Nick Drake once told his mother Molly that he felt he had failed in everything he had tried to do, and this was not long before his death at the age of 26 in 1974 from an overdose of anti-depressants. By the standards of his era in popular music, the recessive and beautiful and enormously sensitive and then shut-down Drake had indeed failed. He had recorded three albums, Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Layter (1971), and Pink Moon (1972), and they hadn’t sold many copies and had received vaguely dissatisfied reviews, though Stephen Holden put in a word for his singing voice in Rolling Stone.
By the mid-1970s, Drake had, in the words of his mother Molly, rejected the world, and nothing made him happy. There are areas of his life that remain a mystery, and some of his lyrics are cryptic, but this is all to the good because they can be read in different ways by different people. Drake’s sales went up when the title track from Pink Moon was used for a Volkswagen commercial in 1999, and the gloomy romanticism of his music was far better suited to that time period than his own.
Drake’s family was upper class English, and his accent is distinct on all his records, to the point of sounding affected (“rally” for “really”), but that has its charm and allure, just as his “failure” in life and success after death has its allure. Drake’s trajectory is something like that of Louise Brooks, who made three major movies at the end of the 1920s that were ignored until years later, when they were re-evaluated and made her immortal, but Brooks was still alive to see this resurgence, whereas Drake was unable to hang on.
Drake’s actress sister Gabrielle has been a highly sensitive keeper of the flame of her brother’s cult ever since the 1990s when his records finally gained some traction, and she was able to stress the connection between Nick and his mother Molly, who taught him to play the piano and also wrote and recorded songs herself at home, which were released as an album in 2011.
Molly’s songs are delicate and melancholy, sung in a sweet little soprano voice, and like her son’s songs they indulge in self-pity at moments only to then look askance at it, which feels very British. “What’s so hot about reality?” Molly wonders on her song, “Dream Your Dreams,” and she emphasizes that dreams should be treasured and indulged even if they don’t come true. She also offers that “joy carries a pain,” something that her son never seems to have experienced himself, for these are the songs of a middle-aged woman of her time and class, bright, somewhat resigned, ghostly, romantic.
Her voice sounds rather impassioned on the song “Night Is My Friend,” where she sings of her love of the time of day when her tasks are done; she longs to see a face that is no longer either on this earthly plane or in her social orbit. “Time can take away happiness, but time can take away grief,” she wisely says on the song “Do You Ever Remember?” and “Poor Mum,” which is about the constraints of being a wife and mother, was meant as a response to her son Nick’s song “Poor Boy” on Bryter Layter, his most hopeful record.
Gabrielle Drake has said that Molly might have been a very troubled person had she not found stability in her marriage to Rodney Drake. In surviving letters, Rodney comes across as the most supportive of husbands and fathers to Molly and his son Nick, who went to Cambridge to study but dropped that when he got a deal to record Five Leaves Left, the title of which refers to the note that used to come in a pack of cigarette paper.
To those around him, Drake seemed like a star already, tall and handsome, with thick hair and a cleft in his chin and a sensuous mouth, but he was also the boy in class hiding behind pillars, not noticed by others, the secret boy of the highest quality lurking in the background of hallways. In real-life photos of Drake at school, there is often a cringing expression on his face, but so there is on the face of anyone with sense stuck in school.
The sound of his singing voice on Five Leaves Left is outright genteel, and it felt particularly out of place amid this time when the working class voices of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were making a case for hedonism. (When Drake visited Morocco with friends in 1967, he met the Stones and made overtures about wanting to be their guitarist, but of course this was temperamentally and creatively unthinkable.) The lyrics to the songs on Five Leaves Left seem to indicate that Drake feels he is hiding things, or made to hide them. There are songs about pining for girls, but they may very well be imaginary. It’s hard to picture the man described by those who knew him being able to speak to any girls he might have found attractive.
“Mostly Nick was uncommunicative and occasionally he’d become talkative and you hung on his every word even though, very often, one didn’t know what they meant because he’d talk in riddles,” said Gabrielle to The Guardian in 2014. “One wanted so much to do something to help, but just didn’t know what to do.” Part of this must be due to the large amounts of marijuana he was smoking, and whatever other drug use he was partaking in at this time when so many young people were using narcotics of one kind or another in an attempt at freeing and expanding the mind. But drugs only narrowed things for Drake, who kept more and more to himself.
Drake’s songs on Five Leaves Left are so pretty and ominous that they feel like invitations to float with him and dissolve, detach, to see things objectively, to look both backwards and forwards in time, with an emphasis on the grave, and this is not just the usual cosseted morbidity of a young person. This is the voice of a total outsider who cannot deal with the crassness of living on just about any level and must protect himself from it at all cost. This is a voice that went on to live in 1990s dorm rooms at night, comforting, seducing.
