For all the instantly memorable scenes in The Royal Tenenbaums (and there are many), the one everyone remembers is Luke Wilson walking into a bathroom and breaking the movie apart. The shaving cream, the sunglasses removed, "I'm going to kill myself tomorrow", and then the razor.
And, of course, the song strumming in parallel: "Needle in the Hay," by Elliott Smith. Music is the emotional Rosetta Stone of the The Royal Tenenbaums, and the purpose of Smith's presence is clear. He cues us in to the bottom falling out of a touching family story, leaving us with pure, stark tragedy.
It's a stunning scene, but I kind of wish it didn't exist. Or that Wes Anderson had chosen a different song. Six years after his suicide, Smith's legacy is choked by tragedy, by the aura of artistic depression that clung throughout his modest commercial rise to the top in the late 90s. The obvious parallel is Kurt Cobain, but the critical mass of Cobain retrospectives has allowed some light to be shed on his other, equal sides: his humor and goofiness, his craftsmanship. Smith, for the most part, lives on only as a cultural cue, a functional tag of sadness, even when there's so much to him that would fit better with Daniel Glover proposing to Anjelica Huston, or Gene Hackman showing his grandsons how to live.
I've got no problem with categorizing musicians by sound. Of course it's reductive, when treated as an end in and of itself. But as a tool, it can help educate ourselves, see patterns, make connections, write history, and understand why we like what we like--the unexamined taste is not worth having. It's the ultimate refutation of anyone who treats pop music as inherently shallow and non-intellectual.
Emotional compartmentalization, however, is different. It gives music absolutely no opportunity to surprise us, confront us. It's goal-oriented, rather than allowing the sound to define itself as it goes along. Ultimately, it means choosing the representation, rather than the presentation, of an emotion, and it tends to favor only the extremes. Music becomes a key to a lock we pick out beforehand, rather than something that leaves us different before and after.
Smith's legacy has suffered more than most, isolated and frozen in retrospect. But we can build bridges, and thaw it out. For those who don't know, Continuum International Publishing runs a book series called 33 1/3, composed of short works about records. They're amazingly varied: pure, adulatory tributes, meat-and-potatoes narratives on the recording process, even some excellent fiction. This past April, superb music writer (and musician in his own right) Matthew LeMay published a volume on Elliott Smith's XO, his major label debut, made on the crest of his half-stardom. LeMay pulls off the most powerful possible use of the 33 1/3 platform: he tears the album's, and the artist's, assumed legacy down, and reveals it as a veil. XO is the crux of Smith's one-sided postmortem image, and LeMay shows it for what it is: a multifaceted, ambiguous, and wholeheartedly lovely record, treating depression honestly as a battle to be fought rather than a crippling anchor, and always touching on humor and hope. XO, both the album and the book, are stirring examples of playing against emotional reduction and allowing artists to breathe and fill up a life with their personality, rather than a corner.
So Luke Wilson recovers from his suicide attempt, and takes the bus home. Again, he is accompanied: "Fly", by Nick Drake. Unlike Smith, Drake never even hovered on the edge of the spotlight in his 1960s and 70s, but lived and died too quickly in obscurity. In the mid-90s, Drake's name began to reappear in articles on the Black Crowes, Belle & Sebastian, and Elliott Smith. He soon became viewed as a godfather, a frontiersman of polite acoustic pain and withdrawn, suffering talent. In 2000, Volkswagen ran an ad featuring his song "Pink Moon". Nick Drake, who by then had been dead nearly as long as he'd been alive, proceeded to sell more records in the next thirty days than he had in the last thirty years.
Since then, even those who should know better (e.g., Nick Hornby) have filed Drake away under "Sad Boy," and left him there, an unenviable king.
It's not as if there's no evidence. Pink Moon rightfully became his most well-known album, and even after dozens of listens, it's a shockingly spare work: the simple piano motif on the title track sounds all the more elegant and beautiful given that it's the only sound on the album that isn't Drake or his acoustic guitar. Songs like "Place to Be" and "Things Behind the Sun" ache with exhaustion and all the wrong kinds of experience, and "Parasite" does not flinch from quiet loathing, directed outwardly and inwardly. And, of course, it was the last album he made, before dying of an overdose of antidepressants at the age of 26. But that should be an opportunity to celebrate and explore his life, rather than stall on his death. Even worse, it's one easy mental hop from Sad Album to Sad Artist, and suddenly three albums, endless stray material, and years of devoted craft are reduced to being bummed because it's raining after work.
