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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
Before he died in 1974, Nick Drake
managed to record only three albums, but that meagre repertory is enough
to rank him among the most influential singer-songwriters of all time.
He turned the tables on rock and folk music, projecting emotions outside in
instead of inside out. If rock music had emphasized the emotional aspect of
music in ever more creative ways, Drake did the opposite: his music seems
to cancel out the emotional factor, his voice sounds neutral, anemic and
indifferent, the arrangements are spectral and almost "silent".
Silence is, indeed, the ultimate referent of Drake's "minimalism".
Drake had little to say, and he said it using minimal means.
Surprisingly (and this was Drake's great discovery), his almost voiceless
whisper conveyed stronger emotions than most magniloquent music.
Drake's lost, tenuous, taciturn manner scoured the terminal states of
melancholy, angst and despair for a reason to live this life.
There was something terrifying in those frail notes:
Drake's music was the equivalent of a suicide letter.
Drake fumbled blindfolded on the edge of the abyss, and his songs were the thoughts that accompanied him while waiting for the fall.
The lyrical, elegiac and naive Five Leaves Left (1969) was already
representative of the drama that developed via
Bryter Layter (1970), mildly revitalized by soul and rhythm'n'blues
spices, and that reached its climax with Pink Moon (1972), Drake's
masterpiece and one of the most depressing albums of all time.
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by DommeDamian)
Nicholas Rodney Drake did not have a long career
and certainly did not have a prolific career, but his influence on the
singer-songwriters of the 90s (especially) was immense.
Rock music had
always been highly emotional musically, and the golden age of 1967-1969 had
done nothing but enhance that emotion in ever more creative ways, leaving
behind the refrain of the Beatles melodic song. Launching into titanic harmonic
feats, Nick took the opposite route instead. His music seems to
completely cancel the emotional factor. His voice has a neutral tone, a
little indifferent and a little anemic, which the arrangements (ghostly to say
the least) help to make it even more "silent". His
"minimalism" was the antithesis not only of the principles of
rock music but also of the intellectual attitude of most of his
contemporaries. He had little to say and he said it with the minimum of
means. The fact is that Nick Drake's almost voiceless whisper ended up
conveying, paradoxically, precisely the most extreme emotions. The faint
and lost voice sounded out the terminal states of melancholy, anguish,
despair. There is something truly chilling about those notes without any
source of force: Nick's music was the musical equivalent of a suicide
note. He groped aimlessly on the edge of the abyss, and his songs were the
thoughts that accompanied him as he awaited the fall. To this
"existential" tragedy is added the artistic one: Nick had very few
fans when he was alive. Many years had to pass after his death for his art to be
re-evaluated. In a sense, in 1974 Nick Drake died of misunderstanding.
The short career of Nick
Drake (born in Burma in 1948) consists of just three short records, recorded
two years apart starting in 1968.
Five Leaves Left
(Island, 1969), recorded while still a
student at Cambridge, features a tenderly naive style. With a calm and
meditative tone Nick reveals himself to be a lyrical and elegiac poet,
dedicated to the search for wisdom through a hermetic sound that is married to
a very colloquial language. Not at all self-indulgent, his songs make use
of subdued orchestral accompaniments (provided by another student, Robert
Kirby), as well as the almost jingle-jangle chimes of his guitar. The
resulting fatalistic atmosphere is sometimes postwar film-noir (Fruit Tree, Way
To Blue, River Man, Three Hours, and Cello
Song).
Nick Drake's formula is
expressed more clearly by the second album, Bryter Layter (Island,
1970): he combines the magical and introverted rhythm and blues of Van Morrison
with the psychic and folk acrobatics of Tim Buckley. An increasingly
tenuous language explains the sweet adolescent sadness, which is not yet an
existential crisis but is still tender and dreamy. This is how superb odes
are born like Northern Sky and At The Chime of The
City Clock . Songs like Hazey Jane are closer to
jazz cocktail and night-club soul than folk, but the sound is more fruit of the
collaborators (John Cale, Richard Thompson, Robert Kirby's orchestra and two
jazz players) than by Nick himself.
His style is the most
radical (i.e. minimal) on Pink Moon (Island, 1972). Nick
Drake sings with no accompaniment other than guitar (and piano solo in Pink
Moon). The record seems to be the result of an existential travail
that is increasingly suffered. His adolescent fairy tales have turned into
cold breaths that exhale an acute sense of desolation, indulge in the
suggestion of solitude, obsessed with the transience of all things. The
crisis has reached the point of no return: the harmonic texture is deboned,
frail and gaunt, the singing is a humble whisper, the conciseness of the pieces
is manic, the lyrics are indecipherable, bizarre, hallucinated. The
salient passages are precisely those of only four lines, cryptic and
penetrating aphorisms, fragments of a now dried up delirium, confessions that
seem unburied corpses, in which the guitar often has the melancholy toll of a
clock (Pink Moon), Donovan-style nursery rhymes (Road),
cataleptic litanies (Which Will), archaic blues (Know), anguished
street folk (Parasite). The crepuscular serenades of Place
To Be and From The Morning are the only songs that
unfold in the rhythm of the great outdoors; but they are ghostly
declarations of love that live on a schizoid romanticism. The bleak and
majestic apex of Nick's philosophy is found in the surreal ruminations of Things
Behind The Sun, one of the most poetic, depressed songs of all time, a
terrifying parable about solitude in the crowd.
Nick Drake was being
treated at a psychiatric hospital when the record came out. The following
year he decided to abandon music and turn to computer science. He was
found dead on November 25, 1974, from an overdose of antidepressant, probably
a suicide.
Time of No Reply
(Hannibal, 1986) collects ten unreleased
works. Fruit Tree (Hannibal, 1986) collects Drake's three
official albums. Family Tree (2007) collects material that Drake
recorded before the first album.
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