It’s all been happening underground like a quiet revolution, and now they’ve burst into the light as buried songs enjoying their promised moment in the sun.

Marigolds and bluebells are favourite things because who knew they were there until they said hello to the morning with their blues and golds and greens.

It’s like they’ve been in the dark for so long, they are now compelled to lift up their faces and whisper astonishment at the world.

Things can lie buried for a long time before they rise to achieve their purpose.

Nature continually reminds us to wait and be patient.

Red Centre desert frogs lie underground for years before they hear rain thrumming on their dusty roof.

Seeds buried by an ice age squirrel lay dormant in the arctic permafrost underneath layers of mammoth and woolly rhinoceros’ bones for 32,000 years until Russian scientists found them 15 years ago and watered them.

The seeds grew and flowered, and a year later produced seeds of their own.

I didn’t get that from Truth Social.

I read it in the National Geographic, so it must be true.

Anyway, winter is always a good human time to hibernate, unless you’re a shallow sun seeker who must party and dance all year long like a plastic sunflower.

My winters are consumed by wood chopping and fire nurturing, foggy dawn dog walks, finding the right hat, and music that goes down like mulled wine.

And there can be no more mulled-wine-like music than the mysterious songs of Nick Drake.

Strange, layered and warm like a wine-dark sea, his songs are delivered with virtuosic guitar, often accompanied by beautiful string and piano arrangements.

His voice is searching, tremulous, quiet.

His music is also a classic example of the buried seed.

He recorded only three albums before his death at 26 in 1974.

After a brief moment in the sun, recording and playing his music to small audiences in the early 1970s, he retired to his bedroom at his parents’ house in Warwickshire, England.

He was just too shy to face the world anymore, and one night he went to bed and didn’t wake up.

He had been diagnosed with depression and was found with a bottle of anti-depressant pills beside his bed, but the jury is still out whether his death was deliberate or accidental.

In his lifetime, his three curious albums sold only 15,000 copies.

He was operating at a time of a crowded flowering of giant pop music talent.

For some reason Drake’s delicate, claustrophobic music resonated with my teenage introversion and I bought his 1971 Bryter Layter, which I still have and love today.

After he died, Drake’s music was forgotten to all but a few folk-oriented musicians. Nobody listened to or played his complicated chord structures and weird open tunings on guitar much at all.

Then in 2000 car maker Volkswagen used Drake’s beautifully moody Pink Moon as the soundtrack to a television advertisement and a whole new and vast audience of intricate acoustic music lovers was born at the dawn of the internet.

Today his music is enjoyed by millions who were never alive during his lifetime, and musicians from Kate Bush to The Cure, REM, Bon Iver and Radiohead cite him as a big influence.

New biographies and releases of his musical back catalogue mean his memory is very much alive.

One of his songs — Saturday Sun — was even played on ABC afternoon radio recently.

Even though the presenter confessed she had never heard of Nick Drake, she enjoyed his music.

All this goes to show that good things never entirely disappear, and strong seeds will eventually rise to meet the sun.

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Saturday, 7th December 2024

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