It's insulting to Drake's legacy, but probably more importantly, it's insulting to ourselves. It plays into the bullshit notion that pop music has to be about images both larger than life and smaller than reality, rather than the very real notion that even the most depressed of people laugh and fart sometimes, and that art can crystallize that diversity into a beautiful and liveable work. It's presumptuous to assume that we can know the artist from their art, but we can come closer to seeing a full, recognizeable person amongst the sound, rather than a Halloween mask good only for supplementing our own ups and downs. I'm not saying vast emotional range is necessary for great, memorable music--check "Ignition (Remix)", and then again, and then several dozen more times. Because that's real, too, as every freakin' weekend (baby) will attest. It's a tragic irony, however, when we praise the likes of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith for the "authentic" sadness supposedly driving their music when that monochrome despair is the most unreal of projections.
The first sound on Bryter Layter, Drake's second album, is exactly what you'd expect: Drake's acoustic guitar, picking out a languid mood. The second sound is strings. Strings? Strings! A whole swooping forest of strings, sounding of slow streams and postcard-perfect sunrises. The third sound is a drumbeat, light and trebly, beating out a quick-retreat pattern under the strings. You may forget about the guitar--it's not the base of the song, and it doesn't even try to fight its way out from under the orchestral instrumentation. It all takes a little over a minute, and then the instruments fade out as a team.
That's Drake on the guitar, of course, yet he seems curiously absent. He doesn't sing a word, and that means more than just his anchoring voice: it means no easy lyrical themes, no orienting line to hang the sad-hat on. The focus is purely on sound, purely on music.
It's an implicit part of the tragic, suffering artiste model plastered on Drake, Smith et al. that music is the medium for their art, rather than truly being the art itself. "Through" is the eternally recurring word in those conversations--the songs are conduits, through which the actual point is conveyed. The songs are "simple," "unadorned," and "natural." These artists are always retrospectively placed in little, isolated bedrooms, never working studios. They're amateurs struggling to get something across, never professional, never skilled.
Bryter Layter puts the lie to it all, right from the beginning. It's music, both of the musician and divisible from them. The emotions reached are conclusions, not polemics--most instrumentals, after all, sound like the product of jam sessions rather than personal pain. Paradoxically, Drake's presence grows through his absence--he's working and playing and conveying probably uninentional images, rather than delivering a straight coke-line of unambiguous despair. All this is called "Introduction," with clear promises made.
And they are redeemed, instantly, on "Hazey Jane II." Those are horns you hear, and breezy guitar, and a rhythm that can only be described as "strutting." Drake's voice arrives in a rush, slicing in to join the instruments like a parallel bullet train, rather than hover lonely above or below them. And what's he saying? It comes too quickly, something about windows and cities and the morning. I get the impression he's rambling on purpose, to keep us from lingering too long on any one word. Instead, he draws us along, skipping across the surface of the song, reveling in the sentiments that come through unspoken: the kind of groove-smile that comes from a fine, empty day, walking for miles without feeling the least bit tired. And the forest and the weasel's teeth don't matter nearly as much as the fact that Nick Drake is not telling us a story: every one of those first few lines ends with a question mark.
The Drake & Co. legacy is one of isolation, shutting out the world to live alone in your, again, little room. But that's not the Nick Drake of "Hazey Jane II." He's out and about, moving through the city and wondering about its future. He's focused, observant, and involved. The moaning singer-songwriter trope is supposedly all about confusion and being lost, but its shallowest practictioners sound like they have it all figured out (even if it's all hopelessly bad), and like they're damn proud of their seclusion. Nick Drake, their patron saint, is above all curious.
Of course, he doesn't answer his questions. How can he? The future is yet to come. So he shrugs. Chill, he says, take your time. Go be with your brother and your sister, get involved in small moments and share in their youth. The song takes him at his word--the music is propulsive and endlessly hummable, providing ecstatic punctuation and matching his meditations with grooves as wide-open as the future. You don't have to pay attention to a single word to love this song and understand it, and if you do anyway, it only grows.
