walking upstream…
Nick Drake
Nick Drake picked up a guitar at sixteen at Marlborough College and, within three and a half years, was recording his debut, Five Leaves Left, at nineteen. He gave two interviews in his life and left no concert footage — nearly everything known about him comes secondhand, through his producer Joe Boyd, his arranger Robert Kirby, and his family. He worked out his famously strange, thumb-wrapped open tunings by ear, taught himself from records by British folk guitarists and American songwriters, and by 1974, at twenty-six, was dead from an antidepressant overdose, his three albums barely sold. What sounded to his contemporaries like private, unclassifiable music was, underneath, a young man translating everything he'd absorbed — a folk guitarist's technique, a songwriter's plainness, his own mother's piano chords — into a voice no one else had.
the sound in question
1972
Pink MoonNick Drake
walk the tributaries ↓
Bert Jansch1960s · Folk / Folk baroque
Still at school, Drake was, in his biographer's word, 'mesmerised' by Jansch's records, and long before he wrote a song of his own he was performing Jansch's — a home tape of him singing 'Strolling Down the Highway' survives on the 2007 rarities set Family Tree. Drake's own producer, Joe Boyd, reached for the same name unprompted: 'my first thought was to compare him to Bert Jansch, Robin Williamson, John Martyn, and John Renbourn,' he said, then singled out what set Drake apart even from his model — 'it didn't really have a folksiness about it.'
listen: upstream & heresource: Record Collector — When I Was in My Prime (Bert Jansch feature, Drake's cover of 'Strolling Down the Highway') ↗
1965
Strolling Down the HighwayBert Jansch
1968
Strolling Down the HighwayNick Drake
listen forSet Jansch's original 'Strolling Down the Highway' against Drake's own recording of it and listen to how closely the teenager tracks his hero's percussive, syncopated right hand — the same stop-start attack, the same refusal to just strum through the changes. It's the clearest surviving proof of where Drake's picking hand learned its vocabulary before he ever wrote a lyric of his own.
Molly Drake1950s · Folk / Piano ballad
Nick's mother wrote and recorded her own songs at the piano in private, on a reel-to-reel her husband kept for the purpose; nobody outside the family heard them until after her death in 1993. When Joe Boyd, Drake's producer, finally heard the tapes, he heard where the tunings came from: 'there's a unique way that she voices chords that made me think that Nick's complex tunings were his way of trying to replicate on the guitar the way his mother played the piano.' 'This is the missing link in the Nick Drake story,' he said elsewhere — 'in the piano chords, are the roots of Nick's harmonies.'
listen: upstream & heresource: Stereogum — Nick Drake And The Mother Of His Mysterious Sound (bio, Molly Drake influence) ↗
1950
I RememberMolly Drake
1969
Way to BlueNick Drake
listen forPlay Molly's 'I Remember' — just her voice and piano, alone in a hushed, unresolved minor key — against Nick's 'Way to Blue,' and listen for how his guitar chords, all those detuned, oddly stacked open strings, land with the same close, murmuring harmony as his mother's piano voicings. It's the sound Joe Boyd meant when he called her playing the hidden source of her son's, as if Nick had found a way to fret her chords.
Bob Dylan1960s · Folk / Folk rock / Rock
At sixteen, newly handed a guitar, Drake was 'rarely seen without' it, working through songs by Dylan, Paul Simon, and Peter, Paul and Mary before he'd written a line himself; his biographer lists Dylan among the handful of songwriters — alongside Phil Ochs, Tim Buckley, Dave Van Ronk — that shaped him. A surviving home tape has him singing Dylan's own 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time' note for note, the sound of a student still working entirely in someone else's voice.
listen: upstream & here
1963
Tomorrow Is a Long TimeBob Dylan
1968
Tomorrow Is a Long TimeNick Drake
listen forCompare Dylan's own live 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time' to the teenage home recording Drake made of the same song — the same loping fingerpicked pattern carrying the same long, plain, unhurried verse, sung in the same unadorned, folk-club voice, before Drake had found the more clipped, harmonically knotted phrasing and the hushed, private delivery that would become entirely his own.