Nick Drake

Definitely. Five Leaves is my personal favorite of his albums. At The Chime Of A City Clock is the perfect song for a rainy autumn night. That song encapsulates one so well.

Beautiful music and a profound lyricist,i came across him when i was reading a review for a Badly Drawn Boy album and there was a "if you like this you might like...".Cheers Q.

I thought Five leaves was the weakest out of the three,Bryter Later being the greatest.Last year I read a biography on him and it was an incredibly sad tale about a very unhappy man.

Cliché or not or whatever, but you gotta listen to Pink Moon.

Time was I'd waste hours fooling around in his tunings.

Black Eyed Dog, considering the context and how Drake died, is simply heart-breaking. I think River Man may be my favourite of his songs tho.

I adore Drake, have done ever since discovering him back in '98 when I was backpacking around the UK and listened to a Drake retrospective on BBC Radio one Sunday arvo. I was pretty proud of my extensive musical knowledge at the time (ah to be a cocky kid again) so I remember feeling pretty thunderstruck that up to that point I had never heard of such an obivously brilliant songwriter.

The Van Gogh of british folk - I'm surprised the biopic hasn't been made yet.

I'm really not. I haven't read the biography, but my understanding is that Drake was a pretty private guy, didn't have much in the way of obvious romantic relationships, and didn't really enjoy performing live. He also didn't have any bandmates, as such, so there wouldn't be much to explore there in terms of conflict. Plus, he was never successful in his lifetime, which means his true impact couldn't be explored unless a fair bit of time was dedicated to his music, post-death.

Much of what makes Drake and his music (and even his life) interesting is so internal that it would present a huge challenge for both writer and director. I think it could be done, but it wouldn't be like any biopic we've seen thus far. It would take a lot of creativity in terms of structure and in engaging the audience in the story of an introvert. I'm glad that he hasn't gotten the color-by-numbers tragic artist biopic treatment yet.

I think you'd have to make a film about some other, more cinematic musical event that Drake may have been involved in some way (maybe he saw a famous concert? Something even like that) and have an actor sitting in the corner playing Drake, with a little arrow pointing him out in the background of the shot, 24 Hour Party People style. But I doubt even that's possible. He seems entirely out of time and place, which lends his music its gravitas. I don't think there is a Van Gogh biopic either. And DaVinci? Who could play DaVinci? Or Captain Beefheart? I could go on...

Yep, I've been a fan for a while now. I've had his Fruit Tree box set (which contains his 3 albums and a 4th CD titled Time of No Reply featuring outtakes and alternate versions of songs from the original 3 albums) for several years and I occasionally go back and listen to it in its entirety, though it's also great to hear the songs pop up on my iPod every now and again during a shuffle. There's a fantastic documentary from 2000 titled A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake that received a very small release in theaters in NY and LA, but never arrived on DVD here in the States (other than being packaged with the Fruit Tree box set during its 2007 re-release). The film contains interviews with his sister, manager and the producers of his original albums, as well as recordings of his late parents reflecting on his death. It's a bit of a downer, but it sheds a little light into the inner workings of Drake himself and what led him to his unfortunate early death. It's also viewable in the "Instant Viewing" area of Netflix here and is also viewable online here at YouTube in 4 parts. Another documentary, titled A Stranger Among Us: Searching for Nick Drake that aired on TV in the UK in early 1999 is viewable online here at YouTube in 4 parts.

What they all said-- big fan of his.

Missed him at the time, but got turned on shortly after his death when I learned that Richard Thompson had played on a few tracks. His ideas of "jazz" sometimes leave me puzzled and/or cold, and my favorite tune of his, "Time of No Reply," has maybe the most banal line he ever wrote ("autumn reached for her golden crown"), but his first two albums never leave my mp3 player, no matter what else comes and goes. I love "Pink Moon," too, but its monochromatic approach means I pull it out to listen to less frequently.

Not sure which of the various outtake sets has it, but I love his cover of Jackson Frank's "Blues Run The Game."

And I don't remember where I found it, but there was a good BBC radio documentary on his life that's probably floating around out there.

EDIT: FWIW, the "A Skin Too Few" documentary seems to have moved off the Netflix "watch instantly" shelf; it's now "saved" to my queue, its availability listed as "unknown." I suppose Youtube may still have it.

Re: a Drake biopic, Van Sant could make it as a follow up to Last Days - what better subject for a film where nothing much happens then a man who barely did anything?

I cast my vote for Pink Moon as Drake's best. I find the orchestrations on the other records a bit overbearing at times, but that album's pretty much a perfect mood piece.

His circumstances had changed a lot by the time of Pink Moon-- he was in bad shape, depressed (as in massively unhappy-- I have no idea if he had a clinical condition), and had failed to hit big (one reason Pink Moon is virtually a solo guitar album is that no one thought it worth the $$ to pay for the kind of musical accompaniment he'd had on the first two). You can hear it in the lyrics, the singing, the playing (compare the felicity of his fingerwork on the first two albums to the dark simplicity of most of Pink Moon). So it's not hard to understand preferring the first two (I do).

Pink Moon is an album that I always have trouble with: on the one hand, it's devastating, and completely moving.

On the other hand, it's one of those artifacts that perpetuates that false idea that rock music (and its attendant subgenres) is always some kind of autobiography, which is frankly insulting to its practitioners. A novelist is expected to create and inhabit characters that reach beyond themselves, but for some reason the popular musician gets locked into this idea that everything's some kind of confessional. Sometimes (like here) they are, but far more often they're not, and not intended to be read that way.

I think that, as I age, I find that I even more prefer the balance of open-hearted wonder and astonishing prescience that the first two albums exhibit. Pink Moon reminds me of the cheap pseudo-nihilism that so many of us played with during our adolescence, and it's an uncomfortable reminder, particularly since, for Drake, there was nothing "cheap" or "pseudo" about it at all.