At first, "At the Chime of a City Clock" sounds like a more traditional, blinders-on reading. Drake's guitar takes center stage with a simple, looking-out-the-window vibe, and his lyrics dwell on urban misery, particularly our impure longing for "green paper." But there's still that drum stumping on below, and Drake ends the first verse reaching back a song: "Turn around and come back again." A split second later, the song is supposed to drop out and leave only his voice with barely audible guitar, murmuring a coup to elevate gray-rain depression to something chilling. Instead: the return of the strings, and some jazzy horn, slicing a ray of aged sunlight. The song expands, and Drake steps back to remind us that a big city is more than just an impetus for numbness and fear. There's unfriendly faces and rainfall, sure, but there's treasure to be found, in whatever form. The rest of the song continues in this vein: the verses detail the city's pain, but through distinct, brief characters and rough poetry in the Dylan tradition. Then, the chorus shows you how to survive it all: friends, chaotic fun, and the one fair face among the blank ones. It's not pure optimism, by any means. What it is, is a strong belief in taking control of life, and squeezing beauty out of every situation, and paying attention to the bad and the good of your surroundings. It's a positively inspirational message, one that is resurrected in the chorus of XO's first single: "I'm never gonna know you now, but I'm gonna love you anyhow."
The murmuring guitar pattern of "One of These Things First" is perfectly mirrored by sprightly, upbeat piano. The two merge into one jammy rhythm; the message is unmistakeable. Oh, but then, the first words: "I could've been a sailor, could've been a cook." We have hit the shoals of useless regret! The next words: "A real live lover, [aha!] could've been a book." [wait, what?] "I could've been a signpost, could've been a clock." Uh...huh.
These could just be sleepy nature-boy ramblings, but the juxtaposition of tangible regrets with seeming nonsense means something. As in "Hazey Jane II," Drake is still able to shrug off the weight of the world that hangs so heavily throughout Pink Moon. Sure, he could've chosen different paths in life. And for all that that matters, he could also have been a book, a whistle, or a flute. Fuck regret. Things might have been better as a sailor, or if you'd spent a "whole long lifetime" with her, but the present matters most, and the future matters next. Drake knows it: he could've been one of those things first, before he nevertheless reached a present he's satisfied with. It's worth noting the few instances he replaces "could" with "should": none are in the past tense, and what he knows he has to be is "even here," "here and now."
If "Hazey Jane II" blew apart the amateur-sufferer model with instrumental interplay, "Hazey Jane I" features Drake doing the same job the old-fashioned way: playing the shit out of his instrument. Pitchfork has compared the song to Ennio Morricone soundtracks, and they got it right: the dancing riff has that same virtuosic, yet meditative feel, and Drake the guitar hero would be more at home in a spaghetti western than in any more tragic drama. Indeed, stand-alone soundtracks make a better reference point for Bryter Layter than the Muzak label slapped on by so many (including, sadly, Pitchfork). Yes, the album is laden with strings, but they're not there to lull you to sleep. The themes aren't blandly inoffensive, they're contemplative and unfold deliberately. The album is best when used to accompany its own subject matter: long city walks, coming to understand the swarms of people around you, reconciling your grand fears with the small, daily pleasures that truly make up life. Listened to on its own, Bryter Layter doesn't feel divorced: Drake calls up those streets, that steady experience, with the touch of a master.
Drake is in control of this music, and this life. His words aren't those of someone utterly lost to pain trying to let some of it out. He relies on the second-person perspective throughout the album, but it's rarely accusatory, and it never feels as if he's just muttering to himself. He's genuinely talking to someone else (named Jane, perhaps), and is trying to give them a hand ("Do you like what you're doing?"), as they both search for a content equilibrium. The narrators on Pink Moon address others, but only in bitter, hopeless desperation--listen to "Which Will," "Place to Be," "Parasite." Compare them to "Hazey Jane I," in which Drake affirms mutual dependence: "Do it for you, sure that you would do the same for me one day."
I can't help but attach significance to title tracks. They're not necessarily overarcing manifestos, but they almost always seem to contain the purest distillation of the album's spirit. The weary, barely-existing beauty of "Pink Moon" certainly works perfectly in that regard. So, too, does "Bryter Layter."
