despite a dedicated publicity push by Island, the LP garnered little fanfare.

He receded deeper into the familial confines of Warwickshire, though he made a handful of final recordings in 1974 before his death. Four songs, released posthumously on the 1979 Fruit Tree box set, include the harrowing “Black Eyed Dog,” Drake’s most direct expression of his depression. On these tracks, Drake’s fragile voice cracks with an edge that breaks his gently floating melodies.

After his death, the music steadily built a cult following. Credit the allure of a poet lost too soon fueling intrigue, yet his compositions echoed across new generations. Fans made pilgrimages to his parents’ house and dubbed cassettes of every piece of homemade tape and recording they could find. His LPs remained in print, and songs continued to be repackaged into collections as subsequent audiences rediscovered him. Though Drake remains far from mainstream, covers from artists like Lucinda Williams and Beck continue to draw new attention to his work.

Time goes by from year to year
And no one asks why I am standing here
But I have my answer as I look to the sky
This is the time of no reply

– “Time of No Reply”

Nick Drake’s music ties to a specific era, late-Sixties British folk, but it transcends beyond into a space if not timeless, at least removed from a specific time. The acoustic Pink Moon, his bestselling disc, voices something both deeply personal and universal, revealing just enough to catch a glimpse of the poet, but ambiguous enough to be imbued with meaning for each listener. Unique tunings and his flow of words unravel with an impressionistic rhythm, but it’s the contemplative beauty of the songs that still ensnares imagination.

It’s a piercing calm amidst the world ambitiously rushing by, rife with a need to express something deeper, yet always removed and apart. The yearning in his songs to understand and be understood is never quite achieved except in brief ephemeral moments that only pool into more questions. Fame would have likely devastated Drake, but whether his overdose was suicide or the accident of a troubled mind seeking temporary relief can only be speculated.

Remembered for a While exposes the brutal effect of Drake’s depression on others, unglamorous reality of the romanticized ideal. There’s no allure in his friends’ and family’s recall of Drake’s struggle, watching helplessly as the young man drifted further away and became more unreachable, unable to achieve solace even in his music. The excerpts from his father’s journals chronicling the last years of Drake’s descent, including the devastation of finding him dead, shatter the myth in ways that most fans would rather ignore.

In that sense, the book’s attempt to pull back a curtain on the legend enshrouding its subject doesn’t entirely satisfy. Since there’s so little to draw from the artist himself, Drake instead hovers over it as something not fully realized, a ghost seen only in the wake of his having been there rather than the effect of actual presence. That, of course – and again – only makes his songs so much more powerful.

Identity dissipates. Artists recede to a specter. Still, art finds its purest connection in communion with the listener.

Time of No Reply

This article appears in January 23 • 2015.