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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: Think like the I Ching.

Nick Drake and the Confessional Poets Pt. II

I started this line of thought in yesterday's diary entry - the parallels between Nick Drake's lyrics and the writings of the "confessional poets", particularly Anne Sexton. I don't think Nick was directly influenced by Sexton - I think he was just writing what he needed to - but looking at this genre of poetry may lead me to some useful insights about his lyrics.

I have written three articles about Nick's songwriting techniques but all of them deal with his musical innovations and devices. I have avoided writing about his lyrics, largely because I don't feel I understand them and, to some extent, because they do strike me as undeveloped at times. But when he is good, he is very, very good and I would like to know why.

Yesterday I said that I thought PARASITE came closer than any other song to describing how Nick saw himself. It is a piece of self-analysis in which he is literally "lifting the mask." For someone as reserved as he was, this could not have been easy. I suspect he compensated for his inability to express himself openly and directly to people by doing it indirectly in his songs. He said as much himself - "If songs were lines in a conversation / The situation would be fine." Songs were the way Nick talked to people, opened himself up and shared himself with others. Because all of us, including Nick, are social animals, there was an urgency about it, a need to share. And this is the definition of a "confessional" writer: an emotionally direct approach to autobiographical material that the writer urgently needs to express.

The Pink Moon album is not the first time this very personal, urgent, self-revealing voice appears in Nick's songs. FLY on Bryter Layter seems to presage PARASITE, not only in its emotional honesty but even in specific word choices. FLY: "Now I just sit on the ground in your way." PARASITE: "Take a look you may see me in the dirt / For I am the parasite who hangs from your skirt." Both lines contain the same image and convey the same sense of shame and worthlessness.

Other songs on Bryter Layter are quite different. ONE OF THESE THINGS FIRST is, in fact, quite the opposite of self-revealing and I think was plainly an attempt to write a pop song that would get radio play. (Nothing wrong with that - I wish it had worked!) POOR BOY adopts a mocking attitude toward a role he sees himself playing, again it is not self-revealing.

Throughout his first two albums, even when Nick is giving us glimpses of his real self (as he does in RIVER MAN, THREE HOURS, SATURDAY SUN, and HAZEY JANE II), the sense of urgency is lacking. It is as if he doesn't hear the roar of the rapids toward which his isolation is inexhorably pulling him. Then, suddenly, on Pink Moon we are confronted with the devastation it has wrought, confronted, as he was, by an overwhelming sense of doom. The urgency and the need to reach out to others is palpable. "We are all in it together," he seems to say in the first song. The pink moon will get us all. The prophet is, of course, always one of the doomed. He doesn't escape it; he only sees it sooner.

Continued... Nick Drake & The Confessional Poets: Part III

Copyright 2002 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.