The Place 2 Be: Nick Drake

The song is very simple in chord structure: Em, D and F#m, when played in the key of Em. Just three chords. The two minor chords set the mood of the song. Major chords engender a feeling of hopefulness and happiness. Minor chords engender a mood of melancholy and sadness. Songs typically follow this pattern. If you’re listening to a song like Smokey Robinson’s My Girl (best performed by The Temptations) it will invariably be a major key song conveying happiness and celebration. If you’re listening to a sad song like Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles it will invariably be a minor key song conveying, in this case, doubt, death, funeral scenes, solitude. There are exceptions to this convention: Suzanne Vega’s Luka is deliberately written in a major chord although the lyrics tell of child abuse - the music designed to represent the child’s attempts to pretend outwardly that they are happy and all is well, to disguise the sad reality.

Place to Be is very autobiographical. As one of the last songs Nick ever wrote and recorded it lays bear his personal feelings during a time that he felt at his most raw. Yet it exudes an extraordinary, terrible beauty also – a classic example of darkness being able to give the greatest light.

This, I think, refers to when Nick was more naïve and unknowing in his youth. When things were simpler, less challenging, more carefree, less stressing. Not just when he was younger but “younger than before” – when he was really young.

This refers to the psychological problems that Nick suffered from and, apparently in his view, resident in him from his early years. He didn’t understand them (the “truth” of his condition) when he was younger and naïve although it was plain for him to see now looking back at the time he was writing this song.

Now Nick has matured he is able to understand these things better and put them in perspective. He is now able to look at the truth of his psychological condition, literally, in the face.

This refers to the expectations others have of him and his own objective reasoning prompting him to get his act together and get his own house in order. He’s previously likened his mind to a shed in his song Man in a Shed – here he talks of getting that room/shed/house/temple of his mind cleaned up. Contemporary reports are that his room in Hampstead was a mess so his mental condition is analogous to his physical environment.

This is another way of referring to his naïveté, his greenness, when he was younger, when he didn’t understand why he felt different. The imagery has other qualities: of freshness, fertility, happy days, sunshine, but has that undertow of naïveté.

This emphasises the halcyon days of his youth again, in the rural Warwickshire countryside, with flowers growing and long summer days when it seemed the sun stopped in the sky and shone forever. The alliteration of “sun shone still” mimics the perceived persistence of the sunshine. The underlying thread is of happiness represented by this sunny imagery. Nick uses rain in his songs to signify sadness, darkness and depression and the sun to signify happiness. This lyric uses this imagery to emphasise how he looks back on the days of his untroubled youth as days of sun and feelings of well-being.

Self-evident imagery of Nick’s depression and sadness. The bathos from the previous line is striking and cold. It is telling in this lyric how the icon of the rain, signifying depression, morphs here into “the deepest sea” – Nick metaphorically describing how deep and vast his depression currently is. Proof positive, methinks, of this rain(water)/sun imagery’s purpose and suitability.

Suggestive perhaps of a sea burial. Perhaps alluding to the short Death by Water chapter in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that talks of “He passed the stages of his age and youth” – Nick is clearly thinking of the current and earlier stages of his life in this song and sounds like he is metaphorically drowning in a sea of troubles. Death by Water also refers to "O you who turn the wheel and look to windward" that could link to one of Nick's other songs Rider on the Wheel. Nick is in need of relief from his current predicament and a place of comfort and release from his anguish.

Back to the strong, life-giving, sun imagery representing Nick’s fortitude and well-being. This weather imagery may allude to his time in Aix-on-Provence and Morocco, sunny climes where he felt at his happiest and evidently made a choice between the predictable career path wanted by his father and his own desire of self-expression through his music. The weather, moods and chords of this song oscillate sharply between sunny/wet, positive/negative, major/minor.

This, I think, refers to him thinking in his early years of expecting to see his life through to its natural conclusion, in happiness from start to finish, personified by the positive sun, literally from dawn to dusk. “When day is done” appears to mean the normal course of one’s life, analogous to the normal course of the sun through the day. One could infer from this lyric Nick not expecting to see his life run its natural course and it instead ending prematurely, as it did.

A painful and honest statement of how low Nick feels. Via Nick’s preference for metaphor and analogy, sadness is now represented by the colour blue, often used to denote sadness, as in “I feel blue”, “I got the blues”, rhythm and blues, but also apposite in its linkage to the “deepest [blue] sea” used earlier as a metaphor for sadness.

One of the all-time great lyrics, coupled with the preceding line. This was crushing when I first heard it and it still holds profound resonance. The yearning, angst and plea for help are tangible in these two lines and in how Nick renders them. Who the “you” is is not clear. Death? Spiritual support? A partner? Sufficiently undefined to make these words relevant to anyone in their given situation without losing their inherent power.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light. 
 
 And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams. 
 
 All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark. 
 
 And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise. 
 
 And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace. 
 
 Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying 
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.