In early 2017, I was on the Christmas break, in between the first and second semesters of my final year in university. I was preparing information for what would become my dissertation. I was doing some reading required for coursework of some kind. But it was also in that cold wintertime that I found out about Nick Drake’s ‘Tow the Line’. Drake’s three-studio-album discography had been firmly set in my iTunes library for years up to that point. Pink Moon, one of my favourite albums of all time, any longtime reader on here knows how I feel about it. I can’t remember what directed me to ‘Tow the Line’. I can only think that after knowing Drake’s three albums for so long, I was on the lookout for more material of his, preferably in the same vein as the work on Pink Moon. This led me in the direction of songs like ‘Black Eyed Dog’ and ‘Hanging on a Star’. But it’s ‘Tow the Line’ I’m here to talk about. So here goes.

‘Tow the Line’ is the last song on the Made to Love Magic compilation, a collection of Nick Drake outtakes, remixes and remasters, released in 2004. Before that year, ‘Tow the Line’ had never been heard by anyone. It was only found during the making of the compilation after producer John Wood had left the tape containing Drake’s other “final” recordings running and, to his surprise, the song started playing after a few moments of silence. ‘Tow the Line’ is reportedly the very final thing Nick Drake ever put to tape, recording it in July 1974, just four months before his untimely death. I don’t know if there’s a sense of finality in the song’s message, but the sound of him putting the guitar down in the very last second does feel like a kind of auditory full stop. I wanted my Pink Moon-ish fill of more Nick Drake material, and I got it with ‘Tow the Line’. It’s been a good near-decade knowing this song exists.

Out of the last five songs Nick Drake did, it’s ‘Black Eyed Dog’ and ‘Tow the Line’ that are the frontrunners for me. I like ‘Rider on the Wheel’ too, but its original (and better) mix seems to not be widely available. While ‘Black Eyed Dog’ is this real bleak, stark, looking-death-in-the-face kind of song, ‘Tow the Line’ has this charging sense of urgency about it. Drake strums away on his acoustic guitar, a G-note on the bottom string droning, makes things feels quite tense. And I think it’s a tense situation Drake is detailing in the lyrics. It’s all or nothing in this period of time he’s singing about, and it seems that the outcome – success or total failure – depends on the ‘you’ person he’s directing the song towards. It’s an ultimatum, is what it is. There’s definitely a finality to it all, what was I talking about? Either the person sticks around and shows Drake the way or they leave and things turn out for the worse. It’s up for them to decide. That’s the final decision. And that’s how Nick Drake capped off his recording career, with issues unresolved, left in no man’s land. We all know it, the guy deserved so much more in his time.