Bryter Layter Nick Drake

• 1Introduction01:32
• 2Hazey Jane II03:45
• 3At The Chime Of A City Clock04:45
• 4One Of These Things First04:51
• 5Hazey Jane I04:29
• 6Bryter Layter03:21
• 7Fly02:59
• 8Poor Boy06:06
• 9Northern Sky03:45
• 10Sunday03:44
• Total Runtime39:17

Info zu Bryter Layter

The second studio album, also produced by Joe Boyd; by 1970 Nick was stretching out with ambitious arrangements and famous guest musicians. Released on Island Records to an initially indifferent audience.

Following disappointing sales of Five Leaves Left, both Joe Boyd and Nick were keen to produce a less pastoral sounding follow-up. According to Robert Kirby the plan was to make an ‘up, good, happy album’. As a result, Fairport Convention’s Dave Pegg and Dave Mattacks were called as rhythm section and Kirby was brought in again to provide string and brass arrangements. This would be the first, and last, album Nick would record with a rhythm section.

Fairport were living in a disused pub in Little Hadham along with their families at this point so Nick went there for pre-recording rehearsals with the two Daves. According to Dave Pegg, Nick was uncommunicative during these rehearsals and said very little.

Once again, sessions for the album were held at Sound Techniques with John Wood and Joe Boyd. As well as the rhythm section the sessions included piano, electric guitar (played again by Richard Thompson), saxophone, brass and strings (with arrangements by Robert Kirby) and John Cale of The Velvet Underground on celeste, piano, organ, viola and harpsichord. Cale was producing an album with Boyd for Nico at this point and persuaded Boyd to let him join the sessions after becoming intrigued by Nick and his songs.

The sound of the album is far more commercial and poppy than either of Nick’s other albums. Indeed, it was the slickness of Bryter Layter which led him to perform solo on his next and final album Pink Moon, a decision Nick apparently took almost as soon as Bryter Layter was finished.

„Nick Drake may be the most ethereal recording artist I've ever heard. His fleeting career — the moody, mysterious music, the remote relationship with his record company — seemed calculated to distance him from reality. Yet his hushed songs touch a rare tranquillity that approaches poetry, and when he died in 1974 at the age of 26, he left behind three albums which are gradually making him a posthumous legend. Bryter Layter is the second of these LPs to be rereleased by Island Records through its remarkable budget label, Antilles.

Drake's melodies are seldom less than enchanting. Built around acoustic folk-jazz guitar figures and muffled percussion, they become emotionally charged when shaded by arranger Robert Kirby's poignant, eddying strings. Drake's impressionistic lyrics are vivid but provocatively sketchy, making them as curiously personal as phrases mumbled in sleep. They're delivered in an airy, nearly unconscious whisper that blends as naturally into the arrangements as a breeze rippling through tall grass.

Compared to the gloomy, vinegary, autumnal Five Leaves Left and the reportedly stark Pink Moon, Drake's second album is a relatively pleasant collection. 'Bryter Layter' and 'Sunday' are light, carefree flute instrumental, and the cantering Hazey Jane II' is positively brisk (though qualified by some disturbing lyrics). 'Northern Sky' gently details how a loved one has enhanced his appreciation of life.

Even in his best moods, though, Drake seems to be reaching out from a position of isolation to a like soul, as in 'Hazey Jane I': 'Do you feel like a remnant of something that's past?' More characteristic is the intensely considered solitude of 'Poor Boy,' 'One of These Things First' (a light waltz about possibilities dismissed) and 'Fly,' which features John Cale's moaning viola.

Whether obscurely introspective or groping outward, Drake seems to be communing with a pantheistic spirit; he consistently charts this communion with stirring empathy and authenticity — but not clarity. It's a measure of his instinct for maintaining a sense of mystery that Bryter Layter's reflections are as ephemeral as a man's breath on a mirror.“ (Stephen Demorest, Rolling Stone)

Nick Drake, acoustic guitar, vocal
Richard Thompson, guitar (on Hazey Jane II)
Ray Warleigh, flute (on Sunday)
Lyn Dobson, flute (on Bryter Layter)
Ray Warleigh, alto sax
Chris McGregor, piano
Paul Harris, piano (on One of These Things First)
Ed Carter, bass (on One of These Things First) Dave Pegg, bass
Dave Mattacks, drums
Mike Kowalski, drums
John Cale, celeste, piano, organ (on Northern Sky)
Pat Arnold, backing vocals
Doris Troy, backing vocal
Robert Kirby, string arrangement

Remastered at Abbey Road from master tapes by the album's original engineer John Wood.

