nick drake

Nick Drake may be as English as Marmite, but I'll always associate his music with the sense of infinite openness and possibility I felt when I first moved to Los Angeles more than 20 years ago. I was a different guy then than I am now, but Drake’s music still has the same effect on me today, even if it’s more muted after having listened to it so carefully for so long…

I’m a bit of a latecomer when it comes to Nick Drake. I didn’t really become aware of him until I lived in England for a short while.  By then, he’d already become something of a cult figure, though somehow I’d never picked him up on my radar.  At first I wasn’t convinced. I got myself a copy of Five Leaves Left, which sounded to me like run-of-the-mill pastoral English folk, very much in the same vein as Bert Jansch and Pentangle, music I appreciate but don’t really connect with on an emotional level.  But even before I became a Drake obsessive, I recognized how amazing he was as a finger-style guitarist. If nothing else, the guy’s playing made my jaw drop…  After I moved to LA, a friend of mine recorded Bryter Layter on a scratchy TDK cassette tape for me, and I played it in my ’92 Saturn all the time as I was becoming familiar with the Southland’s endlessly vast urban/suburban/exurban topography.  From the desert to the sea to all of Southern California, as the late Jerry Dunphy used to say…  I can’t quite put my finger on how it happened, but from the moment I got off the airplane and into my rental car at LAX, and then drove onto the freeway for the first time, my feeling was, I’m home…this is home…this is good.  A big part of it, I think, was the sheer size of the place, the way it swallows you up and makes you anonymous, a mere speck of dust floating in the dry air amidst the swaying palms.  This is actually what a lot of people don’t like about LA, but they tend to be folks who need to feel more connected than I do.  Los Angeles living is good if you like feeling disconnected, but not so much if you need lots of friends and can’t stand being by yourself. The place lends itself to existential anomie, which has a negative connotation in the sociological sense of the term (‘normlessness’), but can be more neutral if you think of it in the more generic sense of being an island unto yourself…  

And while I’ve grown to adore the whole of Nick Drake’s body of work, Bryter Layter is the record that’s closest to my heart and speaks most directly to the way I live here in LA.  Part of this is that it’s the music I listened to constantly during a particularly formative and tender period of my life, but I think my connection to it runs deeper, transcending time if not place. Of Drake’s three fully-realized albums, Bryter Layter is the one that has the most urban-ish feel. I’ve described it to anyone who’ll listen as a record about life and loneliness in the big city.  It’s not just the content of tunes like At the Chime of a City Clock and Hazey Jane II, but also the generally expansive vibe the album gives off with its string arrangements and baroque textures. It’s a record that only makes sense in a bustling cosmopolitan setting. One listens to it and visualizes a heroic nomad wandering the city streets at night, alone in his thoughts and self-imposed isolation. I listen to Bryter Layter now and remember that great period of awakening in my life when everything about LA was still new to me, all of it bombarding my senses unrelentingly.  And I wanted more, more and more. I couldn’t get enough of this city and its strangeness…  An infinite number mysteries and hidden treasures still remain out there today, waiting to be uncovered.  I doubt they can ever be fully exhausted, though my appetite for discovery is not what it once was. One’s enthusiasm for adventure and new experiences fades somewhat with age.  But after all these years, Bryter Layter still makes me wanna get in my car and drive up and down those long boulevards that were once bursting with so much hope and promise…