The Rooster #5

On my clandestine love affair with folk music

The dreaded Spotify Wrapped happened this week, our annual streaming service musical intervention where we are confronted with our listening habits in all their revealing mortification. It can be hilarious. Yesterday my friend Joanne McNally the Irish comedian discovered that her most listened to song was the viral song from TikTok user - Girl On Couch entitled ‘Man In Finance’.. my partner Tom, who is a staunch anti-capitalist, listened to a reggae song called ‘Beat Down Babylon’ by Junior Myles the most this year.

Molly Drake, Nick Drake’s mother.

And me? My joke was that as someone who has made a career out of playing cutting edge electronic music, all I listened to this year was folk music. My most listened to top five songs were all from the same album, an album that was released in 1972 by the folk singer Nick Drake, entitled Pink Moon.

I thought for this weeks Rooster I would recommend some of my favourite folk music, both old and new. The music in this list is all picked guitars and gentle voices but it has the power to quietly devastate a listener. The songs have an intimate atmosphere to them that draws me in like a fire in the hearth, and is especially lovely to listen to during the Autumn and Winter months. Let’s start with some contemporary folk. Here are three releases that came out this year that I have listened to over and over again.

Jacob Alon - Fairie In A Bottle

Jacob is from Dunfermline in Fife in Scotland. They play a guitar and sing with a wide ranging falsetto, from gentle whispers to huge soaring notes, think Jeff Buckley and Nick Drake but trans and singing about poppers and Grindr. They are beautiful; all cheek bones and full lips and a head full of dark curls, and their songs chronicle their experiences of obsession and unrequited love, queerness and loneliness. They only have two songs available to listen to on streaming and have already been chosen to perform on Jools Holland. I got to see them perform in a tiny church last weekend at the Irish music festival Other Voices. They are incredibly charismatic on stage; gentle souled and warm, with that macabre Scottish humour that I love so much.

Oisin Leech - Cold Sea

Oisin Leech recorded this album in an old school house on the coast of Donegal, the most north westerly tip of Ireland and a wild and beautifully rugged part of the country. The music is simple, just Oisín, his guitar and some gentle embellishments of synths and a lovely turn from the legendary Irish folk musican Donal Lunny on the bouzouki. Washed with imagery of the ever changeable weather, the over all feel of Cold Sea is intimate but expansive.

Adrienne Lenker - Bright Future.

This is Adrienne Lenker sixth solo album. Her main job is as the lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter of the band Big Thief. The music is more augmented than the previous two tips, with piano and bass and violin, but the music was cut straight to tape, so we have this sense of the songs happening in real time which gives the music a heightened vibrancy. This vibrancy, compounded with lyrics that are highly personal recollections of her childhood, her relationships, her dalliances with love in all its forms, gives the record a naked vulnerability that draws you in close.

I love what she says about her songwriting process in this interview with Exclaim.

"It doesn't feel like it's just originating from my brain. It feels like I'm following an invisible thread of intuition, from one choice to the next [...] maybe I don't even fully understand once I've written it, but it just feels right. And I just trust that. And then over time, it reveals its layers of meaning to me. That's a mark of what I feel is a good song. It keeps me wanting to play it."

And now we rewind, back to the 1972 to my most listened to artist of 2024, Nick Drake.

Nick Drake - Pink Moon

This album does everything for me. The album was reviewed really badly at the time but has over the decades come to be known as one of the most influential folk albums of all time. It’s short, at under 28 minutes long, and wholly simple, just Nick, an acoustic guitar and eleven songs. It was recorded when Nick Drake was in his early twenties, between bouts of heavy depression. Reading up about it, Nick found the trappings of being a recording artists difficult. He didn’t do interviews or promotion and he didn’t want to play his songs in front of audiences. This album was his third and intentionally stripped back to just the guitar, and remarkably, the whole thing was recorded over just two consecutive nights in a studio in London. It seems that people associate this album with his depression, and there is melancholy in there but I get a sense of hope from it as well. Nicks voice is smoky and tender, the songs are soothing and intimate, his guitar playing, utterly exquisite. In a tragic turn of events, Nick died at the age of twenty six from an overdose of anti-depressants. Pink Moon was his final album.

Nick’s mother was Molly Drake, a singer, composer and poet. She was a huge influence on her son Nick and after his death and hers, some of her recordings finally made their way into the public consciousness.

Molly Drake - The Tide’s Magnificence; Songs and Poems of Molly Drake

The songs were recorded in her home in the 1950s; they are plain, stripped back, with simple melodies that make them feel like lullabies. Her lyrics, beautifully poetic, touch on the fragility of human existence. Molly never released any of her music, her art was a private enterprise, her songs for her ears and her familys only.

You can hear her influence all over Pink Moon. Where Nick played guitar, his mother Molly played piano, but apart from this difference, there is so much familiarity between them both. It’s a deeply poignant experience listening to Nick and his mother’s music side by side. The poetic lyrics, the melancholy, the same smokey tenderness in their voices. Molly died in 1993, nineteen years after her son died by suicide. There is something beautiful about their songs being left behind as proof of their love for one another.

Molly Drake is buried with her son in Tanworth-in-Arden in Warwickshire. Her tombstone is inscribed with her son’s words.

"Now we rise, and we are everywhere."

Molly and Nick Drake.