Songs And Artists I Relate To
#4: Nick Drake
For my fourth take on this series, I am not going to focus on one song, but on a music artist I can relate to. That artist is Nick Drake.
Nick Drake is one of the greatest Folk singer-songwriters of all time, but he didn’t get to realize his success in his short time with us. The melancholy of his music reflects his experience on Earth.
Growing up catholic made me partial to melancholic music. You think of Jesus — basically a perfect person — and how his life was cut short. He died for our sins, but you would have thought his life was cut short if he were your friend.
Drake was diagnosed with simple schizophrenia. I had a similar diagnosis. He and I both spent too much time in our young adulthood smoking copious amounts of grass when we didn’t have a direction in life. And reality slipped away before us. Shortly before or after my first breakdown, I watched a documentary on the life of Nick Drake. I could see some similarities between our experiences. I first heard his song, Pink Moon, on a compilation album when I was in high school. The raw beauty of it struck me.
I just finished Nick Drake’s biography by Richard Morton Jack. It had the endorsement of his family, so I thought I should read it, and I saw similarities. We were both slow to find relationships as teens. There was innuendo about him being gay or bisexual in the book, but maybe he was trying to find the right person. I had opportunities with girls, but they weren’t right for me. I realized I needed a girlfriend when I got to college, but no relationships materialized. I was also struggling with school and my social life. Mental illness was encroaching in on me and arrived first as a clinical depression.
Nick Drake dropped out of college to focus on music, against the advice of his parents. He had struggled with his albums not selling. He needed to tour, which, at the time, meant venues full of people getting drunk and wanting to have a rowdy time. His contemplative music didn’t suit those crowds. He would perform and not interact with the crowd. Those wild crowds turned on him, and he lost the desire to play live, instead spending a lot of time smoking grass alone.
When he was with his friends, he wasn’t very communicative. That was also how my illness first started. I had so much anxiety about not handling myself at college. I almost lost the ability to talk with my parents about what was going on with my life. After dropping out of school during my first semester, I came home and would spend most of my time in bed, like the last few months at college.
I remember my dad not knowing what to do with me. He was a business manager for a contractor on a military base near my hometown. He asked the project manager a big favor to get me a job. I was given a decent job for an eighteen-year-old at the height of the war on Terror. My brain wasn’t functioning well after being depressed and not taking care of myself. I was not ready for the manual labor that awaited me.
While living alone, Drake wasn’t eating or drinking well but wanted to be independent. I should have gotten a place of my own, but instead, I lived with my parents. They took care of me, but I had all this disposable income that I spent on music and marijuana. Working was hard, and I wanted to give another crack at college.
After working for eight months, I went back to another college in north Louisiana. While working, I was in a manic phase; I had a girl I liked. She could tell I wasn’t in a good place and didn’t want to get into a relationship with me. I felt my story was similar to Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. I was in erotomania before my life-changing jailing. I was thinking about the girl I liked the past summer. I also imagined marrying other girls I almost had relationships with.
That night, I took an unannounced walk. I was confused. I wasn’t a threat to anybody, but my mom called the police and told them she thought I might have been on drugs when I left. The police found me walking, first blinded me with a Q-beam, then tackled and maced me. If they had talked to me, maybe my psychosis wouldn’t have deteriorated so badly while in jail.
Toward the end of Nick Drake’s life, he was trying to get a normal job. He had been on psychiatric medicine for a while. He lost his ability to write music, his muse. He asked a girl he knew out of the blue to marry him, and she turned him down. He was desperately trying to find something to live for.
Sadly, he took too many of his antidepressants and died at 26. His fame and music spread after he died. I was sad he didn’t get to see his music affect so many lives. He didn’t get to see the success he deserved during his lifetime. I’m fortunate that I found peace in life after my diagnosis, but I certainly saw a lot of similarities to my own story.
