The alternate classic Nick Drake album fans were never supposed to hear
Even though the discography released in his lifetime was pretty scant, it was evident from the end product of his three albums that Nick Drake was the sort of gifted artist who only comes along once in a lifetime.
From the opening moments of ‘Time Has Told Me’ on his debut album, Five Leaves Left, you know you’re being invited into a special but intimate place where Drake is opening up about some of the most personal aspects of his psyche. However, at the same time, the record has a warming quality to it, something that many artists forget to include in works that are incredibly personal in nature.
His follow-up, Bryter Later, is a little less intense when it comes to its emotional impact, but no less exhilarating from a musical standpoint, with a larger focus on elements of jazz being thrown into the compositions along with more lavish arrangements. However, his final album, Pink Moon, is about as stripped back as one can get without losing its potency, with very little other than guitar, vocal and the occasional piano heard on the record.
The thing is, you do wonder as to whether listeners were ever meant to hear these records, given how personal they were, and how reclusive Drake became throughout the course of his career.
His label, Island Records, almost had to bully him into playing the game of being in the music industry, with him showing little to no interest in the idea of being heralded as the next star of the British folk scene. This is exemplified by the fact that Pink Moon came to them without any warning or indication that he was working on it, with the moment the master tapes were dropped into the hands of label head Chris Blackwell being the first knowledge of its existence.
However, one record from Drake that people certainly weren’t meant to hear was one that came after his passing, which came much to the annoyance of some of the people closest to him.
The sound engineer, John Wood, who worked on Five Leaves Left, expressed his disappointment at the fact that Island opted to release a four-disc box set of outtakes from the album’s sessions, The Making of Five Leaves Left, in 2025, and bemoaned the practice of releasing unheard archival material from artists who have died in general, which had previously happened to Drake in the 1980s when his final recordings were issued for the first time.
“I have to say, it’s not something that I’m a great fan of,” he argued in an interview with Rolling Stone, “I have to be a bit blunt about this, but the whole idea of issuing outtakes has never been anything that I have to say that I’m very in favour of. My attitude is, if the artist had wanted it to go out, it would’ve gone out at the time.”
Perhaps it would have kept the mystery of Drake’s life and recording career alive longer had demos and outtakes never been released, but at the same time, fans were evidently curious to know what other treasures there were out there, making for a tricky tightrope to walk when it comes to releasing archival music posthumously.
