Tag Archives: nick drake

#1403: Nick Drake – Tow the Line

Leave a reply

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.

#1358: Nick Drake – Things Behind the Sun

Leave a reply

It always comes back to Pink Moon. There have been a few “last songs from an album” posts around recently. After this, there’s only one more to come from Pink Moon. Any fan of it will be able to correctly guess what song that post will be for. But for now, this one’s for ‘Things Behind the Sun’. The track is the longest one on Nick Drake’s third and final studio album, positioned right in the middle of it, acting more as the closing number for the LP’s first half before you’d flip the vinyl around and listen to the second. Even back when I first heard the track in late, late 2012, it did feel like I was listening to what was meant to be considered the record’s most poignant moment. This and the preceding instrumental, ‘Horn’, together make up a one-two punch of poignancy. They both sounded so much sadder than anything else than the numbers that came before. But then again, I think ‘Horn’ acts as more of the tone setter, the moment of quiet reflection before the storm of ‘Things…’ begins soon after.

Not like ‘Things…’ is this wild, raucous rock number or anything. It’s just as acoustic as everything else the album delivers. It’s a storm in terms of the tone… there’s something uneasy, disquieting about it. It’s probably the minor key it’s in for the verses. That would do it. ‘Things Behind the Sun’ sees Drake detail his disillusionment with his musical endeavours. He goes out to perform, but he doesn’t trust the people who go and watch him. And as he goes about his way, observing people on his idle travels, he sees how they act and concludes that there’s no point in trying to win their hearts with his music – the likelihood is they won’t listen anyway. It seems to me that this is a track – another being ‘Harvest Breed’ – where he more or less implies that he won’t be around for much longer, or at least has thought about the end of his life, but doesn’t want to “name the day” on which it happens or reveal that he’s tried to end it before. So until then, where the more sprightly, happier chord progressions come in, he’ll take his time, find delight in the dark humour he appreciates that makes other people frown and generally keep to himself with his head down while he carries on feeling depressed. He’s comfortable in his state of dejection. It’s all very bittersweet.

And just like almost everything other song on Pink Moon. the track is provided to you solely by Nick Drake with his weary vocal and fingerpicked acoustic guitar. Goes to show how much you can do with so little. One thing I’ve always liked about this tune is how rhythmic Drake’s playing style is. He sort of skips around from one chord to the next throughout, playing a root note or two in between. It really shows during the guitar break halfway through when he jumps higher and higher with the progression before dipping back downwards again and repeating the process again. I’ve always thought this and ‘Which Will’ – which if you didn’t guess, will be the next song – both had a rhythm that could have been infused into a hip-hop track of some kind easily, which I guess would be sacrilege to some for weird reasons, but it’s just how I feel. Then Kendrick Lamar used a re-recorded sample of ‘Things…’ in one of his own songs – unreleased, mind you – and my point was proven. But overall, it’s disheartening to listen Drake’s track and hear how let down he was by the fact – and it was a fact at the time – that his music wasn’t going anywhere, not making him the big star that he wanted to be and that people told him he could be. It happened eventually, people love his music now. If only he’d stuck around.

#1312: Nick Drake – Sunday

Leave a reply

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.

#1129: Nick Drake – Road

3 Replies

Time for another song from Pink Moon again. Have I mentioned that it’s one of my favourite albums of all-time? Would be a major misstep if I haven’t done so in any of the posts from the six songs I’ve already written about from there. Nick Drake felt let down by the music business, withdrew within himself and became heavily depressed, recorded the album in two days with just his acoustic guitar with a tiny piano overdub and left his studio output at that as sadly passed away a couple years after its release from an accidental-ish overdose of antidepressants. Despite the dark context, the album’s intentional ‘less is more’ production works wonders for the eleven tracks it holds. It also puts a strong emphasis on the impeccable guitar work by Drake, whose finger-picking style on the album is properly introduced on its third track, ‘Road’.

On the songs that precede ‘Road’, those being the title track and ‘Place to Be’, Drake plays his guitar with a lively strum. There’s an energy behind the chord changes that occur under the words he sings in both. But just as the last chord of ‘Place to Be’ fades to silence, ‘Road’ comes in with a finger-picked pattern that contrasts the low strings with the higher ones which ring out and shine like the sun on a clear winter morning. That’s right. Metaphors for you. That pattern then segues into another which focuses on a melody on the lower strings, utilising triplet timing for a brief second, before going back to the initial pattern the track began with and eventually getting to Drake’s vocal. I could actually go through a line-by-line analysis of this song. There are only four of them in there. I’d like to think Drake thought the guitar figures were too good that he didn’t have to fill the song up too much lyrically. Most likely he thought he said all that needed to be said in those few words.

The guitar work may give an idea of hope and optimism. To some anyway, most might not see that at all. But if you do get that idea, it’s to deceive you away from the actual resentment and bitterness Drake expresses in the lyric. “You can say the sun is shining if you really want to” – You can say everything fine and dandy. “I can see the moon, and it seems so clear” – I can see things for the way the way they really are. It’s not all that good. “You can take a road that takes you to the stars” – You can take a path in life that’ll bring you fame and fortune. “I can take a road that’ll see me through.” – I’m just looking to make it to the end of the day. Or something along those lines. That’s how I see it. So there’s a fine example of juxtaposition going on here between music and lyric. But it’s that juxtaposition, present here and very much throughout the album, that gives the track that edge. Plus, the melodies are great and it’s very easy to sing along to. And the sound of those guitar strings are wonderful.

#1043: Nick Drake – Place to Be

1 Reply

Well, well, it’s Nick Drake again. Though this won’t be the last time I write about him on this website, it’ll be the last time you’ll see a track of his in this particular section. Who knew that basically a quarter of the songs on Pink Moon began with the letter ‘P’? Never would have thought about it without this, would you? Not like it’s very useful information anyway. Representing the last of the Ps from Pink Moon today is the album’s second track, ‘Place to Be’. With the preceding title track providing a more surreal, symbolic take on Drake’s outlook on life, ‘Place to Be’ is where he lays the facts down straight.

I believe this track is the last one on the album on which he uses a plectrum to play his acoustic guitar, with the rest all consisting of his intricate fingerpicking. And as a result, just like the ‘Pink Moon’ track, ‘Place to Be’ has a very driving momentum to it with Drake playing the guitar with an air of confidence and striding force. The strings ring out with a rich tone to them, and the music overall lures you in with its warmth. But on top, Drake tells the listener how he is as the man who sings to you compared to the days of yesteryear, and he’s not doing too well. The lyrics are plain to understand. When he was younger, he was ignorant to the cold, hard truth. But now he has himself hardened as a person and can see things for what they are. He used to be vibrant and bright, but now has become darker in his moods. He asks to be given a place to be, and by that I assume he means a place to just exist without any troubles. Maybe somewhere to belong. It’s left up in the air, but it taps into a feeling I’m sure is felt universally.

The third and final verse contains the most telling and hard-hitting revelation out of those listed in the previous two. Referencing his ‘Day Is Done’ track, which bear in mind was only released three years prior, he tells the listener that compared to then he was now the weakest he’s ever felt. So weak in a need for something or someone that isn’t fully disclosed. They’re just referred to as ‘you’. Maybe you is the ‘place to be’ itself. Maybe it’s a loved one. I’ve seen interpretations that suggest that ‘you’ is death. Any way you look at it though, it’s a sad affair. But instead of making it too melodramatic, he transferred his energy into an beautiful earnest acoustic performance. It does make you wonder how things changed so much for the worse for him in that relatively short amount of time.