Nick Drake(19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974)
With every passing year, it becomes a little less accurate to say that Nick Drake has a cult following. Cults, by their very nature, tend to exist on the margins, the subject of their admiration unknown or even unloved by the vast majority of people. Mention Nick Drake to a certain generation of music fan and chances are you won’t have to explain yourself. Latterly, Drake’s name has become a byword for a certain kind of acoustic music. Gentility, melancholia and a seemingly casual mastery of the fretboard – in the minds of many listeners, any combination of these traits warrants comparison to Nick Drake. As a result, Drake is perpetually referenced across the reviews sections of every music title. That quite often the records in question bear no meaningful resemblance to Drake’s music speaks volumes. His legacy may, in one sense, be huge. But there’s painfully little of it: just three complete albums – Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Layter (1970), Pink Moon (1972) and a final quintet of songs recorded shortly before his death. As his relevance increases, so does an insatiable communal yearning for their source to yield more. Hence the constant namechecks. Hence the constant repackaging and remixing of the same old bootleg recordings. Somehow we cannot quite accept the fact that this was all he left behind.

Such a turn of events isn’t without a certain irony. Towards the end of his life, Drake appeared to long for the vindication that comes with commercial success. And yet he seemed incapable of compromising himself to the pursuit of recognition. His shyness made interviews difficult. Live performances became increasingly rare. When recording music, the only compass he used was his own intuition. For Five Leaves left, he asserted himself when he needed to – dispensing with the arranger suggested by Joe Boyd and replacing him with his old Cambridge associate Robert Kirby. Pink Moon was just Drake and a guitar, an exercise in intricate desolation, no less perfect for its stark brevity. Commercial success may not have vindicated him, but the intervening years certainly have. Ten years ago, he entered the Billboard 100 (and the Amazon Top Five) for the first time. Thirty seconds of Pink Moon used in a Volkswagen advert alerted America to the otherworldly magic of Drake’s hushed English tones. His friend and label-mate Linda Thompson recalls recently hearing the song in LA over a supermarket tannoy: “I couldn’t believe how amazing, how right it sounded. How did he know?” Writing about Drake, the late Ian McDonald attempted to put into words why Drake’s music should have achieved such a relevance in the century after its creator brought it into being. In a celebrated essay, McDonald posited the suggestion that songs such as River Man and Way To Blue reconnect us with a part of our selves that modern life has all but eroded away. Certainly, much of his music is endowed with a peculiar prescience. Over arrangements that seem to mimic the bustle of a world moving too fast, the prescient Hazey Jane II sees Drake impishly enquiring, “And what will happen in the morning when the world it gets/So crowded that you can’t look out the window in the morning.”

The manner in which Drake’s life ended has inevitably coloured the way his songs are perceived: among them, the haunting Black-Eyed Dog and the self-mocking Poor Boy. “Don’t you worry,” he sings on Fruit Tree, “They’ll stand and stare when you’re gone.” In the liner notes to 1994’s Way To Blue compilation, Drake’s producer and mentor Joe Boyd commented that, “listening to his lyrics… he may have planned it all this way.” His point – that the best music will always invite conjecture and speculation about its authors – is well made. But at the same time, it should be added that the sadness in Nick Drake’s songs was frequently the corollary of an all-consuming joy. As often as not, both extremes are to be found within the same song: the autumnal languor of I Was Made To Love Magic; the life-affirming brush-strokes of Northern Sky (“I’ve never felt magic as crazy as this”). Records born exclusively of misery and catharsis can do little other than depress their listeners. Their candour may garner critical bouquets but they rarely return to the CD tray. Drake certainly suffered from depression – most notably in the latter two years of his life – but his music was not a function of that depression. Richard Thompson who played on Five Leaves Left and Bryter Later remembers a quiet character, though not a miserable one: “I remember long silences, but they were never oppressive. With Nick, you sensed [that] very little needed to be said that couldn’t be said with a guitar in his hand.” As Drake puts it on Hazey Jane II, “If songs were lines/In a conversation/The situation would be fine.”

Thirty three years have now passed since Nick Drake’s death. Original pressings of his records change hands for around £200. Dedicated fanzines and websites continue to interpret and second-guess every note and utterance. The bucolic village of Tanworth-In-Arden, where Drake grew up, attracts a steady trickle of visitors – somehow seeking to climb further inside the music. And yet as his father Rodney recalled, “And I remember in one of his reports towards the end of the time at his first school, the headmaster… said at the end that none of us seemed to know him very well. And I think that was it. All the way through with Nick. People didn’t know him very much.” It’s impossible to keep count of the contemporary artists who cite Drake as an inspiration, but a cursory round-up includes R.E.M., Snow Patrol, Norah Jones, Radiohead, Brad Pitt, Sam Mendes, Paul Weller, Keane, Portishead, Belle And Sebastian, The Coral, Coldplay, Heath Ledger, David Gray, Super Furry Animals and Beth Orton. Along with household names of his creative lifetime – the Stones, The Beatles, Marley, Hendrix – his albums have become an unofficial set text for anyone passionate about music.

In 2012, he has become so much more than the sum total of his work. The greater our fascination with him, the more we reveal about ourselves. In this sense, maybe Ian McDonald was right. Perhaps his music allows us to feel a little less like, as Drake put it, “a remnant of something that’s passed.”

Dieses Album enthält kein Booklet