Did Nick Drake write the greatest four-chord song in history?
There are few in contemporary folk so shrouded in mystique as Nick Drake.
One listen to any of the three studio albums released in Drake’s lifetime shows an acoustic singer-songwriter cutting a unique mark in the era’s folk trends with an effortless originality. While never dour or overly sullen, his songbook is still haunted with an austere beauty and terse pensiveness that can veer into sunny wanders but never too far away from a poetic realm of mournful rumination and frosty existentialism.
Finding scant commercial success, Drake’s mental health issues took their toll, and in 1974, he was found dead in his bedroom from an overdose of amitriptyline pills at 26 years old.
As ever with the unfortunate mythos that propels an artist’s life into musical lore, Drake’s eternally frozen youth and enigmatic reservations from what little spotlight he enjoyed are inextricable from his legacy. Furthered by a crippling aversion to playing live, his LPs are coloured with a gleaming purity, intimate windows that feel plugged-in to his candid soul and troubled psyche, exposed to ballads plucked from some strange ether.
Drake’s mysterious power was potently present on his debut album. Released in July 1969, Five Leaves Left collated a gathering of songs that stirred with weathered, lyrical musings far beyond his years. Standing as the record’s centrepiece and a core fan favourite is the quietly arresting ‘River Man’. Inspired by the chromatic works of composer Frederick Delius and possibly William Wordsworth’s The Idiot Boy, ‘River Man’ weaves a stunningly moving and serene wander with the aid of a 12-string section, all illustrating Drake’s elusive vignette of time’s seasonal passing and life’s clarity in the titular River Man’s grasp.
Evocative poetry and meditative production go hand in hand with its unique time signature for many of Drake’s fans. Lilting strangely with a 5/4 beat, ‘River Man’ has long been the source of fascination for many musicologists and piano players for the manner in which its irregular soar only furthers its dream-like aura, rather than collapsing into itself in an undisciplined mess.
‘River Man’ was the subject of a recent video from pianist and YouTube personality Charles Cornell. As detailed in ‘The Most Hauntingly Beautiful 4-Chord Song Ever Written’, Cornell breaks down the trance-inducing energy, unveiling ‘River Man’s smart placement of chords in its four-part harmony. While Drake’s introspective vocals provide its hushed melody, below are the percolating drops of his acoustic strums, beginning with a C major add nine chord, followed by a C minor add nine just before his vocals come in, then defying compositional principles by jumping strangely to an E flat seven chord, rounding off on an A flat before repeating the cycle.
It’s a simple but hypnotic structure that so effortlessly casts a bewitching magic over the listener, each chord inexorably pulled toward a space unorthodox yet deeply moving. Drake’s coolly masterful and intuitive chord interplay is ‘River Man’s enduring elixir, forever floating like a leaf caught in a gust between studied rule-breaking and naive brilliance.
