Some thoughts on Nick Drake

The thought of British folksinger Nick Drake being so depressed that his life would end at the tender young age of 26 is itself, to me, a sobering and depressing fact about how hard life can be. While Nick Drake (1948-1974) may not have been able to cope with life, it is also clear to me that his was a gentle and sensitive poet's soul. Listening to his record Pink Moon - his most stark recording - you come directly in contact with Nick Drake's very soul, and this soul lives on. The record is thus haunting, and beautiful.

I'm not exactly a religious fanatic (I started out Catholic and eventually became a Unitarian-Universalist, with an eclectic set of beliefs and a non-dogmatic non-literalist take on religious traditions), but I cannot help but think that the sheer depth of the music of Nick Drake, and of Pink Moon in particular, hints at a realm of the spiritual. There is simply something in this - Drake's quiet guitar strumming, his mournful singing, the overall simplicity of the arrangements - that is not unlike the moment of contemplation that one sometimes experiences while sitting in a holy place, be it a church, or a chapel, or even a small natural pond surrounded by nature, and which is thus transcendent.

In fact, as Ian McDonald's sympathetic Mojo article "Exiled From Heaven" argues, "Nick Drake wasn't a literal disciple of Blake or Buddha. There are no direct Blake references in his lyrics, nor is he likely to have treated Buddhism as more than a confirmation of concepts he'd arrived at through his own experience. Nevertheless Blake's mystical vision and the tenets of Buddhism illuminate a great deal of his work. Drake's outlook seems to have boiled down to the linked recognitions that life is a predicament and that the world is ultimately an irreducible mystery to us. Why it exists, why we exist in it, why there is anything at all, we haven't the slightest idea. From this sense of predicament and mystery flows all his work and also his message to us. More than that, the same influences shaped the growth and decline of his life." The article adds, about Drake's vocals, that it is "a low, close, sustained sound, rich in chest vibration yet entirely without glamorous vibrato. It's the sound of incantation: slow, deep, OM-like. His phrasing is riverine, flowing across metre and through bar-lines as though detached from normal time. It's as if he's seeking to impress upon us the sense of another way of being."

Looking at, and considering such elements of this music, it is obvious that there is more here than a quick consideration might recognize. It is perhaps these various elements which makes this music so rich, and which, for me at least, causes it to become ever more satisfying with each subsequent listen. I just know that I'll be listening to Nick Drake for the rest of my life. I can't say that with confidence about too many musicians.

Finally, I close with this