I remember vividly the first time I heard Nick Drake. It was in the mid-’70s, probably ’75 or ’76. I had gone over to visit my friend Robert, whom I had known for two or three years at that point; he had already introduced me to some good music and has continued to do so over the years since. “I’ve got something you should hear,” he said. He gave me a chair that was well-positioned to get the best from his very good stereo system and put on “River Man.” I was transfixed.
Usually if I like something very, very much on first hearing, I get a bit less enthusiastic later on. And it often happens that music which doesn’t particularly grab me at first becomes a lasting favorite. It’s pretty rare for me to be knocked out on the first hearing and just as much so after dozens of hearings and the passage of thirty years. But so it has been with "River Man" and Nick Drake’s other best work.
If you’re new to Drake’s work, or if you know the song but haven’t seen this video, I suggest you not click on this link until you can give it your attention. I generally dislike music videos but this one is very good (at least). YouTube doesn’t allow it to be embedded, so click here.
And here, embeddable, is another of my favorites, “Northern Sky”:
If you’re new to this music, and you like it enough to go and buy one of Drake’s albums, you aren’t going to want to stop there, so you may as well go ahead and purchase the collection Fruit Tree, which contains his three completed albums and some uncollected tracks, several of which are excellent.
You can read the story of his all-too-brief career here at AMG. I notice that this summary emphasizes the depressed quality of his work, but that’s by no means its only dimension, and arguably not, in the end, the most significant.
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