The Drakes are a very seductive family in their way, Nick, Gabrielle, Molly, and Rodney. Nick kept having to return to his family home as his mental health worsened, and though he found it like a prison, there was nowhere else he wanted to or could be. The photos of his bedroom show incongruously cheerful yellow bedding and yellow everywhere else, but even this cheerful color could not cheer him, and he had no Rodney to cheer and help him as his mother Molly did.
There is a stateliness to Drake’s music, an official yet stoned quality, that links him to two of his favorite composers, Delius and Ravel. He seems an awfully young man to be singing so much about “things you meant to do” as he does on Five Leaves Left, but perhaps he had internalized that from Molly. The party is over, Drake sings, the game is over, and people lay forgotten in the ground.
He was too introverted to be able to promote this album in any way, and it seems a shame that Island Records didn’t seize on this as a publicity angle à la Garbo or J.D. Salinger. They might also have reached out to prospective women fans and stressed that Drake needed to be saved and loved, which is still the bedrock of his cult, and still fed by the fact that there is no moving/talking film footage of Drake but only a handful of photos.
Bryter Layter, which is a reference to how BBC weatherman would say that the weather would be “brighter later,” was an attempt at a more commercial sound. On one of his most disturbing songs, “Hazey Jane II,” which begins with a tumbling out of very ominous words about friends leaving him behind and there being no safety “amidst the books and all the records of your lifetime,” there is a “friendly funky” musical background behind it that makes no sense at all.
“Do you feel like a remnant of something that’s past?” Drake asks on “Hazey Jane I,” which for some reason comes later on the record. Again, a curious sentiment from a young man, much more the thought of a middle-aged person. Drake was young in the worst and best ways, in his depth of feeling, in the intensity of that feeling, but he was also above that, and this above-ness begins to feel like both the source of the singularity of his creativity and part of the mental health struggles that were pulling at him, pulling him down.
Is “One of These Things First” addressed to a real girl he knew? It seems possible. “I could be here and now,” he tells this girl, and this is a kind of promise to his posthumous cult, too, who long to love him and rescue him. On “Poor Boy,” which has a samba-ish beat at times, he is somewhat humorous about how he feels “so sorry for himself,” and is “so keen to take a wife.” Was Drake really keen to take a wife? I feel like we should take him at his word here. In his identification with his mother Molly, I think he likely sensed what her husband Rodney did for her, and this is what he longs for for himself. What held him back? Why were real girls never drawn to him in life, as seems to be the case?
“He’s a mess, but he’ll say yes/If you just dress in white,” he sings on “Poor Boy,” and that is very seductive, but maybe there is a clue there. Is no girl innocent enough for him, immaculate enough? There is a humor in this song, and it is the objective sort of humor that couldn’t be more winning. Perhaps he was never able to use it in life but only in his music, which never reached enough people to get him this wife he yearned for. The cover of Bryter Layter is creepy, a photo of him that is shadowy and like something from a horror film. Maybe this is a clue, too.
Mental health problems followed, and lack of sales for his second album, and these two things were likely somewhat related. He was very angry that the two albums he made did not reach a public; he felt cheated. And there is some anger there on his third and best-known album Pink Moon, in which Drake speaks to us far more directly with just his guitar and a bit of piano that will break your heart forever when it comes in a minute in to the title track, a heartbroken decrescendo on the keys of that instrument his mother had taught him to speak with. But the low tones of his voice as he mutters, “Pink pink pink pink” are entirely his own. This record was recorded quickly in two sessions at 11pm. It is night, that time that was the “friend” of his mother Molly.
The four lines of “Know” are the Nick Drake image distilled. “Know that I love you,” he keens, “Know I don’t care,” he says, and there is somehow no contradiction between these two statements. “Know that I see you,” he sings, and suddenly this could be a stalker until he follows with, “Know I’m not there.” On his first two albums, he had wanted to be a real boy, to live a life. But on Pink Moon, it’s as if Drake knows that he is bound to be a ghost, both in what was left of his life and then far more powerfully as an image after death. But if this is a real girl, how does he see her if he’s not there? Maybe because she is a girl who lives only as a dream in his imagination, just as Drake himself is the dream boy in death, the dream boy to love even with the hair he won’t wash or the fingernails he won’t clip or the words he can no longer say. This is a love far beyond sex. It is celestial.
There is nightmare on this last album, too. “I am the parasite of this town,” Drake sings on “Parasite,” his awareness turned very sad as he tells us about his own deterioration. What makes it sting even more is that he is aware of how much he had going for him and what privilege he had, and he somehow screwed it up anyway: “Falling so far on a silver spoon,” he sings, with great self-loathing and regret.
But the last track “From the Morning” feels like a release with its lines, “And now we rise/and we are everywhere,” words that were printed on the tombstone of his mother Molly after her own death in 1993. Drake thought he had failed, but he left something of himself behind forever, something purer than he was, some ideal of such soothing yet unsettled ambiguity.