I think I first heard Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter during my second year in university. I have a memory of being in the new shared house, in my room on the top floor listening through the LP. Although that may be a memory of another time of listening to it, having maybe done so at some point previously. My times are muddled. I’d have to check my old laptop to be sure. Saying all this, I think Bryter Layter is a fine album. It’s not the one out of Drake’s three studio albums I go back to frequently, that would go to the one that starts with ‘P’ and ends with ‘ink Moon’. But I can appreciate it a bunch, just ’cause it is a Nick Drake album and the guy was really good at what he did during the short time he did it for. It’s the last one in which Drake played alongside hired musicians, and I’ve come to think of ‘Sunday’ as the coda, final statement, whatever, that brings that era of his style to a close.

The track is the last song on Bryter Layter, coming after the LP’s most well-known track of ‘Northern Sky’ and ending the whole package as an instrumental, switching between minor and major keys. I think it’s minor for the most part, but ends on an unexpected major chord leaves things on a small, bright note. Nick Drake strums and plucks away on his acoustic guitar in the left channel, but very much gets buried by the other instruments, particularly the strings that are eventually brought into the mix. Maybe it was this production choice, that does sort of happen throughout the whole album, that eventually led Drake to go against having backing musicians and go with the absolute bare minimum on Pink Moon. And I’m sure Drake’s playing some interesting chord shapes on that guitar of his on this track. Someone should do something like a Pink Moon‘d version of all the songs on Bryter or even Five Leaves Left. It would certainly show both records in a new light, I feel.

The melodic anchor of the whole track relies on the work of Australian flautist Ray Warleigh. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2015, but a small, small part of his contribution to the art of music lives on in this track. I guess you could split the track into a group of sections, each with their own theme going on. There’s the first minute and three seconds, which set the tone, 1:04 – 1:18, another minor-key transitional piece that leads into a major-key section from 1:19 – 1:49, followed by 1:50 – 2:28, which sounds quite a jazzy tone to me, I’m not quite sure. And then comes an optimistic, springtime morning-sounding passage from 2:29, which might just be the happiest sounding piece of music associated to Nick Drake’s name. Like a sun coming out from the clouds. The jazzy interlude returns at 3:00 before the track returns to its first section to finish it off from 3:21 onwards. If only I knew my music theory, it would help a lot. I know that I definitely feel something throughout this whole track, its changes within certainly take me on a journey. And I think that passes a test of some kind. If you’re listening to music and you’re emotionally affected by it, feel like you’re transported to another plane, then the song is most likely a very, very good one.