Nick Drake is, sadly, a sad story in today’s day and age. An artist, incredible with the acoustic guitar and a simple magician with his words, kills himself after releasing three of what are today considered some of the best Singer-Songwriter albums of all time, with his last one, Pink Moon, finished only two years before his last breath, being considered one of the best albums of all time. The tragic part is that all of these high ideas of his art only happened many, many years after he passed away, as he died considering himself a failure, unable to reach anyone with some of the deepest rivers of expression any composer has let flow out of them. He killed himself on 1974, along with a lot of people who died on that day and we don’t know their names, thinking his name would dissipate in history as theirs has. His albums would take many years to be rediscovered, with the help of his family and a few friends spreading his gospel around.

This is the basic context for his life, and mostly all you need to know before you listen to anything from him and read this text. I discovered him in 2020, I think, along with a lot of artists and bands that I can’t remember anything about anymore. But he certainly stood out. His tenderest voice, floating along his guitar while you can see the twilight colors of colorless lives behind, and you see himself through his mirror, translating his discontent, his ugliest selves into beautifulest roses to the ear and heart. You can see an endlessly lovely person in his songs, a person of infinite kindness, until you’re left alone with his disgraceful misery, towering above you, displaying your self as an endful and empty bag of hope.

Even though I say all of this about his sadness, you can find a lot of comfort in his voice and guitar playing and the arrangements behind him. Regardless of the man he must have been, whenever I want to feel kindness in music form, a lot of his songs come first to mind. And I say regardless, because as I said previously, I see a lot of myself in him. I think he valued kindness a lot, even if he couldn’t express it often because his own head seemed hopeless of itself. I can relate to it, and this idea that comes sometimes that many of my songs may go unheard, maybe eternally. I think if you’ve ever felt a bit hopeless and/or depressed, there’s a lot of room to cry and to smile in his songs.

Today, I’ll talk a bit about his first album, initiating a personal analysis of his discography that’ll go along for the next few days. I wish this discography dive would be much longer, but he sadly only left us with those three records.

Before anything, I highly recommend that you go check out his songs. The full albums are excellent listens, but if you need a quick feel to see if you enjoy his style if you’ve never listened to him, I recommend a few songs. Pink Moon. Day is Done. Place to Be. Northern Sky. Those are some of my favorites from him.

Walk with me here, now.

Five Leaves Left (1969)

1969 is known amongst music enthusiasts as one of the best years in music history. The Beatles seemed to be finishing off their legendary run of albums that forever changed the story of modern music with the release of one of the most celebrated records of all time, Abbey Road. They would disband on 1970 on the region known as Greater London, and in that same region, but one year before, King Crimson was formed and soon enough would release another contender for the best record of all time with In The Court of the Crimson King (for such an eccentric genre as Progressive Rock, the cover art for this record is one of the most famous cover arts of all time). Frank Zappa released the masterpiece Hot Rats. You have The Velvet Underground’s self-titled coming months before. The first two Led Zeppelin albums, the first Neil Young album with Crazy Horse. Gal Costa’s self-titled. The Rolling Stone’s Let it Bleed. I could list numerous incredible contributions to music that happened on that year, and even though we can always think of how lucky the people that lived through that year and could listen to those releases as they happened were, they all missed Nick Drake’s Five Years Left; an album that, to me, can rival any of those I listed before.

If you know of Nick Drake, you probably only know of his album Pink Moon, the one I said earlier that was released two years before he left this world. It was the album that introduced the world to him, as the title track appeared on a Volkswagen commercial, marking a surprisingly popular moment for one of music’s most forgotten souls. That whole album is incredible, and we’ll sing its praises when we get there. However, you’d be very upset if you knew how much grace and beauty you’d be missing if you ignored an album like this one.

When I first listened to Five Leaves Left back in 2021, I had already listened to Pink Moon a few times. His last album is completely stripped down; it’s voice, guitar, and gloom. So when you’re introduced to his first steps as a musician, you don’t expect the amount of string sections you find on this album. His discography goes the reverse route of many others; instead of increasing the production and the arrangements and the complexity of all of the instruments in the background, he decreases it (even though his sophomore effort is pretty lavish). So you see an orchestra here, only to see it slowly die out until you’re left with only him and his guitar on Pink Moon, moments before he’s gone, too.