It's another instrumental, and it may make you gag on first listen. The strings sound like they should be accompanying Mr. Raccoon on his morning jaunt through the woods, and Drake's voice is tagged out for a flute. Like most of Bryter Layter, "Bryter Layter" isn't foremost a deliberate emotional polemic. It impresses technically: the jazz sophistication of the arrangement, the way the guitar and flute melodies collide and step back from each other. But you don't have to forget it's Nick Drake to love it, and after a few listens, its position at the center of the album becomes perfectly appropriate. The tempo is designed for deliberate walking, the mood perfectly content but never apathetic or the least bit lazy, the lines between city and forest that seem so stark on Pink Moon are magnificently blurred. If it sounds too old-timey, you may be confusing age with maturity. Bryter Layter is quintessentially mature.
Wes Anderson chose "Fly" well; to Pink Moon fans, or anyone else who buys wholeheartedly into the posterboard image of Drake, et al., it's the most familiar sounding track on Bryter Layter. The strings are at their most impressionistic, hovering nearly immobile in the background, leaving the acoustic guitar to dominate a traditional, descending melody. John Cale shows up on harpsichord, but acts as little more than a partner to Drake's guitar. Drake's lyrics foreshadow virtually all of Pink Moon: "Now I sit on the ground in your way." The song's first word is "Please."
But actually, I love this song. Allow me to clarify: I love Pink Moon. I love sad, desperate songs. What I don't love is artists with work as mature and emotionally diverse as Nick Drake's reduced to one skimpy pallette, and I especially don't love that pallette being treated as the all-superior endgame of emotional music. Broken-down intensity is but one color to paint with. There are many others, and using the full set doesn't devalue any individual one--it lifts them up and makes them whole. "Fly" is the most naked and tragic song on Bryter Layter, and it certainly doesn't ask observational questions or linger much on contemplation. And it is essential for all that, and indeed fits and improves the album for all that. For the first six songs, Drake is an older brother, cautioning us to slow down in life, learn our surroundings, and let regrets fall away with the rain. But older brothers have problems, too: to quote Charlie Brown, "Who reassures the reassurer?" That kernel of self-doubt, which flowered black on Pink Moon, was always a key element of Drake's music, and on "Fly," he makes my heart stutter. I can think of few lines as perfect and piercing as "I just need your star for a day."
So how does he follow that up? (You're going to love this.) "Poor Boy" makes "Hazey Jane II" and "Bryter Layter" look starker than winter trees. It doesn't start with guitar. It doesn't have guitar. It has rutting lounge piano, and alto sax, and more skittering drums, and backup soul singers. This sounds like! This sounds like...
Well, it sounds a lot like 1970. Which is when it was made.
Yet another annoying constancy of the sorrowful singer-songwriter mode is that most American of music adjectives: "timeless." It's the omnipresent ideal of stateside acoustic music, to find that melody and those lyrics that can outrace age itself, to find a song that hits the same target forty years down the line.
I've never really understood the urge to preserve music in amber; I'm sure most of my favorite songs from the 1960s don't mean the same to me as they did to listeners at the time, but that doesn't mean the new aura is any lesser. But there's a more disturbing aspect to the timelessness paradigm. It values music that sheds its own era, trying to lift itself out of the present flow of humanity and reach some vaguely defined infinity. Again, children's stories get it right: Toy Story 2, in which the hero rejects a pristine eternity to embrace his own messy, beautiful time.
Ironic, considering how many of the roots-loving "timeless" hounds emphasize authenticity; music always sounds more real to me when it is of its time, even if that time is foreign to me. It's what hip-hop can do better than anything else--talk about that street on that day, where those things happened to real people, who're making records too. That seems to me to be the real source of Americana fans' discomfort with rap, more than any sonic barrier or weaksauce concerns about violent lyrics. Rap, from the parties to the revolutions, embraces the present era above all else, and that throws a lot of folkies off.
Even Drake isn't diverse enough to have helped father rap, but a similar celebration of the ideas of the age is at work in "Poor Boy." The cracked-apart, psychedelic identity of 60s pop hit reboot in the 70s, becoming smoother, shinier, and professionally busy, full of slick instrumentation and tangibly big choruses. Folk did it first: James Taylor somehow became Dylan's heir, as every watery Californian got signed to a major label and began tightening things up and adding string sections. Motown had yet to fall, and commercial R&B was built on these kinds of solid grooves and almost-too-classy instrumentation. Unsurprisingly, crossover attempts were common.
