Nick Drake
Tanworth-in-Arden

Probably smuggled out of the Drake household shortly after Nick's death, these 18 songs - among which 10 are original, 5 covers, and 3 traditional - inevitably provoke, at the end of the listening, a bitter feeling of slight shame, like someone caught stealing a secret - of a chilling intimacy - jealously guarded behind the curtain of a painful life. And the just barely adequate quality of the recordings makes things worse - in short, this disc, as poignant and eagerly awaited as it was, lasted in my player less than "Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk" or, worse yet, the atrocities later perpetrated by mother M. Gibert (arghh!).

Poor Nick, and how can one separate listening to his music from his life journey among men first, and then as a soul immersed in the desert of life. Something that - alas - I never succeeded in effectively and so it was that, before falling in love with the (immense) artist, I fell in love with the man, and then I took on the artist. "Ffo - For fans only" - the dog seems to bark on the cover, and how can one blame it? The liner notes speak of these as the tender attempt by Drake to convince his mother to let him play that out-of-tune little guitar bought for 13 dollars, she, who had so wanted her Nick to take piano lessons. "Mom, look, I can play, let me play, let me play for you," the plea is so sweet in that moment - so sad now that everything has fallen and been destroyed, now that my soul blows on the ash that burns in the hope of rekindling some still burning ember.

I don't know if the so distant, at times unrecognizable, voice of the very young Drake, will help me revive the last fervent desires of the morbid fetishist that runs through my veins but I do know - for sure - that on my twenty-seventh birthday I was happy, happy to still be alive and I know I awaited that day with unbearable anxiety. But I was still there, the day was gone, I had survived my inner demons, and "Fruit tree" was still there playing in my player.
I will miss the sad exuberance of those days, and the days when I timidly discovered him and slowly made him mine. And the joy I felt when I finished "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Camus, which lasted on my bedside longer than it did on that of my hero.
These 18 songs now remain - light and naive as only those of a twenty-year-old boy full of hope can be while he implores his mother for a smile. Among these, by critical requirement, a "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" by Bob Dylan (languid and poignant), Gershwin's "Summertime" unrecognizable, and the gem "Rain," deserving of future publication but strangely left there in the drawer, or perhaps, so personal as to remain a gift for that mother, who we like to imagine, concluded the listening with a smile.
And our initial shame becomes even slightly more bitter.