Song 4 – A song that makes you sad – ‘Black Eyed Dog' – Nick Drake.
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| Nick Drake |
Nick Drake’s been a huge favourite of mine since I first heard him, courtesy of my sister, in 1995. He’s a lot better known these days, but it’s fair to say he was gathering a fair head of steam even back then, the re-issuing of his back catalogue on CD allowing a lot of people to hear him the first time. I think his slow rise to fame, mostly by word of mouth, has been a part of so many people coming to hold him so close. Of the people I know who’ve heard of Nick Drake, he’s in everyone’s top 10 favourite artists and this is perhaps because we all came to him without knowing anything about him and without associating his songs with any particular period. We didn’t hear him on the radio, on a soundtrack or an advert. He was ours alone for a little while and we had the pleasure of introducing him to some of our friends too.
There is a timelessness to this brand of pastoral folk that makes it stand out. It’s not a part of the traditional English folk scene that saw such a huge revival in the 1960’s before disappearing in a druggy, self indulgent, prog-rock-esque mess in the 1970’s. It’s not part of the self-consciously serious ‘real music’ style that MTV Unplugged created in the early 1990s and that aging rock fans clung too along with ‘Mojo’ magazine and the wreckage of their youth. It doesn’t sound like anything else. Just that powerful distinctive guitar style, those lush almost classical arrangements and that very English voice.
So why pick this as a song that makes me sad? This was one of the last songs that Nick Drake ever recorded, in February 1974, about 9 months before his death. He’d been suffering from depression for years. A couple of unrequited loves, the failure of his musical career (none of his albums had sold more than 5000 copies) despite huge critical acclaim, probably due to crippling stage-fright and anxiety. He’d declined physically to the point that this vocal had to be over-dubbed (one take alone being too fragile) although this guitar sounds as clean and strong. The huge talent is as evident as ever but the lyrics are those of a man tormented. The ‘Black Eyed Dog’ is, of course, depression and it’s horrible and painful to imagine Nick haunted by the feelings that would lead him to take his own life, by accident or design. So, it’s an easy song to feel sad about. This magnificent, talented, man in such pain and pouring it out in such beautiful music.
A few years ago I saw ‘The Royal Tennenbaums’ at the cinema and half-way through the film, over Richie and Margot meeting in a tent, Nick Drake’s song ‘Fly’ started to play on the soundtrack. The soundtrack had been a ‘who’s who’ of great and influential bands and performers, The Ramones, The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, The Clash and there was Nick Drake, in the middle of a big Hollywood movie, up there with the best of them. I had a huge lump in my throat and felt so proud of him and wished he could have seen it.
He's not a miserable song-writer by any means and I do recommend you take the time to listen to more of his work.
David Millington
4th April 2011
Nottingham
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