![enigma album within the ruins enigma album within the ruins](https://i2.wp.com/www.swedishmetal.nu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Isolert-World-In-Ruins.jpg)
I read Patrick Humphries’ biography of the man, and it struck me that I have never read a biography that contained less hard information about its subject. If we’re being honest, as I said, part of the appeal of Drake lies in the enigma. After taking a bit of a break from Drake’s music, I have undertaken some almost-fortieth anniversary listens to his stuff with a more dispassionate ear. And I’m no longer a sad, depressed teen looking for music that reflects his own lonely mindset. That might have made me the most annoying kind of hipster of all.īe that as it may, Nick Drake is now massively popular and influential, forty years after his sad demise. In fact, I was one of those people who became annoyed when the world at large invaded my own little galaxy of obscure musicians who spoke to only a chosen few. I’ve never been one to crow when the world picks up on some musical passion of mine, well after I did.
![enigma album within the ruins enigma album within the ruins](https://www.nocleansinging.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/CromDubhCover-e1427991601848.jpg)
![enigma album within the ruins enigma album within the ruins](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cabLq3PqPp4/maxresdefault.jpg)
ENIGMA ALBUM WITHIN THE RUINS MOVIE
But the fact that hip dudes were now choosing Nick’s songs for their oh-so-cool movie soundtracks was quite telling. I remember a Drake song being featured in the movie The Royal Tenenbaums, a painfully, knowingly pretentious movie and the only one I ever walked out of. And of course, the fact that Drake was both long-dead and had been enigmatic while alive no doubt contributed greatly to that. However, the commercial somehow sparked a massive upswell of interest from indie hipsters in the enigmatic Drake’s work. Selling cars? I was disgusted and horrified at this cheapening of a great legacy. My jaw almost fell off my face when I recognized the title track of Drake’s last album, Pink Moon, a record usually referenced as the cry of a soul in serious trauma.
ENIGMA ALBUM WITHIN THE RUINS TV
Where the modern world enters his music, it’s always as a looming, almost evil presence threatening to destroy a bucolic idyll.Ī decade after my discovery of Drake’s music, I was watching TV and a car commercial came on. As a teen, along with Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny’s trademark melancholy and John Martyn’s unguarded soulfulness, Drake’s music became the soundtrack to my isolation and a great source of solace.Īll the hype and legend aside, it’s the otherworldliness of Drake’s elfin music that is so appealing - while Fairport Convention and their ilk unearthed two hundred-year-old traditional songs, Drake’s lyrics, intoned in his soft voice, conjure up visions of a magical, misty walled garden that the ills of industrialization have never touched - a fairyland as in the fiction of William Morris or Lord Dunsany. It’s a testament to Boyd’s generosity (and that of Chris Blackwell of Island) that he even managed to get three of them out. During Drake’s own lifetime, his records did not sell well at all. That, in fact, is how I became a fan around 1990, the time when I was collecting all things folk-rock on Boyd’s Hannibal Records. In Drake’s case, it likely never would have happened without the advocacy of his old record label man from the seventies, Joe Boyd, who kept Drake’s LPs in print for all those years. One artist who started in obscurity and ended up an icon, decades after his death in 1974 at age twenty-six, is Nick Drake, who definitely went from 1973’s zero to 2000’s hero in quite astonishing fashion. However, the appetite of collectors for collecting all the detritus of recorded music history then sifting through it for gems has unearthed some great music put on vinyl in the 1960s and ’70s. Popular music history is scattered with the ruins of careers that never quite took off, mouldering old LP sleeves found in attics, albums recorded by people who no doubt thought that garnering a record contract would lead to fame and glory, or at least some royalties and a performing career.