Nick Drake was beautiful. From a distance, perhaps when he was strolling down some seashore huddled beneath an oversized overcoat or leaning against a brick wall as the still witness to an endlessly busy world, his lithe body always seemed to curl slightly, suggesting a 6’3” question mark and the mystery such embodied punctuation entailed. Up close, though, his features thickened, summoning a noble Jim Morrison; in Drake, the harsh features of the angular American brute had a softness and sullenness, his deep-set eyes offering invitations to get lost in darkness for a while, maybe forever.
Of course it made sense, then, to transform the gentle-voiced teenager into a pop star, to chase the vapors of recent American and British folk revivals and position him within the contemporary rise of nascent folk-rock. Who could he not have charmed? In the late ’60s, when Drake was nominally studying English at Cambridge, his ambition temporarily overpowered his shyness, allowing him to network with a little coterie—producer Joe Boyd, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, friend and upstart string arranger Robert Kirby—who seemed to believe he could be a star, too. They made Five Leaves Left.
However staggering its songs about death, self-doubt, pain, and occasional sublimation remain, 1969’s Five Leaves Left has forever suffered from its grand designs. A masterful acoustic guitarist whose understanding of counterpoint allowed him to elicit a little orchestra from six strings, Drake gave in to the common idea that his first album should be enormous or have, as he put it in one dorm-room demo, “as expansive a sound as possible.” A string section with four violas, a conga player who knew nothing of restraint, a Richard Thompson electric lead that refuses to pause for breath: Five Leaves Left is an unnecessarily overstuffed treasure chest, everyone around Drake crowding a sensitive soul who didn’t yet possess the ability or desire to say no.
The Making of Five Leaves Left is the rare deluxe box set that offers little in the way of revelatory unearthed songs but instead holds a trove of uncluttered renditions of its classics, before Rocky Dzidzornu cut in with his congas or Kirby with his classical mannerism. The result of a decade-long descent into an archive that Universal Music had been uncertain still existed, The Making combines 32 meticulously selected demos and discarded takes with the album’s final form, last remastered in 2000. Hearing the sequence in full reinforces what Drake, and subsequently the listening world, seemed to discover three years later on Pink Moon: He never needed more than a guitar, a piano, and that voice that felt like a permanent sunset to become a star, even if that happened long after he died.
Since Drake’s death in 1974—at 26, still a year shy of 27 Club infamy—his estate and assorted labels have released much more of his music than he ever released in his lifetime, like many of that era’s heroes who died so young. Every decade or so, a new collection, like 1994’s Way to Blue or 2004’s Made to Love Magic or 2014’s Tuck Box, offers both another generational introduction to Drake and often some unheard gem, some new testament to his lost gifts; the mystique of Drake remains so strong that Fruit Tree, a box set of his “completed recorded works,” has been reissued three times since 1979. The results have occasionally been awkward, as when producers cut his voice free from a scrapped 1968 recording of “Magic,” sped it up, and put it behind a facelifted string section; it became a hit, yes, but the treacle made Drake sound like the smooth-voiced narrator of a Disney film with a song that is fundamentally about the infinite despair of enduring isolation.
There are, blessedly, no such tricks on The Making. Instead, it takes the opposite approach, presenting these songs in assorted embryonic stages, both before and after Drake incorporated other players. The first six cuts—from Drake’s initial winter 1968 session with Boyd and engineer John Wood, when the singer was 19—are astonishing. Drake’s voice is commanding and confident, unhurried as he waits for the ocean to find its shore during “Time Has Told Me” and perfectly equivocal as he teeters between nostalgia and the future during “Saturday Sun,” recognizing that both entail forsaking the present.
With his guitar galloping in circles and his voice testing the limits of a whisper, this take on “Strange Face” (which later became “’Cello Song”) is as masterful as Drake ever became; unbothered by the cello and percussion that eventually made their way to Five Leaves Left, he uses the open space to glide freely with the melody, finding a warmth that feels like he’s welcoming us to a fireside chat. During a second version recorded six months later, though, Drake withdraws into the song, sighing as he sings as if under the spell of the hash he loved; the unknown ensemble around him mixes string drone and gamelan-like percussion, suggesting alternate psychedelic byways Drake never had the time to explore.
By that point, after all, Drake already had firm ideas about how Five Leaves Left should sound. Not long after that first session with Boyd and Wood, he recorded his early songs with the arranger Kirby on a bulky Grundig reel-to-reel, annotating string parts and flute interlocutions as he went. He is strangely self-effacing and self-assured, telling Kirby he will only release “The Thoughts of Mary Jane” if it “works out nice on a backing point of view”; rising through tape wow, flutter, and hiss, his solo version summons a blissfully stoned afternoon by a stream, in no need of any accompaniment at all.
Drake did, however, have an intuitive musical partnership with bassist Danny Thompson, a blues player then deep in the dawning days of Pentangle. They were very different people, the boisterous Thompson having little use for the way everyone else handled the fragile Drake with kid gloves. “Danny would come into a session, clap Nick in the middle of the back very hard, give him a Cockney rhyming slang greeting and tease him,” Boyd remembers in the set’s wonderfully thorough liner notes. “And Nick loved it.” Their duo performances occupy a quarter of this set, and, like those early demos, they are stirring testaments to the power of Drake’s simplicity. Their interplay during a tag on “River Man” is hypnotic, while their exchange during “Saturday Sun” is somehow moody and bright, like a day where quick-moving clouds create a constant volley between shadow and light. It remains a shame their relationship—as free, easy, and open as it sounds here—did not outlast these sessions and, what’s more, that it did not fully define Five Leaves Left.
When Drake finished playing his first song for Boyd and Wood on that early day in 1968, a brisk little bauble called “Mayfair,” Boyd cut in on the studio talkback before the final chord has even decayed: “Just keep going,” he told Drake. I can’t hear that bit without feeling a lump in my throat, the next six years of Drake’s tragic life and cruelly ironic end collapsing against that split second of earnest encouragement. Drake seemed to have a preternatural sense for the way his story would end—he foretold it that very day with “Fruit Tree,” singing about being forgotten while you’re here, then “remembered for a while.” The Making is one of the few posthumous Drake releases that reaffirms the argument for remembering him longer still, because maybe there’s more to know. It sheds the excesses of Five Leaves Left and finds the gift buried beneath the brush: a singer, forever short on time, always at his best when taking the most direct route to a beautiful bedrock of very hard truth.