Despite this surprise, the album only fully clicked with me today, hours before I started writing this text. Just as with Pet Sounds previously, this current life I lead opened my eyes to a lot of feelings I never realized I missed so much. You never know a piece of yours is missing until you find it, and in my case, it probably will be missing me eternally. So there’s no better landscape for a Nick Drake listen. I got so emotional listening to this album today that I rushed to buy the CD on Amazon (I found it a bit cheaper, since the full price on some records there is scary for a brasilian. It was the last in stock too!!).

Five Leaves Left goes through a journey in Nick Drake’s eyes. You can’t help to imagine a cabin near a forest when picturing this young-old soul singing these words. Speaking of which, he was only 20 when he recorded this album. Right as we start this trip, in Time Has Told Me, he already seems older than life, carrying this inherent hope that haunts so many of the depressed souls of the world.

Time has told me
You’re a rare, rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
For someday our ocean
Will find its shore

Some like to say that the troubled cure line was what gave The Cure the idea for their name, although no source can really say it (Robert has always been a very vocal Nick Drake fan, though).

I think these lines can only hit you where it hurts once you’ve lived through them. Once, they were happy words to me. Now, they’re words of goodbye. Words telling you you have to trust that you will meet the person you love again, and to not ask for what can’t come. Words I wish I could sing to her, words I wish I wrote to her, words I wished she knew about even if we were to never meet again.

Time has told me
You came with the dawn
A soul with no footprint
A rose with no thorn

Your tears, they tell me
There’s really no way
Of ending your troubles
With things you can say

And time will tell you
To stay by my side, oh
To keep on trying
‘Til there’s no more to hide

I relate a lot to all of this, of course. And the kindness to be able to express this care for the other person is something I could spend a whole life trying to write but would always come short on the words that mattered. Like a garden, he picks the flowers so tenderly and graces your mind with his company. This is an excellent start for the album, which I love to say that has one of the strongest A sides I’ve ever listened to.

We have River Man next, one of the most well-known tracks from this record. I have to say: it is not my favorite from the album — that would be the closer for the A side. However, it is impossible to be oblivious as to why this song ressonates with so many people.

I think it is completely haunting to believe that it is a song about suicide. It’s always difficult to understand what can only come with hindsight and what is actually there. For example, reading some interpretations of this song on Genius, I see a person time and time again trying to say this song is about Nick Drake’s discontent with popular music while being an unpopular musician. Sometimes, we let some aspects we read about an artist’s life become such staples in our images of them that it can blind us to what they were actually saying¹ (which is funny to talk about in an album with Fruit Tree in it).

1. It can happen in real life, too. Your image of the person may tell more about yourself than of the person. ↩︎

I only say all of this because I don’t often like a lot of the hindsight glasses people use for lyric comprehension; we know an artist eventually did something, so every song has to be about that. However, after all I’ve said here, I truly think this is one of the clear exceptions. To think this song is about him reminiscing about his own suicide is completely haunting. Did he consider throwing himself on the River Cam, the river he’d pass by every day after moving to Cambridge? Is the River Man Charon, the ferryman of Hades?

Said she hadn’t heard the news
Hadn’t had the time to choose
A way to lose
But she believes

“Hadn’t had the time to choose/A way to lose“. This scares me so much.

By the end, Betty (the character of the song) supposedly reminds herself of a good memory and sensation, postponing her death indefinitely. It reminds me of what many depressive people talk about: just as they try to go forward with a suicide attempt, sometimes, something happens. Someone calls for you right on time. Someone knocks on your door. A song from your childhood starts playing. Something interrupts those thoughts for a moment, and the person gives up on the attempt. This is a tragic realisation: sometimes, all you need to stay alive is for something to interrupt you. Something to take you somewhere for a second. Someone to be there with you, to show they remembered you. And you win a few more days on Earth. Maybe months. Maybe years. Maybe a lifetime. Nick Drake and many others never had that something. There was no summer rain. No knock on the door. No call answered. As a person who’s been suicidal before, a couple of months ago even, this is all too fresh. This is the fleeting image of a life, through the fleeting medium in which we can ever receive it.

