Running with Nick Drake

Okay, so this post is kinda about running. And its (tangential at best) connection to music.
When I run I usually listen to electronic music. Something uptempo with propulsive, head nodding beats to help me forget about the lengthy gap between this and my previous outing (not to mention the many ruinous cigarettes smoked between then and now). I use music much as an athlete uses energy drinks: to patch over my physical deficiencies.
I am lucky enough to live right next to Bath's glorious Kennet & Avon Canal, which despite being adjacent to a great chugging over polluted highway (The London Road), feels a million miles away.

Anyway, listening to my default running album, John Talabot's magnificent recent LP, Fin , I realised how incongruous these beats were given my surroundings. Despite making some of the most organic, and life affirming dance music of recent times its tempo felt totally out of sync with the gently undulating river, the ducks, and heady scent of wild garlic as I hurtled past them. So I switched to something with a slightly lower BPM- Nicolas Jaar and his only LP, last year's Space Is Only Noise. Yes, this was more attuned, but still the dark warped voices, and twisted beauty of this precocious producer's compositions felt awry. They would be more in harmony with a sweat soaked disco or a purposeful walk across some bustling metropolis. But here amid the swallows, and the narrow-boat dwellers basking in the evening sun it was just wrong.

So, scrolling up from Nicolas Jaar I find Nick Drake. A perfect match! I opt for 1969's Five Leaves Left, Drake's debut aged just 21 (incidentally, the same as Jaar is now). There is something ineffably English about Drake's gently melancholy output, and amid the last dying rays of sunshine, 'Thoughts of Mary Jane' sounds as natural as the birdsong around me. His breathy voice and warm acoustic style embellished beautifully by Joe Boyd's lush folky arrangements. It's as English as a pint of ale and as mysterious as the scent of wild garlic or hedgerow on a sleepy Sunday morning.
As I settle into a post five mile stupor (I like to push myself) this bucolic folk music helps me take it easy and take in my surroundings. I stop and survey the Avon valley at the Dundas aqueduct.

The view from atop the Dundas aqueduct

Drake, who succumbed to an overdose of antidepressants aged just 26, has a reputation for being forlorn. Yet I find his meditative and hypnotic guitar style relaxing not despairing. It is the sound of late English summer afternoons not a yelp of desperation as would be easy to suggest. The sadness is implied rather than demonstrated, he was not a self pitier.
'Fruit Tree', for example, is a melancholy rumination on fame -'fame is but a fruit tree, so very unsung/ It can never flourish until its stock is in the ground' and is an eerily prescient observation from Drake, who though respected was largely unknown while alive. His three records hardly sold during his brief lifetime, yet his LPs now routinely go for three hundred plus on discogs and such like.  His 'stock' grew steadily after his demise into a fully fledged cult, and contemporary opinion would surely place him in the highest echelon of singer songwriters that ever lived. I certainly would. Yet Drake hated performing live, crippled by doubt and depression, he lived the life of a loner, only adding to the mythology surrounding him, making him into a kind of Romantic poet.

Though, while not entirely off mark, I think this is imposing an imagined 'life' upon the music too much. An excessive privileging of biography from which the music stands wonderfully separate from. To put it another way, I couldn't run to Elliott Smith, Leonard Cohen or any of the downer troubadours with which Drake is often paired. He is such an accomplished guitarist that his songs don't need any embellishments. And his style is not slow like the Cohens of this world, it's brisk, swirling and hypnotic. Beautiful melodies simply pour from his instrument which often sounds like several playing at once. See 'Which Will' for a case in point.
This is why my favourite Drake album by far is 1972's Pink Moon. Often thought to be a document of despair, I beg to differ. Though emanating no doubt from a troubled soul, to me this is the sound of someone finding their metier or niche, and being completely 'one' with their instrument and message. Whatever ailed Drake, he rose above it on Pink Moon, an album that is solely (his) voice and guitar (save for a few sparse notes from Boyd on piano). However, far from feeling sparse it is almost opulent, and very earthy; a perfect accompaniment to the English countryside. Not at all depressing, the melodies are too strong- his voice too composed. Nowhere a trace of melodrama. Just beautifully intricate playing- even dark moments such as 'Things Behind The Sun' feel merely contemplative not depressing.
Pink Moon  is one of those few works which I regard as timeless. Unencumbered by ego, style or excess it is a work that I believe will still sound as good 100 years hence. While today's innovators such as Jaar turn to richly sampled tapestries of sound to evoke similar feelings of alienation and introspection to that of Drake, Pink Moon is a reminder that this need not be so complicated. Moreover, a reminder of just how powerful that tired old dog of genres, that of the 'singer songwriter' can be, given the correct personnel. Indeed, are today's electronic producers not much like a modern day equivalent of the acoustic troubadours of yore? Anyway, I digress.  Fashions and mediums may change but Pink Moon is timeless, transportive and a surprisingly good running companion.