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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: Collapse.

Philip Ward sent me a copy of an article he wrote about Sandy Denny. If you are at all interested in her music, it is well worth reading. And if you have never heard her music, it is still well worth reading. He looks at her lyrics and her stage presence and her life and puts together a revealing essay that deals with the artist as a talented, flawed, contradictory, brilliant, insecure, determined, courageous human being. The complete article can be found here: The Lady She Had a Silver Tongue.

Philip sent the essay to me several months ago, frustrated that he couldn't find a publisher for it. I thought it deserved a wide reading and wrote back with my thoughts. He posted an excerpt from my email in his blog along with some insightful words about the role of the sea in Sandy's songs: embracing, a destroyer of boundaries, both overwhelming and enveloping. It's another piece that is definitely worth reading: Deep Sea Diving. (I found the small type and black background a little difficult to read so I copied and pasted to a text file.)  

As I wrote to Philip in a reply to his blog, I see parallels between Sandy Denny and Nick Drake. These parallels exist for many reasons, among them the fact that both artists shared the cultural ground quakes of the 1960's and the rapid growth of the music scene in London, not to mention friends and a producer! But they also absorbed, consciously and unconsciously, the British ethos - the myths, the "tale" that was a profound part of growing up British in the post-WWII 1950's. Paolo [another posted reply] is right in noticing the pervasive influence of the sea on an island nation. Its historic use in folk songs reflected its role in the lives of those who lived from it and surrounded by it, the beauty, the untamable quality, and the secrets it concealed. It both sustained life and it could kill. BTW, this is also a description of the White Goddess, the ancient pagan female figure described in Robert Graves' book of the same name.

Nick Drake's lyric writing has feminine elements in it, particularly his use of nature as an embracing womb. But his concept of the sea is as a dividing element, especially in his early songs. In "Clothes of Sand" he writes: 'So make your way on down to the sea / Something has taken you so far from me.' More tellingly, in "Strange Meeting II" (Princess of the Sand), he stands at the edge of the ocean, approached by a woman who does not speak. On the new Family Tree CD, Nick introduces the song by saying, “This is my surrealist song. A sort of funny dream.” And I think it was a dream - the kind of archetypal dream in which we tell ourselves the hidden story of our own life. In Jungian terms, the Princess of the Sand is Nick's anima. Her withheld message is possibly an admission of how much he is not yet willing to admit to himself, or doesn't yet know. In the song, he is determined to return and look for her. Maybe next time she will tell him what is hidden beneath the surface.

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Read Notes On Songwriting by Robin Frederick for more information and insights into writing songs that reach out to listeners.

Copyright 2007 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.