3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Overlooked No More: Molly Drake, a Maternal, Musical Force Behind Nick Drake's Sound
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
She was a devoted wife, a charming hostess and a doting parent to two children who had established themselves as public figures — the musician Nick Drake and the actress Gabrielle Drake.
That's essentially all people knew about Molly Drake at her death in 1993. What many did not know was that she was a remarkable artist in her own right — a poet, singer, composer and pianist whose posthumously released home recordings represent a new reference point in 20th-century song.
Most of Drake's quiet, melancholic tunes like 'Set Me Free' were written in the 1950s and hit on universal themes of despair, heartbreak, longing and loss.
'I Remember,' one of her most indelible compositions, is a physical and emotional travelogue through the history of a doomed romance. The songwriter Anaïs Mitchell described it in an interview as 'absolutely perfect, a whole world, novella, philosophy encapsulated in three verses and a coda.' The song's lines read, in part:
The autumn leaves are tumbling down and winter's almost here
But through the spring and summertime we laughed away the year
And now we can be grateful for the gift of memory
For I remember having fun
Two happy hearts that beat as one
When I had thought that we were we
But we were you and me.
Upon hearing the song for the first time, the filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn was rendered nearly speechless. 'It's every lover's story,' he said in an interview. 'It's everything.'
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