150. Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left (July 1969)

1. Time Has Told Me

2. River Man*

3. Three Hours

4. Way to Blue

5. Day Is Done

6. Cello Song

7. The Thoughts of Mary Jane

8. Man in a Shed*

9. Fruit Tree*

10. Saturday Sun

****

One of the frustrating things about doing this is that I'm often listening to music I don't like when I'm not in the mood for it. I tried to listen to Five Leaves Left yesterday and got annoyed. I woke up this morning, however, feeling sad and weird, with that odd sensation of nakedness that I sometimes experience that feels as though the world were trying to stab my soul. So I put this album on, and found it was the perfect antidote to my occasional feelings of hopelessness and fear.

It's kind of impossible to talk about Nick Drake without mentioning the mythology that surrounds him. A painfully shy young man who would almost certainly have been diagnosed with ASD had he been born a few decades later, he stumbled through life making counterintuitive bids at fame that completely eluded him, recorded three eerily perfect albums of melancholy folk music, and died (more than probably a virgin) at the age of 26 from an overdose of antidepressants that may or may not have been deliberate. A peerless guitarist with a soft, enchanting voice, his lyrics were at once deeply obscure and oddly resonant. With the benefit of hindsight, they describe the journey of a young man from a hopeful outsider who's optimistic that he'll one day, given time, find what he wants in life, to an embittered recluse who's unwillingly accepted that he simply has no place in the world. His three albums are like one long suicide note. As a consequence, he's become something of a patron saint for disaffected weirdos who, for one reason or another, just can't seem to fit in.

Despite all I've just said, Five Leaves Left is a largely optimistic album. The dark atmospherics are tempered by lush arrangements and uplifting melodies, and while Drake's lyrics explore alienation and the gulfs between people, they also give the sense of someone who is still hopeful, and perhaps even comfortable in their isolation. The best example is probably "Man in a Shed", a wryly funny song that's probably the most direct thing Drake ever wrote, about a weirdo who lives in a shed trying to seduce a woman who lives in a beautiful house, not really expecting to succeed but arguing that she might find that a shed is actually much nicer than she thinks.

The main thing that Drake trafficked in, though, was beauty. You may not always be sure what he's getting at, but his studio recordings are gorgeous and haunting, and nothing really captures this better than the strange and enchanting "River Man". It could be an old folk song that fell through a portal to another dimension. In any case, it was the first Drake song I ever heard, and the song that convinced me I needed to check him out.

 I still prefer his last two albums to his debut, probably because they were the two I owned on CD for years, but this is a strange and beautiful album, perfect for when the stress of the modern world is getting you down and you want to wander in a twilight world and ponder the great imponderables. Bryter Layter is baroque and rocking, while Pink Moon is stark and compelling, but Five Leaves Left is just so damned pretty. A very melancholy kind of pretty, but then that's the kind of pretty I like best.