Nick Drake ...
When the day is done
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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.
When the game's been fought
You speed the ball across the court
Lost much sooner than you would have thought
Now the game's been fought.
When the party's 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 party's 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.
River Man
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Betty came by on her way
Said she had a word to say
About things today
And fallen leaves
Said she hadn’t heard the news
Hadn’t had the time to choose
A way to lose
But she believes
Gonna see the river man
Gonna tell him all I can
About the plan
For lilac time
If he tells me all he knows
About the way his river flows
And all night shows
In summertime
Betty said she prayed today
For the sky to blow away
Or maybe stay
She wasn’t sure
For when she thought of summer rain
Calling for her mind again
She lost the pain
And stayed for more
Gonna to see the river man
Gonna to tell him all I can
About the ban
On feeling free
If he tells me all he knows
About the way his river flows
I don’t suppose
It’s meant for me
Oh, how they come and go
Northern Sky, Bryter Layter
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I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you're here
Brighten my northern sky
I've been a long time that I'm waiting
Been a long that I'm blown
I've been a long time that I've wandered
Through the people I have known
Oh, if you would and you could
Straighten my new mind's eye
Would you love me for my money
Would you love me for my head
Would you love me through the winter
Would you love me till I'm dead
Oh, if you would and you could
Come blow your horn on high
I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you're here
Brighten my northern sky
Cello Song
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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
You would seem so frail
In the cold of the night
When the armies of emotion
Go out to fight
But while the earth
Sinks to it’s grave
You sail to the sky
On the crest of a wave
So forget this cruel world
Where I belong
I’ll just sit and wait
And sing my song
And if one day you should see me in the crowd
Lend a hand and lift me
To your place in the cloud
The Thoughts Of Mary Jane
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Who can know
The thoughts of Mary Jane
Why she flies
Or goes out in the rain
Where she's been
And who she's seen
In her journey to the stars
Who can know
The reason for her smile
What are her dreams
When they've journeyed for a mile
The way she sings
And her brightly colured rings
Make her princess of the sky
Who can know
What happens in her mind
Did she come
From a strange world
And leave her mind behind
Her long lost sighs
And her brightly coloured eyes
Tell her story to the wind
Who can know
The thoughts of Mary Jane
Why she flies
Or goes out in the rain
Where she's been
And who she's seen
In her journey to the stars
Place to be
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When I was young, younger than before
I never saw the truth hanging from the door
And now I'm older see it face to face
And now I'm older gotta
get up clean the place.
And I was green, greener than the hill
Where flowers grew and the sun shone still
Now I'm darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be.
And I was strong, strong in the sun
I thought I'd see when day was done
Now I'm weaker than the palest blue
Oh, so weak in this need for you.
Saturday Sun
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Saturday sun came early one morning
In a sky so clear and blue
Saturday sun came without warning
So no-one knew what to do.
Saturday sun brought people and faces
That didn't seem much in their day
But when I remember those people
and places
They were really too good in their way.
In their way
In their way
Saturday sun won't come and see me today.
Think about stories with reason and rhyme
Circling through your brain.
And think about people in their season and time
Returning again and again
And again
And again
And Saturday's sun has turned to
Sunday's rain.
So Sunday sat in the Saturday sun
And wept for a day gone by.
Black Eyed Dog
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A black eyed dog he called at my door
The black eyed dog he called for more
A black eyed dog he knew my name
A black eyed dog he knew my name
A black eyed dog
A black eyed dog.
I'm growing old and I wanna go home
I'm growing old and I don't wanna know
I'm growing old and I wanna go home.
A black eyed dog he called at my door
A black eyed dog he called for more.
From The Morning
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A day once dawned, and it was beautiful
A day once dawned from the ground
Then the night she fell
And the air was beautiful
The night she fell all around.
So look see the days
The endless coloured ways
And go play the game that you learnt
From the morning.
And now we rise
We are everywhere
And now we rise from the ground
See she flies
And she is everywhere
See she flies all around
So look see the sights
The endless summer nights
And go play the game that you learnt
From the morning.
NICK DRAKE: Essential Songs.
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00:00 Day is Done
02:27 From the Morning
04:57 Place to Be
07:42 Pink Moon
09:49 Northern Sky
13:35 River Man
17:56 At the Chime of a City Clock
22:41 Cello Song
27:26 Hazey Jane II
31:13 Things Behind the Sun
35:10 Fly
38:10 The Thoughts of Mary Jane
41:30 Man In a Shed
45:38 Fruit Tree
50:18 One of These Things First
55:10 Time Has Told Me
ArtMorpheus
Nick Drake Biography
With every passing year, it becomes a little less accurate to say that Nick Drake has a cult following. Cults, by their very nature, tend to exist on the margins, the subject of their admiration unknown or even unloved by the vast majority of people. Mention Nick Drake to a certain generation of music fan and chances are you won’t have to explain yourself. Latterly, Drake’s name has become a byword for a certain kind of acoustic music. Gentility, melancholia and a seemingly casual mastery of the fretboard – in the minds of many listeners, any combination of these traits warrants comparison to Nick Drake. As a result, Drake is perpetually referenced across the reviews sections of every music title. That quite often the records in question bear no meaningful resemblance to Drake’s music speaks volumes. His legacy may, in one sense, be huge. But there’s painfully little of it: just three complete albums – Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Layter (1970), Pink Moon (1972) and a final quintet of songs recorded shortly before his death. As his relevance increases, so does an insatiable communal yearning for their source to yield more. Hence the constant namechecks. Hence the constant repackaging and remixing of the same old bootleg recordings. Somehow we cannot quite accept the fact that this was all he left behind.
