“Nick Drake has always had a lore attached to his memory. The beginning of the bedroom tapes. Intimacy so intense it’s scary. He has drawn people in since the moment his record was silently discovered in someone’s basement, with the lights down low. Used records perused to choose the one mentioned as a reference to the majority of one’s favorite artists. One is almost shocked the first time they hear the delicate tones radiating out: the quiet. The way one is scared of being pushed too far away from something loud, this is so quiet it creates a dark hole, an abyss, which is equally terrifying because at least when you are repelled you could run, but when one is sucked into the void, all you could wish is to be able to run, to move, to breathe.
But as with all artists’ artists, Nick Drake is generally not discovered till much later, after you have sifted through the Bob Dylan, flew past Neil Young, and graduated from Nina Simone. I remember when I discovered him, just post college and in the haze one gets lost in transitioning from having an established goal to now trying to make something with it. Changing cities, working in unrelated jobs, and trying to figure out how to live within a new schedule, a new life. In the midst of the malaise I stumbled upon this hilarious, yet appropriate book at the Friends of the Library book sale I purchased just for the title alone, “Twentysomething, Floundering, and Off the Yuppie Track”.
Because there I was, rediscovering high school roots, meeting my parents again for the first time - a child with an adult pedigree. A dear friend, Jessica Goldberg, gave me the tape, “Pink Moon” in the middle of the woods at my party at a freshwater spring in central Florida, which I planned and hardly anyone showed up to. I actually slept in my car the night before, everyone was held up by the rain it seems, except me, as I was the host. It was raining, Florida rain, humid rain. Jessica and I were in a car, and I was already feeling isolated, questioning what are friends and who are friends, and he came on; calming in its somberness. Depressing, but okay because that is just where you need to be right then, creating moments you maybe don’t love at the time, but will always cherish because they create moments you want to share, moments to travel back to.
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