Nick Drake, Long a Folk Mystery, Is (Partly) Revealed - Joe Boyd in The New York Times
The English singer Nick Drake made only three studio LPs before his death. The new album “The Making of Five Leaves Left” includes revelatory recordings made before his debut. Credit © Victoria Waymouth
Nick Drake, Long a Folk Mystery, Is (Partly) Revealed
By Will Hermes
This article was originally published in The New York Times on July 23, 2025.
A 42-track collection built around two found recordings helps illuminate the creative process of the revered but elusive icon, who died in 1974.
It all goes back to that Volkswagen ad: four young people blissed out in a Cabrio convertible while Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” provides the soundtrack for their starlit back-road drive.
When the striking TV spot first aired in 1999, the English folk singer — who died of an antidepressant overdose in 1974 after three brilliant, barely noticed albums — had begun a posthumous ascent from cognoscenti secret handshake to cultural touchstone. The spot spring-loaded it.
Nowadays, Drake’s influence is common. You can hear aspects of his sound — a hushed baritone coo unfurled over an eddy of fingerstyle guitar — in the intimate soul of Annahstasia, the finely stitched folk-rock of Joan Shelley and the fragile indie-pop of Skullcrusher (who has a single called “Song for Nick Drake”). Shelley and Skullcrusher contributed to a 2023 tribute album, “The Endless Coloured Ways: The Songs of Nick Drake,” as did the Irish rock band Fontaines D.C., who delivered a potent version of “‘Cello Song.”
“We’re all really big Nick Drake fans,” said the group’s Conor Deegan III, who first heard Drake’s music in the VW ad and responded, like his bandmates, to “something melancholy and otherworldly” about him.
That otherworldliness is magnified by the scant evidence of his time in the world. A famously shy performer who played few shows before he was sidelined by mental illness, there are few documents and no known film footage of his music-making. Notwithstanding home recordings circulated on bootlegs and disappointingly scattershot compilations, his three studio LPs — “Five Leaves Left” (1969), “Bryter Layter” (1971) and “Pink Moon” (1972) — have stood as Drake’s immaculate legacy.
Drake in 1967. One recording on the new album was made in a dorm room with an early Grundig reel-to-reel recorder. Credit © Bryter Music
That will change with “The Making of Five Leaves Left,” due Friday. It’s a 42-track collection that includes revelatory recordings made in the run-up to his debut — vivid studio demos and outtakes, including compositions that didn’t make the album, plus a work tape with his commentary on his songs and how he’d like them arranged. It shows a musician with rangier influences and a more collaborative creative process than what many may have assumed.
The centerpiece is two newly acquired tapes. Drake had given one of them to his friend Beverley Martyn, the English folk singer. It documents his first sessions at London’s fabled Sound Techniques studio — solo recordings of just voice and acoustic guitar. “Exquisite,” is how Joe Boyd, 82, the producer of “Five Leaves Left,” described them on a video call. In the past, Boyd has been unenthusiastic about “completist” compilations, particularly when the artist is unable to weigh in. “With all my skepticism,” he conceded, “I was knocked out. I was very moved by it.”
The other newly discovered tape captures Drake performing demos of songs for Robert Kirby, a baroque music scholar and fellow University of Cambridge student, in a dorm room in early 1968, and discussing how they might be arranged. It suggests the string arrangements that define “Five Leaves Left,” most of them by Kirby, were integral to Drake’s conception of the music — unlike many albums of the era, when such arrangements were often more about marketing than musical concerns. “Nick worked very closely” with Kirby, said Boyd, who mentioned the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” as one precedent. “So it’s not like what you’re hearing on the final version of ‘Five Leaves Left’ is some violation of Nick’s vision.”
The dorm room recording was made by another schoolmate, Paul de Rivaz, with an early Grundig reel-to-reel recorder. He’d kept the tape as a memento, stashing it “in a cupboard” at his parent’s house, where it sat for years. He finally had it transferred to CD; word got back to Island Records of its existence, and in 2018, the retired BP oil executive found himself at Abbey Road Studios sharing the recording with Drake’s sister Gabrielle Drake — an actress and a director of his estate — and Island Records’ Johnny Chandler. The tape “was not what they’d expected at all,” said de Rivaz in a video call. When the playback concluded, “there was a sort of stunned silence,” he added.
“Nick’s voice brought him winging back to me,” recalled his sister, 81, in an email. “Not so much his singing, for that has accompanied me throughout my life. It was his speaking voice that conjured up my beloved brother so very clearly — self-effacing, yet sure; polite but firm. And I found myself overcome by the admiration and wonder I have always felt at his certainty — belied by his diffidence, but always absolute — of what he wanted his songs to sound like.”
“Nick’s voice brought him winging back to me,” recalled his sister, Gabrielle Drake, when she heard the dorm-room recording. Credit © Alex Henderson
The de Rivaz tape, not studio quality but crystal clear, was used in nearly its entirety for the new collection. You can hear Drake commenting on “Made to Love Magic,” noting that it’s “in a minor key, but it goes into a chorus in a major. It would be nice to make this as celestial as possible.” Also de Rivaz recalled that the tape was made in the morning, and that Drake complained of being hung over. (“I’m afraid this is proving to be an unprofessional tape altogether, partly due to intoxication,” the singer says at one point.)
There are many small marvels. An early studio arrangement of “’Cello Song” — working title “Strange Face” — is an out-of-character stab at folk-rock psychedelia akin to what Donovan was up to at the time. Other songs that didn’t make that album show different shades of Drake’s talent. “My Love Left With the Rain” and “Mickey’s Song,” which has a lilting melody recalling Dave Brubeck’s 1959 jazz hit “Take Five,” display wordless bossa nova-style singing, perhaps echoing period recordings by João Gilberto or Antônio Carlos Jobim. There’s an untitled instrumental with jazzy guitar chording, and an early studio version of “Made to Love Magic” features bluesy bent notes and gentle dissonances.
“There is an ever so slightly — as much as Nick can ever be — ‘funky’ side to the way he plays guitar on that song,” said Boyd, who admits it didn’t catch his ear at the time he oversaw its recording.
These discoveries, and the notion that there was a fresh story to tell, inspired the Drake estate to sign off on the project. “Gabrielle guards Nick’s legacy like a lioness with newborn cubs,” said Neil Storey, a former Island Records press officer who helped research and curate the project, which took nine years to complete. The 50th anniversary of “Five Leaves Left” in 2019 came and went — which was “irrelevant” to the project, Storey explained, because Drake’s music “doesn’t accede to time.”
Yet time continues to burnish Drake’s reputation. Richard Morton Jack, author of the exhaustive 2023 biography “Nick Drake: The Life,” firmly believes the artist will “occupy the same cultural space that Dylan and the Beatles do in a hundred, two, three hundred years time. That’s not a qualitative judgment; I think that just seems a likely trajectory.”
The singer and songwriter Ben Harper, who contributed a radiant take of “Time Has Told Me” to the “Endless Coloured Ways” tribute, was thrilled by the prospect of newly issued recordings, and similarly feels Drake has yet to get his due. “I think he’s one of the greatest, most singular artists of his day, and deserves more than a Volkswagen commercial,” he said by phone from his home in Paris. “I mean, put him on a stamp. He’s a treasure.”
A version of this article appears in print on July 25, 2025, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: New Revelations From a Folk Enigma.