Nick Drake
Way to Blue

THE REVIEW

This is how the afternoons in Hamburg passed, inside harbor bars, on shabby fake marble tables writing rhymes. Hours spent twirling teaspoons between fingers and a bit of light in the smoke of the place. But even that smoke was no longer needed to conceal the scratched soul, what sense did those winter afternoons have, soaking memories and sufferings in saltwater, what sense if not to make them burn and intoxicate them with a glass, in front of that dark sea and that thick blanket of clouds broken only by the chimneys.

The red velvet couches often hosted the questions of discomfort always stretched between evocation and the necessity to find refuge, of the man who can only choose one culture, one way of thinking and escapes to other imaginary places the terrible wrath of materiality, being an unsuspecting victim of himself and his sensitivity, now stretched to the extreme of endurance, now nullified by some mass anesthetic…

The day will come when we can dance, awakening and meeting the Truth, or even just the small and partial truth of an artist or another human, and perhaps change without needing to look back? It's not up to me to answer, I don't have the expertise, but as a living person, it's up to me to ask myself some necessary questions...

The first thing that comes to mind is why we continue like this, why must the watchwords be homogenization, flattening, why today adhere to the non-culture of surface restored or maybe just smeared. Why my peers? Why with those cursed pieces of iron, tattoos, cigarettes... generation that uses symbols of revolution in a society where there isn't even a moral order to overturn, and uses the fashion of the much-hated progenitors, thinking they embody revolt but rushing into the mouth of mindlessness? Why do we give ourselves so easily to certain places and to boys that are all the same.

We cannot forever play the sad boys to whom destiny, which certainly has its faults, played a bad trick. I am probably wrong, but I doubt much can change with the music of Blink 182... Life is, and must be, flair and determining oneself through a process of differentiation not of hiding in the masses. Then, excuse the anger, the too many "whys" and the rhetoric, but I feel the need for more artists, and a painting in the corner of this place seems like an escape route within reach... it sketches fields of saffron and a road between wings of flowers and petals and perhaps there lies the answer, provided there's the will to walk, on that road.

And I wonder if Nick Drake was somehow this.

A secret character, a wild British faun, not coincidentally, perhaps found in the restorative and consolatory necessity of art his own message, the thread that stitches and underlies the words whispered by the faint and restless voice. This record doesn't have any merit over other works except to once again emphasize the fragmentary and lateral poetry of this destroyed poet, the partiality of existence, the transience of feelings and the impossibility of gluing all the crumbs of an existence, the need to return to nature and not to blend into the masses.

Songs that are minimal emotions told with uncommon nakedness and violence. And like shards of a broken vase, incomplete and sharp, verses of fragility and violence create a whirlpool inside the darkest, disarmed intellectual tunnel which is also bare, shocked by the breadcrumbs of marginal lives lost in the utmost atemporality. After all, Drake's poetics is still hidden today, sheltered on a road crossing saffron fields wind-tousled, but where at least the blush was never a shame.