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Three Hours and Way to Blue are some of my favorites in here, which makes me sad they’re not as praised as others from this album are. The guitar playing in Three Hours along with the congas shyly whimpering are endlessly misterious, bringing us to a lot of different places in the garden of his mind, being the longest song in here at 6 minutes and 12 seconds. Way to Blue, on the other hand, brings back the orchestration for a grander than life piece. Definitely one of my favorite songs from him. It sounds like a song from an old Disney animated movie, it has the heart and pulse of a song in a musical being played at the time where the main character needs most direction, but can’t seem to find it. The lyrics are tragic, but so deeply beautiful, especially in the tender way they’re sang.

As side A comes to a close, we’re greeted with what I consider to be one of the best compositions ever made: Day is Done. It is simply flawless. The arrangements, his voice, the perfect and very Nick-Drake-like lyrics. If you have only one song from this album to listen to, this has to be the one.

When the day is done
Down to earth, then, sinks the sun
Along with everything that was lost and won
When the day is done

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

When the night is cold
Some get by but some get old
Just to show life’s not made of gold
When the night is cold

When the bird has flown
Got no one to call your own
Got no place to call your home
When the bird has flown

I could be sitting in front of a typewriter for a thousand years and I’d never write anything as beautifully depressing as this. This is one of the moments where you can most clearly see his depression coming through the cracks in the ceiling, his hopelessness in the middle of all the kindness he displays throughout this album.

When the game’s been fought
Newspaper blown across the court
Lost much sooner than you would have thought
Now the game’s been fought

When the part is through
Seems so very sad for you
Didn’t do the things you meant to do
Now there’s no time to start anew
Now the part is through

When the day is done
Down to earth, then, sinks the sun
Along with everything that was lost and won
When the day is done

This was the song that made me look for sales on this CD at midnight, the song that made me tear up in immense sadness even after so many years since I’ve listened to it first. There’s nothing like it, and I find a hard time now having to say something about it that the piece alone doesn’t already do an excellent job on speaking for itself. How many times have I not felt like this? How many times in a day? How many, now sang by a soul who couldn’t wait for the day to be done already.

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The B side starts off with ‘Cello Song, also one of his best compositions. I can’t help but wish some things here I could sing for her to listen to in a colder than cold night alone.

Strange face, with your eyes so pale and sincere
Underneath, you know well you have nothing to fear
For the dreams that came to you when so young
Told of a life where spring is sprung

The Thoughts of Mary Jane is endlessly charming, bringing a flute and some nice words for a lady once again, although many say this song is about his trips while smoking pot. Man in a Shed is the most upbeat song in here, feeling like a song you could play in a pub by the piano, talking about a man wishing a lady could enter his humble and simple world. The lyrics are lovely, I recommend them, also. I think of her when I listen to this one, too.

We get to Fruit Tree and Saturday Sun now, the two last songs on the record. I truly think Fruit Tree is one of his best songs of all time, while many consider that title to be given to Saturday Sun, another excellent tune. In Fruit Tree, he’s tragically singing about what he thought (or you could say, knew) to be his fate: many artists only find fame many years after they’re gone. Another haunting song to listen to after knowing his story. That summer rain from River Man becomes the song Saturday Sun, this positive light that he seems unsure if it can stay for much longer, while he tries to see the illumination in darkness by the time Sunday’s rain comes.

Slowly, Nick Drake paints the image of his subconscious through every gap in his words, through every accent in his guitar picking, through the brushes of the strings unfolding in our ears. All of that for miniscule traction. He wasn’t recognized for his efforts, even if closed ones seemed to believe he had a gift. As 1969 came to an end, this stranger to the world would still find in him something to say to the world that ignored him. Recorded in 1970 and released in 1971, came Bryter Layter. But that’s not for you to worry about today.

Highlights: Time Has Told Me, River Man, Way to Blue, Day is Done, ‘Cello Song, Fruit Tree (every song is great, though).

Bryter Layter post coming soon…

About the text: Originally, the whole discography was supposed to be in a single post. I changed that since that wouldn’t be a staple for the next discography dives anyway — they’ll have way more albums to talk about and a single post for all of them would be a snooze fest. Bryter Layter post will come in a couple of days from now, just so no one’s overwhelmed by my blah-blah-blah’s.