I can’t even remember when it was that I started listening to Nick Drake. I know I was in college because I talked about him at length with a lecturer there. We also watched a documentary about him in one lesson and I already knew who he was at the time. I know that friends and family were fans, but I can’t remember who introduced me to him or how it happened. All I know is that one day I took the Fruit Tree box set from my brother’s CD collection and listened to it back-to-back in one sitting. I own that box myself now, lucky enough to grab a copy from a shop before it was deleted. It’s probably one of the boxes I return to most, spending periods of my life going back over it as if it were brand new and always discovering something I’d forgotten or that I’d never held in as high regard as the classics.
Nick Drake is one of those artists where I can probably say “there wouldn’t be a Mitch & Murray without him”. There are a couple more. Sparklehorse is one. Red House Painters are another. Others have helped form the sound of the band (Low, Kepler, Mogwai) but they’re not the reasons behind the actual recordings starting in the first place. Nick Drake probably was. Unlike many other artists that gave me an “I can do that” feeling, I knew I’d never come close to producing something as bewitching and finger-bending as Drake’s guitar work or as delicate as his vocal style. I’m quiet, but not with that willo-the-wisp mistiness that he carries off in his tenderest moments, nor with the easy soul that he trots out almost out of nowhere on a song like Saturday Sun.
Pink Moon is undoubtedly a favourite of mine. Not just my favourite album of his, but of all time. It clocks in at under 30 minutes. Some of the songs only just sneak past the one minute mark, yet every piece of music on there is a gem. The mood is generally dark (dragged down by Drake’s depression which led to his suicide shortly after the album was completed) but with brief bursts of levity and near sunshine- single shafts of light through the clouds. From The Morning is still a song that can bring me to tears and I’ve never fully understand why. After the heaviness of a song like Parasite and the undercurrent of despair and drudgery, it chimes like a final smile amidst it all. It sounds like a momentary escape all too sadly before his final moments.
And that says nothing of his playing. Listening to some of his songs is like listening to three guitarists at once. The bass lines go beyond a simple pedal between two strings and incorporate leaps up and down, with flicks of a spare finger to extend the run. Chords chug in the middle and the highest strings skip melodies between the rest. River Man has a deep chugging 5/4 drive to it which still seems ethereal, perhaps aided by the lulling string section in the background (easily the best arrangement on any of the first two albums). The strings, piano and brass disappear on Pink Moon, peaking to the point of intrusion on Bryter Layter- an imperfect album that is still better than most of what anyone else can produce. Even in his more dated moments, you can still pick out the gentle genius that’s being shrouded by over eager producers attempting to make his work more palatable for the audience. The exception for me is Danny Thompson, whose bass lines make any recording of anything 1000 times better.
Yet when he’s stripped down to a guitar and voice- as on Pink Moon or many of the demo versions of songs available on various CDs- it’s more perfect than any orchestra could manage. Black Eyed Dog, Rider on the Wheel, Which Will, Know, the demo version of Fly (which is one of the most painfully beautiful songs he recorded) all stand apart from a majority of modern recordings because of the sheer glory of what they are. It reminds you that today’s popular folk artists are the likes of Jack Johnson, Newton Faulkner, Ed Sheeran and Paulo Nutini. Maybe we won’t see the likes of him again….
I chose to cover Horn because it’s the only one I felt I could do anything with. The original is less than 2 minutes long (mine is 4), and played on a single guitar without vocals (mine has four guitars). I admit that it’s partly inspired by the Woven Music recordings by Shinji Masuko (if you’ve not heard it, go buy it) but the main thought was there: to use a single instrumental guitar line as the basis for something bigger. Rather than writing a whole arrangement around it I simply improvised. The original track is made up of a looped distorted guitar with the main melody line picked out without a time signature- trying to capture that relaxed style that Drake has on that track. It’s almost as if he’s just making it up as he goes, jotting down an idea mentally and seeing what appears for a minute or so. I then overdubbed a “bass” (a guitar through a microsynth with lots of sub-octave to replicate Danny Thompson’s double bass sound, though not his style), another drone track that I manipulated through a Koma BD101, and a delayed guitar providing some improvised guitar chords (nothing special, just three chords that fitted underneath that I moved between as the sections of the melody changed, but not trying to ground it). I wanted the whole song to fall apart as if disconnected, but also get them to gel together as a consistent whole. This occurs when the bass (the only bit played to a fixed time) pulls the delayed guitar and melody together, despite the two being recorded independently without any common time frame. Keeping it weaving, making sure things only join by coincidence, was deliberate in order to capture something of Drake’s music. Something like a river. Something autumnal. Something sewn together in patchwork but creating a unique pattern of its own.
Nick Drake is nearly perfect. I’ll never reach those levels, so I’m glad someone else has.
The Man From Mitch and Murray 