Nick Drake

Nick Drake was born on June 19, 1948, in Rangoon, Burma, where his father worked as an engineer, and the family relocated to Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire, in 1951^[1]. Both of his parents were musical: his mother, Molly Lloyd, wrote and recorded her own songs at home, and the fragile, understated delivery of those recordings has often been cited as an early influence on her son's singing style^[1]. His older sister, Gabrielle Drake, went on to a successful acting career^[1].

Drake attended Marlborough College from 1962 to 1965, where he excelled athletically but showed little interest in academics, and went on to study English literature at Cambridge starting in 1967, remaining largely disengaged from university life and preferring to play music alone in his college room^[1]. Producer Joe Boyd discovered him performing at London's Roundhouse in December 1967 and, struck by what he called his "mysteriously original" material, signed him to a management and production deal, becoming a mentor throughout Drake's short recording career^[1].

Drake was almost entirely self-taught as a musician. He played piano and saxophone in a school band called the Perfumed Gardeners before buying his first acoustic guitar in 1965, and he developed his distinctive sound through alternative open tunings that produced dense, unusual chord voicings difficult to reproduce in standard tuning^[1]. His guitar playing drew on Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and the jazz of Miles Davis, while his lyrics, built from elemental, often rural imagery of moons, trees, and rain, reflected his reading of William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and Henry Vaughan^[1].

Island Records released Drake's debut album, Five Leaves Left, in 1969, followed by Bryter Layter in 1971, a more orchestrated, outward-facing record made with members of Fairport Convention and John Cale of the Velvet Underground^[2]. Despite hopes that its fuller arrangements would broaden his audience, the album sold poorly, and Drake's refusal to tour or promote his work left it largely unnoticed outside dedicated folk circles^[1].

The commercial disappointment, compounded by Boyd's relocation to Los Angeles after selling his production company to Island in 1971, deepened a depression that had already begun to take hold. In 1971 Drake saw a psychiatrist at St Thomas' Hospital and was prescribed antidepressants, which he took reluctantly, and a nervous breakdown in early 1972 led to a five-week hospitalization; a treating therapist later suggested he may have been dealing with schizophrenia rather than depression alone^[1]. Drake's third and final album, Pink Moon, recorded in two late-night sessions in October 1971 and released the following year, stripped his sound back to just voice and guitar^[1].

Those who knew Drake described a man who compartmentalized his friendships so thoroughly that many who attended his funeral met each other for the first time that day^[1]. His closest musical friendship was with singer-songwriter John Martyn, in whose Hastings home Northern Sky was written; Martyn grew concerned enough about Drake's decline that he wrote the title track of his own 1973 album, “Solid Air,” directly about him^[1]. Drake's longest emotional attachment was to Sophia Ryde, a friend he met in London in 1968 and whom biographers have called the nearest thing he had to a girlfriend, though the relationship remained undefined and was never consummated. A week before his death, Ryde told Drake she needed time apart from him, and a letter addressed to her was later found near his body^[1].

Drake died on November 25, 1974, at his parents' home in Tanworth-in-Arden, of an overdose of the prescribed antidepressant amitriptyline; a coroner recorded the death as suicide, though the circumstances have long been debated by biographers^[1]. None of his three studio albums sold more than a few thousand copies during his lifetime. His reputation grew almost entirely after his death, gaining momentum through the 1979 box set Fruit Tree and a widening circle of admirers, including Kate Bush and R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, through the 1980s^[1]. A 1999 television commercial that used the title track from Pink Moon introduced his music to a far larger audience than he had reached while alive, and later artists including Bon Iver, José González, and Radiohead's Philip Selway have cited him as a formative influence^[1].