Again, Drake was not some wunderkind, out-of-nowhere amateur. He was a professional British folk singer--that's Richard Thompson on guitar in "Hazey Jane II." British folk singers cottoned on quickly to what was selling in America--members of the Beach Boys show up on "At the Chime of a City Clock" and "One of These Things First" (Mike Kowalski and Ed Carter, respectively). So when Nick Drake recorded a six-minute, finger-snappable soul ballad, it wasn't an insular joke. It was a sign of the times.
And "Poor Boy" has aged much better than most of its contemporaries, because Drake had the range to handle it. The music is gorgeous, but never ostentatious. Drake doesn't miss a step, his voice melding perfectly to the rounded tones and half-steps of classic lounge music. His backup singers, Doris Troy and P.P. Arnold, sound fantastic, and bring the chorus up to a heavenly grace. If there's humor, it's at the sake of the theme, not the music. Drake sighs "I'm a poor boy," but the usual poor-boy image doesn't include a gorgeous-sounding Greek chorus to help them along. If it hadn't been clear before that Drake was aware of how the sensitive types are played, it's clear in "Poor Boy," and he playfully mocks it while surrounding himself with beauty.
Indeed, by the time "Poor Boy" eventually ends, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that this was a folk album.
The next song starts with guitar.
"Fly" got the soundtrack seal of approval, but "Northern Sky" is the most universally beloved track on Bryter Layter. It's the one that NME and Entertainment Weekly stepped out to praise, the one that appears on every mixtape and tribute, the one that most reviews of Bryter Layter end by discussing (except those, like this one, that plod dinosaur-like through each sucessive track). Even those who ignore Bryter Layter, or dismiss it as dated, or automatically humble it in Pink Moon's shadow, take a moment to praise "Northern Sky." Indeed, it works as the best stand-alone track off the album, but it's something more.
"Northern Sky" is Nick Drake in a parallel universe. It's recognizeable as a love song, but the lyrics are impressionistic, describing not a person or an event, but a scene: holding "emotion in the palm of my hand," feeling "sweet breezes in the top of a tree." He ends by repeating the first verse, a trick Cobain would use to sledgehammer his point home; Drake doesn't need a reason beyond the loveliness of the words, and the perfection of the emotions captured. It's not a story, it's a moment, presented with all the past leading up to it ("It's been long time that I'm waiting") and all the rich future trailing off from it ("Would you love me 'til I'm dead?")
That, there, is the balance of Bryter Layter. Drake knows a hard past, and an uncertain future, and faces both with honesty and perspective, then leaves them both behind. He's got the present, and why shouldn't the present be beautiful, with quivering touches of cymbal? Who's to say that wandering piano and layers of woodwinds can't do as good a job of cutting to the heart as solo guitar? Who's to say they can't do a better job, allowing for ambiguity and level passages, and getting toes to tap along the way? These lessons have been learned by Belle & Sebastian, who exploded their early gentle folk into Technicolor millennial soul, by Sufjan Stevens, who used gargantuan orchestras to discuss Michigan and Illinois and made people cry and cheer, and by Elliott Smith, who used major label money as an artistic stepping stone, adding layers of instrumentation not to cloud his vision, but to spread it and let it grow. The most beautiful, intimate moment of "Northern Sky" has nothing to do with Drake's voice. After the second chorus, the gentle rhythm steps aside, and piano notes cascade upward, straining for the sky for a brief moment; then they duck back down, and you can almost sense Drake grinning, knowing that he can't reach the infinite, but that he's found something better below.
Bryter Layter comes to a close on another instrumental. "Sunday" continues much in the same vein of the title track: there is a flute, tapping percussion, and echoing strings. Drake's guitar sounds more restless than before, occasionally stabbing out from the pace set by the other instruments. The strings float up, to hang on an eerie, distant pitch, and fate hangs there too. Then the flute returns, and the rhythm, and Drake turns away from the dark cave by the riverside, promising to remember it. The song is perfectly titled: by the end, I can picture Drake returning home from his Sunday stroll, laden with ideas for the busy, heartbreaking, buoyant, funny, hope-filled week to come.
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