Even when I could no-longer read and write because my attention span was shot to pieces by depression, even when I could no-longer leave the house to go and look at art, I could always manage to listen to music, and to Nick Drake’s music in particular, and be comforted by it.

I’m twenty and in an attic room of King’s College, Cambridge when I first hear Nick Drake. I’m in the first flushes of a love-affair with a girl called Lucy and we have managed to get hold of a double mattress from somewhere, so we don’t have to sleep cramped up in her single college-issue bed. We want to sprawl. We’ve dragged the mattress into the living room and now we’re lying in bed together, listening to what seems like hundreds of songs, one after the other, sharing all the memories we have attached to them. All those other loves and other lives.

Then she gets up and puts on Nick Drake.

She comes back to bed and I take the CD case from her hands and lie in her arms looking at a photo of a shy boy in multicoloured stripes. This is the cover of Way To Blue: An Introduction to Nick Drake, a compilation album released by Hannibal Records in 1994.

‘Have you not heard of him?’ She asks me incredulously. I curl closer to her – so much for sprawling – and close my eyes. I felt an immediate connection with the music mediated through the rhythm of her body – the thrum of her heart and soft rise and fall of her breathing. At the time, it seemed like the perfect music for being in love to. When ‘Northern Sky’ came on we decided that this had to be our song. That refrain But now you’re here, Brighten my northern sky was too perfect to pass up. She was from the bleak industrial North, or so I naively thought of it in my head (like something out of the Elizabeth Gaskell novels I devoured). It seems ridiculous now, and I have to admit that I don’t even like the song anymore. It find it mawkish in the extreme, lacking all the emotional depth and musical intelligence of Nick Drake’s greatest works. If I had to choose a love song of his now, it would always be ‘Which Will’ which speaks much more clearly to me of the deference and fragility of falling in love, both through the delicacy and intricacy of that guitar and through the lyrics:

Which do you dance for

Which makes you shine

Which will you choose now

If you won’t choose mine

. . .

And tell me now,

Which will you love the best

My love affair with Nick Drake lasted far longer than my one with Lucy did. ‘Which Will’ was never our song, and in the end she took off with a mutual friend who she later married. I went to the wedding and I think they’re still living in rural bliss in Granchester being very Organic. My path has never seemed so easy but Nick Drake has remained with me throughout, a constant companion, not only in moments of love but also in the blackest moments of despair.

My struggle with depression began in my early twenties and has lasted, on and off, for fifteen years. To write about it is one of the hardest things to do, and I only feel I can do it now because I have come through it. I feel settled and secure. I know I am loved. I am confident, at least most of the time. Most importantly, I can read and write again. Nick Drake’s struggle with depression and eventual suicide are, of course, no secret, and it’s the reason that he remains an almost cult-like figure amongst those who suffer from mental illness. The reason, in many ways, that his music endures.

There are many songs on Way to Blue that speak to depression. ‘Time of No Reply’ recounts the terrifying loneliness of a depressive episode – of being left by the roadside all alone, while ‘Hazey Jane II’ – at odds with its jaunty, upbeat melody – again speaks to that loneliness in its reference to all the friends that you once knew are left behind. More subtly, ‘Black Eyed Dog’ riffs off Winston Churchill’s imagining of his own depression as Black Dog. It is a powerful example of how myths (the Black Dog with its glowing eyes is a figure in English folklore, who portends death) can be understood as collective cultural memories of very real and personal experiences of despair, and of how great artists like Nick Drake recognise and communicate this.

For me personally, the song from Way To Blue that speaks most to my experiences of depressions is ‘From the Morning.’ It is a song that I have returned to again and again – for solace, for understanding, for guidance and also for optimism. It is a song that undoubtedly talks about suicide and of the many lives stolen by depression – indeed, several lines from it are on Nick Drake’s gravestone:

And now we rise

And we are everywhere

And now we rise from the ground.

But while ‘From the Morning’ undoubtedly does talk about depression – about how the night she fell all around – it is a song that will always be about the possibility of recovery and about the optimism that you will see the night through, powerfully communicated in Nick Drake’s instruction to go play the game that you learnt from the morning.

My relationship with Nick Drake’s work speaks very powerfully to me of the redemptive power of art, and of music in particular. What do I mean by that? I suppose the capacity of art to save us, to rescue us figuratively and perhaps quite literally from Hell. Even when I could no-longer read and write because my attention span was shot to pieces by depression, even when I could no-longer leave the house to go and look at art, I could always manage to listen to music, and to Nick Drake’s music in particular, and be comforted by it. And I’m still listening now, fifteen or so years after I was lying in Lucy’s arms in that room in King’s College. It’s a beautiful day an I am streaming Nick Drake from the Internet in an endless loop – A day once dawned, And it was beautiful, A day once dawned from the ground. I have just written a long email to an old friend, and the cat is curled asleep in my lap, purring like a warm steam-engine. Through Way to Blue, and especially through ‘From the Morning’, Nick Drake taught me how to sing the blues and how in singing them I could find my way back to happiness.

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Jordan Vibert is… ‘Music lover from Bristol. Eclectic tastes. Writes at the weekends.’

Follow Jordan on twitter @jordanvibert