The Songs - Northern Sky

This is another entry in my ongoing “songs that visited me and decided they wanted to stay” series. I hope you like these enough to become a paid subscriber, because I really need you! I only ask for $5 a month.

This one is FREE to all though. HAPPY HOLIDAYS.

Northern Sky - Nick Drake

Would you love me for my money?
Would you love me for my head?
Would you love me through the winter?
Would you love me 'til I'm dead?

I can’t remember the first time I heard Nick Drake’s music. The romantic in me would love to say it was piped into the womb, but the timing isn’t quite right. So it must have been included in the blizzard of mix tapes my itinerant older brother used to send to me when I was in my early 20s. Up ‘til then my musical education started and ended with whatever was on the radio and whoever was on the cover of Rolling Stone. I was not prepared for Richard and Linda Thompson and Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny and….surely Nick was in the mix as well. My big bro was a bit of an anglophile, and he opened my mind in the same way that copious amounts of drugs supposedly would have. Since I couldn’t afford drugs (or albums), I remain forever grateful for these tapes. And for him.

It was the Pink Moon songs that hit me first. As a fledgling guitar player this was Mount Everest…..and nearly 40 years later Nick’s use of crazy open tunings and an absolutely metronomic right hand ensure that I will never be able to sing you a Nick Drake song around the campfire. I don’t want to say that the songs are too complicated. That’s the wrong word. I suspect that Nick could sit down with a competent player and unlock the song for them in a few minutes. But we’re on our own down here, and the songs remain unreachable for most, both technically and…..if I may be a bit pretentious here….spiritually.

Because I have no idea what he’s going on about. The words tumble out in a mumbled whisper, in a sort of child-like language that we’re not quite privy to. You’ll need a lyric sheet for most of them. Nobody is going to sing along to Nick Drake anyway, but what strikes you about his voice is not the words he’s singing, but the crushing loneliness of what he sounds like mouthing them. This is alternative blues music. This is what an upper class white English white boy sounds like when he’s being chased by the same hellhounds that ran Robert Johnson down. The Blues don’t give a shit. They are as relentless as cancer. The blues tried to take down titanic figures like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. One called it “the tired spot”. The other “the black dog”. There’s nothing romantic about this type of suffering. Nick Drake was not alone. He just felt that way. That’s the disease.

I’m not sure if there was ever an official diagnosis for what Nick suffered from. Severe depression. Schizophrenia. Today there would surely be other names or acronyms thrown in the mix. But it was a stiff-upper-lip sort of time, especially for a country just a few decades removed from an unspeakable war. So he surely resisted the labels and the pills thrust at him, and did his best to self-medicate with weed and solo all-night music sessions in his childhood bedroom. But surely the music on Pink Moon (and the few sides he made after) would not have been possible if Nick had been freed from his crippling mental illness.

How should that make us feel?

Listening to Pink Moon conjures up many powerful emotions. Can pleasure possibly be among them?

That’s not a rhetorical. Can it?

But then I heard “Northern Sky”.

I was never a huge fan of Nick’s first 2 records. I felt like the orchestrated arrangements worked against the songs, to the point where Nick himself is almost superfluous at times. There is surely beauty all over Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, but my brain has to work too hard to get there. But that’s my brain’s fault. I’m forever working on it.

But in the midst of these records is “Northern Sky”.

One of the most beautiful songs of the 20th century. A song from which I take nothing BUT pleasure.

Nick’s voice and guitar adorned with simple piano and organ. There’s nothing working against its gorgeous, simple melody. For slightly less than 4 minutes, Nick slices through the fog…

I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons, knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you're here
Brighten my northern sky

…..and I have no idea if it was just a good day….or if he was falling in love….but whatever it was it was more powerful than the anti-depressants that would eventually kill him. All the anguish. All the pain. Gone. The tired spot had been reached. The black dog was dozing contentedly at his side.

He sounds happy.

In a bit…

—tf

Songs That Visited Me and Decided They Wanted to Stay

Intro
In a Big Country
Found Out About You
Tutti Fruitti
Surrender
Who Knows Where the Time Goes?
Nightswimming
Fast Car
Take Five
Romeo and Juliet
Wichita Lineman
Waterfall
There She Goes
A Sort of Homecoming
Purple Rain
Nights On Broadway
Tough All Over
What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round
Inside Out
Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More
America
Thirteen
I Wish
Love is Alive
Back in the High Life Again
Volunteers
The Show Goes On
Mike Collins
Fall Down
Green Grass & High Tides
Tom Sawyer
Mainstreet
Volunteers