Nick Drake
Five Leaves Left
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NATN Recommended
Nick Drake
Five Leaves Left
Hannibal, 1969
RiYL: Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen |
Drake is a special case in a lot of ways. Although musically and lyrically, he's not really that separate from any of the other late '60s British folkies, there's something intangible and momentous about his yearning, almost sighing delivery and unhurrying fingerpicked guitar. The string arrangements that support him for most of his first two albums -- Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter -- are much more luxuriant than most indie rock ears are prepared for. But once you get used to Drake's presentation, you find his simple irony of incredibly depressing lyrics and astonishingly beautiful songs addictive.
Five Leaves isn't quite as gorgeous as Layter, nor as stirring as the almost entirely solo Pink Moon, but it does showcase the artist at his most vital and flexible, before depression and drug use sunk him and eventually killed him in 1974 at age 26. After your ear gets used to the old-fashioned production, songs like "Three Hours" and the jaunty "Man In A Shed" (sample lyric: "Well there was a girl who lived nearby / Whenever he saw her he could only simply sigh") draw you in with their delicate guitar and Drake's prematurely exhausted vocals. The songs are (barely) carried by upright bass and piano on the more upbeat (with Nick Drake, "upbeat" is a highly relative term) numbers and an orchestra on the moodier tunes, but everything is secondary to Drake's gorgeous singing and sharp acoustic accompaniment.
The artists influenced by Nick Drake are many and diverse: Tom Verlaine, Bob Mould, and Archer Prewitt are three artists I've read mentioning him this week. Most indie rock is quite detached from Drake's sparse arrangements, and the sound of Husker Du's raving, slashed electrics and Drake's mega-restrained acoustics are about as far as two guitar sounds can get. So what do all these people take from Nick Drake? That's hard to explain. Drake does what he does so well, it's almost silly to think of someone trying to replicate it. But I can certainly see where one man so clearly establishing his legacy in song would inspire others to the same, no matter what the vision.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.