Such a turn of events isn’t without a certain irony. Towards the end of his life, Drake appeared to long for the vindication that comes with commercial success. And yet he seemed incapable of compromising himself to the pursuit of recognition. His shyness made interviews difficult. Live performances became increasingly rare. When recording music, the only compass he used was his own intuition. For ''Five Leaves left'', he asserted himself when he needed to – dispensing with the arranger suggested by Joe Boyd and replacing him with his old Cambridge associate Robert Kirby. Pink Moon was just Drake and a guitar, an exercise in intricate desolation, no less perfect for its stark brevity. Commercial success may not have vindicated him, but the intervening years certainly have. Ten years ago, he entered the Billboard 100 (and the Amazon Top Five) for the first time. Thirty seconds of Pink Moon used in a Volkswagen advert alerted America to the otherworldly magic of Drake’s hushed English tones. His friend and label-mate Linda Thompson recalls recently hearing the song in LA over a supermarket tannoy: “I couldn’t believe how amazing, how right it sounded. How did he know?” Writing about Drake, the late Ian McDonald attempted to put into words why Drake’s music should have achieved such a relevance in the century after its creator brought it into being. In a celebrated essay, McDonald posited the suggestion that songs such as River Man and Way To Blue reconnect us with a part of our selves that modern life has all but eroded away. Certainly, much of his music is endowed with a peculiar prescience. Over arrangements that seem to mimic the bustle of a world moving too fast, the prescient Hazey Jane II sees Drake impishly enquiring, “And what will happen in the morning when the world it gets/So crowded that you can’t look out the window in the morning.”
The manner in which Drake’s life ended has inevitably coloured the way his songs are perceived: among them, the haunting Black-Eyed Dog and the self-mocking Poor Boy. “Don’t you worry,” he sings on Fruit Tree, “They’ll stand and stare when you’re gone.” In the liner notes to 1994’s Way To Blue compilation, Drake’s producer and mentor Joe Boyd commented that, “listening to his lyrics… he may have planned it all this way.” His point – that the best music will always invite conjecture and speculation about its authors – is well made. But at the same time, it should be added that the sadness in Nick Drake’s songs was frequently the corollary of an all-consuming joy. As often as not, both extremes are to be found within the same song: the autumnal languor of I Was Made To Love Magic; the life-affirming brush-strokes of Northern Sky (“I’ve never felt magic as crazy as this”). Records born exclusively of misery and catharsis can do little other than depress their listeners. Their candour may garner critical bouquets but they rarely return to the CD tray. Drake certainly suffered from depression – most notably in the latter two years of his life – but his music was not a function of that depression. Richard Thompson who played on Five Leaves Left and Bryter Later remembers a quiet character, though not a miserable one: “I remember long silences, but they were never oppressive. With Nick, you sensed [that] very little needed to be said that couldn’t be said with a guitar in his hand.” As Drake puts it on Hazey Jane II, “If songs were lines/In a conversation/The situation would be fine.”
Thirty three years have now passed since Nick Drake’s death. Original pressings of his records change hands for around £200. Dedicated fanzines and websites continue to interpret and second-guess every note and utterance. The bucolic village of Tanworth-In-Arden, where Drake grew up, attracts a steady trickle of visitors – somehow seeking to climb further inside the music. And yet as his father Rodney recalled, “And I remember in one of his reports towards the end of the time at his first school, the headmaster… said at the end that none of us seemed to know him very well. And I think that was it. All the way through with Nick. People didn’t know him very much.” It’s impossible to keep count of the contemporary artists who cite Drake as an inspiration, but a cursory round-up includes R.E.M., Snow Patrol, Norah Jones, Radiohead, Brad Pitt, Sam Mendes, Paul Weller, Keane, Portishead, Belle And Sebastian, The Coral, Coldplay, Heath Ledger, David Gray, Super Furry Animals and Beth Orton. Along with household names of his creative lifetime – the Stones, The Beatles, Marley, Hendrix – his albums have become an unofficial set text for anyone passionate about music.
In 2012, he has become so much more than the sum total of his work. The greater our fascination with him, the more we reveal about ourselves. In this sense, maybe Ian McDonald was right. Perhaps his music allows us to feel a little less like, as Drake put it, “a remnant of something that’s passed.”
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