Nick Drake – Performance Zen

On a recent musical connect the dots tour through Wikipedia, I stumbled across a reference to Nick Drake. I had first heard of Nick Drake through a review of his work on All Things Considered months ago.

The sound is ephemeral. The sound is haunting. The sound is a lost gem of our time.
It has shocked me how much the songs he made are what I have needed over the last few weeks.

If you get a chance, watch A Skin Too Few, the documentary of his life; you will have to look in the usual places online to find it, as it hasn’t been released on DVD yet.
Find him. Listen. You will never go back.

I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you’re here
Brighten my northern sky.

I wandered around the net today, linking random connections together. Richard Thompson, John Martyn, Nick Drake.

When I visited Nick Drake’s official site (sadly out of date) I found this lovely image dominating the front page.

A lovely, weathered, black leather notebook.

Nick Drake strikes me as a person that is a lot like I could have been. Painfully shy, suffering from depression, trying to get the ideas out in a world that was not his. When he died in 1974, he was ignored and forgotten.

Now that he is all the rage again, it important to go back and consider his life. Consider what he made in a few short years. The stories he tore out of himself, willing to share this one aspect of his life with us.

The rest, well, they are hidden in the little black book.

Tag: Nick Drake

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