Nicholas Rodney Drake (19 June 1948 - 25 November 1974) was an English singer-songwriter and musician best known for his acoustic, autumnal songs. His primary instrument was the guitar, though he was also proficient at piano, clarinet, and saxophone.
Although he failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime, Drake's work has grown steadily in stature, to the extent that he now ranks among the most influential English singer-songwriters of the last 50 years. Drake signed to Island Records when he was twenty years old and released his debut album, Five Leaves Left, in 1969. By 1972, he had recorded two more albums Bryter Layter and Pink Moon. None of the albums sold more than 5,000 copies after their initial release. His reluctance to perform live or be interviewed further contributed to his lack of commercial success. Despite this, he was able to gather a loyal group of people who would champion his music. One such person was his manager, Joe Boyd, who had a clause put into his own contract with Island Records that ensured Nick's records would never go out of print. Drake suffered from depression and insomnia throughout his life, and these topics were often reflected in his lyrics. Upon completion of his third album, 1972's Pink Moon, he withdrew from both live performance and recording, retreating to his parents' home in rural Warwickshire. On 25 November 1974, Drake died from an overdose of amitriptyline, a prescribed antidepressant; he was 26 years old. There was residual interest in Drake's music through the mid-1970s, but it was not until the 1979 release of the retrospective album Fruit Tree that his back catalogue came to be reassessed. By the mid n1980s, Drake was being credited as an influence by such artists as Robert Smith and Peter Buck. In 1985, The Dream Academy reached the UK and US charts with "Life in a Northern Town", a song written for and dedicated to Drake. By the early 1990s, he had come to represent a certain type of 'doomed romantic' musician in the UK music press, and was frequently cited by artists including Kate Bush, Paul Weller, and The Black Crowes. Drake's first biography was written in 1997, and was followed in 1998 by the documentary film A Stranger Among Us. In 2000, Volkswagen featured the title track from Pink Moon in a television advertisement, and within a month Drake had sold more records than he had in the previous thirty years.
Musical style
Drake was obsessive about practising his guitar playing, and would often stay up through the night, experimenting with tunings and working on songs. His mother remembered hearing him "bumping around at all hours. I think he wrote his nicest melodies in the early-morning hours." A self-taught guitarist, Drake's guitar style is characterised by his use of alternative tunings, which he uses to create cluster chords. Such chords are difficult to achieve on a guitar using standard tuning; Drake used tunings which made cluster chords available using more conventional chord shapes. In many songs he accents the dissonant effect of such non-standard tunings through his vocal melodies. Drake studied English literature while in Cambridge, and was particularly drawn to the works of William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and Henry Vaughan. However, his lyrics do not invoke the metaphors and imagery typical of such influences. Instead, Drake employs a series of elemental symbols and codes, largely drawn from nature. The moon, stars, sea, rain, trees, sky, mist and seasons are all commonly used, influenced in part by his rural upbringing. Images related to summer figure centrally in his early work; from Bryter Layter on, his language is more autumnal, evoking a season commonly used to convey senses of loss and sorrow. Throughout, Drake writes with detachment, more as an observer than participant, a point of view Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis described "as if he were viewing his life from a great, unbridgeable distance." This perceived inability to connect has led to much speculation about Drake's sexuality. Boyd has said he detects a virginal quality in his lyrics and music, and notes that he never observed or heard of the singer behaving in a sexual way with anyone, male or female. Kirby described Drake's lyrics as a "series of extremely vivid, complete observations, almost like a series of epigrammatic proverbs", though he doubts that Drake saw himself as "any sort of poet". Instead he believes that Drake's lyrics were crafted to "complement and compound a mood that the melody dictates in the first place."
Discography
* Five Leaves Left (1969)
* Bryter Layter (1970)
* Pink Moon (1972)
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