Five Leaves Left Nick Drake

• 1 Time Has Told Me 04:24
• 2 River Man 04:19
• 3 Three Hours 06:13
• 4 Way To Blue 03:09
• 5 Day Is Done 02:26
• 6 Cello Song 04:45
• 7 Thoughts Of Mary Jane 03:19
• 8 Man In A Shed 03:52
• 9 Fruit Tree 04:47
• 10 Saturday Sun 04:05
• Total Runtime 41:19

Info for Five Leaves Left

Nick’s first album, named after the warning found towards the end of a packet of Rizla cigarette papers, was begun in July 1968 at Chelsea’s Sound Techniques studios, an 8 track studio built on the site of the old Chelsea dairy at 46a Old Church Street SW3. The finished album wasn’t released until over a year later.

Joe Boyd produced the album in terms of booking studios and hiring musicians but it was John Wood, the album’s engineer, who was responsible for the finished sound. Around this time the emphasis for popular music was starting to shift from the single to the LP and bands were starting to experiment with instrumentation beyond the usual guitar, bass and drums and take longer to find the sounds they wanted. This suited Nick’s material and, in any case, he didn’t exactly have a well-performed live act to commit to tape anyway.

Initially in-house arranger at Apple Richard Hewson was drafted in to arrange the strings, but Nick wanted Cambridge friend Robert Kirby for the job. Despite Kirby’s youth (he was 19 at the time) and relative inexperience, Boyd was impressed with the results and Kirby was given the job. The four tracks Kirby arranged (for string quartet, bowed double bass and – on one track – flute) were recorded in a single 3 hour session with Nick playing live in the same room. One further string arrangement on ‘River Man’ was done by Harry Robinson.

Other musicians brought in to fill out the sound included Fairport Convention’s Richard Thompson on electric guitar and Danny Thompson on double bass. The bass parts were overdubbed after Nick had recorded his guitar and vocal parts.

„There's not a single dud in the trilogy of albums that singer/songwriter Nick Drake released during his all-too-short career. And 1968's Five Leaves Left--his first album--is certainly no exception. Drake's sensitive guitar work and sensitive vocals are backed by the baroque sounds of a chamber string group and the platter's lyrics show maturity well beyond the age of their 20-year-old creator. More sparse than its follow-up, the jazzy Bryter Later , but less tortured than Drake's dark final chapter, Pink Moon, Five Leaves Left is a classic folk disc. Songs like 'River Man', 'The Thoughts of Mary Jane' and 'Day Is Done' are among Drake's finest moments. Newcomers be forewarned: this music is as infectious as it is bleak“. (Jason Verlinde)

Nick Drake, vocal, acoustic guitar
Paul Harris, piano
Richard Thompson, electric guitar
Danny Thompson, bass
Rocki Dzidzornu, congas
Clare Lowther, cello (on Cello Song)
Tristan Fry, drums, vibes (on Saturday Sun)

Digitally remastered

Nick Drake(19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974)
With every passing year, it becomes a little less accurate to say that Nick Drake has a cult following. Cults, by their very nature, tend to exist on the margins, the subject of their admiration unknown or even unloved by the vast majority of people. Mention Nick Drake to a certain generation of music fan and chances are you won’t have to explain yourself. Latterly, Drake’s name has become a byword for a certain kind of acoustic music. Gentility, melancholia and a seemingly casual mastery of the fretboard – in the minds of many listeners, any combination of these traits warrants comparison to Nick Drake. As a result, Drake is perpetually referenced across the reviews sections of every music title. That quite often the records in question bear no meaningful resemblance to Drake’s music speaks volumes. His legacy may, in one sense, be huge. But there’s painfully little of it: just three complete albums – Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Layter (1970), Pink Moon (1972) and a final quintet of songs recorded shortly before his death. As his relevance increases, so does an insatiable communal yearning for their source to yield more. Hence the constant namechecks. Hence the constant repackaging and remixing of the same old bootleg recordings. Somehow we cannot quite accept the fact that this was all he left behind.

