September 29, 2026

The opening of "Northern Sky" — a keyboard figure that sounds to me like a celesta, though I have never confirmed the credit — drifted through the kitchen speaker while I was washing up, and I stopped. That was enough to put Bryter Layter (Nick Drake, 1970) on properly: volume up a little, window open onto the street, seated at the table rather than moving through the room.

Bryter Layter is the arrangement record in Drake's small catalogue. Robert Kirby wrote the string charts — the same Kirby from the debut — and John Cale contributes throughout, though I find it difficult, without the liner notes in front of me, to say where Kirby's warmth ends and Cale's cooler sensibility begins. The album moves between those two registers without resolving them, and that tension is most of what makes it interesting. The instrument that opens "Fly" — harpsichord, I have always assumed, though possibly something else — sounds as though it came from a different century and somehow doesn't feel like a mistake.

The record isn't trying to build toward anything. It works room by room, and that is its method. What I sometimes want from it is a track that breaks the temperature, and "Hazy Jane II" comes closest — the rhythm section opens out in a way nothing else on the album quite manages, and the whole thing briefly feels propulsive. It sounds to me like the record testing what it might have been.

Re-listening reveals small things. Tonight I noticed a slight hesitation in the string entrance on "One of These Things First" — whether that is intentional, or a quirk of the recording, I can't say. It sounds as if it might be both.

Pink Moon, which followed in 1972, answered the problem of arrangement by removing it. I am still not sure whether that was the only possible answer, or simply the most honest one.

#music #listeningnotes #folk #nickdrake