Five Leaves Left

Drake, Nick

album cover

"You Find the Darkness Can Give the Brightest Light"

In his treatise A Defense of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley likens the poet to "a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds." That eloquently describes the enterprise of the British singer, songwriter, and guitarist Nick Drake (1948–1974). On three albums that were almost completely ignored during his lifetime, Drake developed music uniquely suited to solitude. His voice an otherworldly, hollowed-out half whisper, his guitar outlining unusual hypnotic patterns, Drake created a sound-world that stands apart from "folk" or "rock." From that place he wrote spare, wrenching songs unlike anything else in popular music.

Drake struggled with mental illness—he died after an overdose of antidepressants, an apparent suicide. He wasn't afraid to explore his conflicted interior world, but he didn't dwell there all the time: This album includes tales of strange oracles ("River Man"), vision-quest journeys ("Three Hours"), philosophical musings on fame ("Fruit Tree"), and luminous portraits of women ("The Thoughts of Mary Jane"). Many are distinguished by a strange confluence: They're woeful and almost resigned, steeped in the enveloping melancholy characteristic of British romantics like Shelley. But at the same time, they contain shrewd, levelheaded appraisals of human nature.

Five Leaves Left is Drake's first statement. Its ruminating songs left those in his circle (which included Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson) awed, and inspired predictions of fame. Its riches are almost infinite—the austere guitar finger-study inventions; the strings (arranged magnificently by Robert Kirby) providing a somber, funereal aura; the melodies that tremble yet manage to cut through the thickest armor.

From here, Drake turned toward more upbeat, Van Morrison–influenced pop (Bryter Layter), and when that failed to draw a sizeable audience, he wrote the stark troubled blues incantations of Pink Moon. It took a VW ad campaign in the 1990s to bring his music to wide attention, triggering more interest than he'd ever experienced in his lifetime. Drake would have approved: On his intense, prophetic "Fruit Tree," he sings, "Safe in your place, deep in the earth, that's when they'll know what you were really worth."

Genre: Folk, Rock
Released: 1969, Hannibal
Key Tracks: "Time Has Told Me," "River Man," "Three Hours," "Cello Song."
Catalog Choice: Pink Moon; Bryter Layter.
Next Stop: John Martyn: Solid Air
After That: Joni Mitchell: Blue
Book Pages: 235–236