NICK DRAKE

02/12/25 • 63 min

If something has changed you irrevocably in the past, its a kind of betrayal of yourself to not re-visit it and try to understand why. For this one I wanted to pull in one of the most sensitive and present people I know to help me out (Pat Sansone of Wilco & Autumn Defense) and he really rose to the test. I think we were able to bring Nick Drake's day to day world into focus with the excitement we felt over this new, unprecedented book in hand called 'Nick Drake : The Life' by Richard Morton Jack. This episode could function as a new kind of category I could roll out every once and awhile that's basically a full-on 'Existential History' deep-dive into someone who's true nature has been hiding in plain sight while they've been somewhat misunderstood. I feel strongly that musicians themselves should be the ones exploring the emotional terrain of the great fallen musicians because we're part of a kind of family who's given everything to be sacrificed on this altar... a beautiful but heavy gamble for sure. Maybe its a bit of the overall mission statement of this podcast to try and re-define how we see the actual humanity that lies behind art instead of just kicking back and being entertained by it. And this kind of study can also function as an expose of what it is to be a human in general. Hustling, sweating, dreaming, failing miserably and worrying endlessly... We can see ourselves in Nick Drake in many ways.. for better or worse.

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Previous Episode

THE TERRORISTS II

"The Terrorists II" arrives to balance out the Mellow Soldiers of Season Six with a bit of history on resistance music and the avant-garde.

It appears to be a natural part of evolution that there are dead spots and valleys in growth, where we just have to WAIT for better ideas while people take urine baths and try out experimental blood-letting procedures. So it's an important task to sweep through culture every now and again to point out that there's some massive amounts of bullshit in our bloodstream that seem to be there voluntarily.

The central concept of this cast needed a name & that term ended up being "NECRO-NESIA"... an idea that means when a culture starts hitting an evolutionary dead end, it tends to turn back & consume "classic" moments of itself... forgetting to move forward at all, while having too much fun enjoying the fruits of its most obvious arrival points. So its a kind of opium addiction to GREAT MOMENTS of capitalism... and the cyclical bastardizing of art into entertainment.

Does Sabrina Carpenter bring anything that wasn't already a basic tenet of the Britney Spears product 25 years ago?... 'The Terrorists II' proposes that we are living in an era where we've become unaware that all culture is becoming THROWBACK culture with no conscience of it's self-consumption.

It follows that the 'Ranger' of culture becomes extremely bored of being surrounded by a lackluster celebration of things that have already happened before... and must take to the farther edges of the earth to seek out new & less stale information. This cast is in GREAT appreciation of those types... while trying to point out that just because the rides at the carnival are FUN, it doesn't mean there isn't a world of depth out there that still needs our attention to keep paving an evolutionary path.

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Next Episode

NICK DRAKE II

This will probably be the only sequel episode Drifter's will ever do on one artist... solely because Nick Drake has such a dense story that had never fully been told until this new book arrived ("Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack"). Pat Sansone (Wilco, Autumn Defense) joins Emil again to hash out the more difficult, back half of Nick's story and provide some light on just how quickly Nick had become mentally ill by the time he recorded Pink Moon. Joe Boyd fittingly gets the last word on Drake's legacy and helps us understand how his disappearance inadvertently set up the autonomy of the space we meet these timeless records in.

Important footnote!:: the super legend that Pat refers to in his intense story at the end of this cast is Ahmet Ertegun :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmet_Ertegun

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