Such a turn of events isn’t without a certain irony. Towards the end of his life, Drake appeared to long for the vindication that comes with commercial success. And yet he seemed incapable of compromising himself to the pursuit of recognition. His shyness made interviews difficult. Live performances became increasingly rare. When recording music, the only compass he used was his own intuition. For Five Leaves left, he asserted himself when he needed to – dispensing with the arranger suggested by Joe Boyd and replacing him with his old Cambridge associate Robert Kirby. Pink Moon was just Drake and a guitar, an exercise in intricate desolation, no less perfect for its stark brevity. Commercial success may not have vindicated him, but the intervening years certainly have. Ten years ago, he entered the Billboard 100 (and the Amazon Top Five) for the first time. Thirty seconds of Pink Moon used in a Volkswagen advert alerted America to the otherworldly magic of Drake’s hushed English tones. His friend and label-mate Linda Thompson recalls recently hearing the song in LA over a supermarket tannoy: “I couldn’t believe how amazing, how right it sounded. How did he know?” Writing about Drake, the late Ian McDonald attempted to put into words why Drake’s music should have achieved such a relevance in the century after its creator brought it into being. In a celebrated essay, McDonald posited the suggestion that songs such as River Man and Way To Blue reconnect us with a part of our selves that modern life has all but eroded away. Certainly, much of his music is endowed with a peculiar prescience. Over arrangements that seem to mimic the bustle of a world moving too fast, the prescient Hazey Jane II sees Drake impishly enquiring, “And what will happen in the morning when the world it gets/So crowded that you can’t look out the window in the morning.”

The manner in which Drake’s life ended has inevitably coloured the way his songs are perceived: among them, the haunting Black-Eyed Dog and the self-mocking Poor Boy. “Don’t you worry,” he sings on Fruit Tree, “They’ll stand and stare when you’re gone.” In the liner notes to 1994’s Way To Blue compilation, Drake’s producer and mentor Joe Boyd commented that, “listening to his lyrics… he may have planned it all this way.” His point – that the best music will always invite conjecture and speculation about its authors – is well made. But at the same time, it should be added that the sadness in Nick Drake’s songs was frequently the corollary of an all-consuming joy. As often as not, both extremes are to be found within the same song: the autumnal languor of I Was Made To Love Magic; the life-affirming brush-strokes of Northern Sky (“I’ve never felt magic as crazy as this”). Records born exclusively of misery and catharsis can do little other than depress their listeners. Their candour may garner critical bouquets but they rarely return to the CD tray. Drake certainly suffered from depression – most notably in the latter two years of his life – but his music was not a function of that depression. Richard Thompson who played on Five Leaves Left and Bryter Later remembers a quiet character, though not a miserable one: “I remember long silences, but they were never oppressive. With Nick, you sensed [that] very little needed to be said that couldn’t be said with a guitar in his hand.” As Drake puts it on Hazey Jane II, “If songs were lines/In a conversation/The situation would be fine.”

Thirty three years have now passed since Nick Drake’s death. Original pressings of his records change hands for around £200. Dedicated fanzines and websites continue to interpret and second-guess every note and utterance. The bucolic village of Tanworth-In-Arden, where Drake grew up, attracts a steady trickle of visitors – somehow seeking to climb further inside the music. And yet as his father Rodney recalled, “And I remember in one of his reports towards the end of the time at his first school, the headmaster… said at the end that none of us seemed to know him very well. And I think that was it. All the way through with Nick. People didn’t know him very much.” It’s impossible to keep count of the contemporary artists who cite Drake as an inspiration, but a cursory round-up includes R.E.M., Snow Patrol, Norah Jones, Radiohead, Brad Pitt, Sam Mendes, Paul Weller, Keane, Portishead, Belle And Sebastian, The Coral, Coldplay, Heath Ledger, David Gray, Super Furry Animals and Beth Orton. Along with household names of his creative lifetime – the Stones, The Beatles, Marley, Hendrix – his albums have become an unofficial set text for anyone passionate about music.

In 2012, he has become so much more than the sum total of his work. The greater our fascination with him, the more we reveal about ourselves. In this sense, maybe Ian McDonald was right. Perhaps his music allows us to feel a little less like, as Drake put it, “a remnant of something that’s passed.”

This album contains no booklet.