“The more you listen to Drake,” wrote Mark Plummer in a May 1972 issue of Melody Maker, “the more compelling his music becomes-but all the time it hides from you … It could be that Nick Drake does not exist at all.” His lyrics were dark and portentous, about black-eyed dogs and things behind the sun and loved ones buried under the sand. Others-especially on his final album, Pink Moon-could have been recorded in his bedroom, with nothing more than his shy voice and acoustic guitar. Some were so loaded down with horns and strings that they sounded like lounge music. He had talent, but his songs were hard to pin down, too jazzy to be folk and too folky to be jazz. Once Drake started making albums, reviewers weren’t sure what to say about them. They liked hearing him play guitar at night, but it never occurred to them that he might be a star someday.īillie Eilish’s Music Revealed What Her SNL Sketches Couldn’t Amanda Wicks He never had a real girlfriend (or a boyfriend, for that matter), and the friends who spent a year living with him in France looked back on him as a fairly unremarkable guy. His Cambridge advisor described him as an underachiever who smoked too much weed. Drake’s childhood friends remembered him as a well-behaved boy from a good family. When Live Aid producer Trevor Dunn set out to write the biography Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake, he interviewed just about everyone who had any meaningful relationship with the singer. Cullman’s account hints at why: Drake was a brilliant musician, but he never had enough confidence or charisma to hold an audience’s attention.Įven the people who knew him the best haven’t been able to offer much insight into who he really was. He was 26 years old and he’d already stopped playing live shows.
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It’s been 40 years since Drake died on November 25, 1974, after overdosing on antidepressants in his childhood bedroom. It was like being at the bedside of a dying man who wants to tell you a secret, but who keeps changing his mind at the last minute.
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He sang away from the microphone, mumbled and whispered, all with a sense of precariousness and doom. He sat on a small stool, hunched tight over a tiny Guild guitar, beginning songs and, halfway through, forgetting where he was and stumbling back to the start of that song, or beginning an entirely different song which he would then abandon mid-way through if he remembered the remainder of the first. A tall man, his clothes-black corduroy jacket and pants, frayed white shirt-hung around him like bedclothes after a particularly bad night’s sleep. His shyness and awkwardness were almost transcendent.