Song 80: Place to Be

Once I was walking around a supermarket, not paying much attention to my inner life, ipod on shuffle and this song, 'Place to Be', from Nick Drake's last studio album, 'Pink Moon' came on.Within a minute or two my breath and my step faltered. A shock of sorrow.

There is so much that is beautiful and desperately sad in Drake's music, but it is this relatively gentle, seemingly innocuous number that now strikes me more deeply than any others.

When Nick, still in his mid-20s (a mid-20s he'd never escape from) when he recorded this, sings

"...I was green, greener than the hill
Where flowers grow and the sun shone still
Now I'm darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be"

you remember this is a boy who may have felt, and been told, as he was growing up, that there was no place in the world he wouldn't be allowed to fit in and feel comfortable - a wealthy and loved English public school boy, a child of empire, with a happy family life, seen as enigmatic and handsome, sociable, sporty, intelligent ... and yet by the time he was 24, all those myriad places, those enormous possibilities had disappeared, and he was begging for just one place to be. And even that last place he ended up, his childhood bedroom, was not a place he allowed himself to be.

I still listen to Nick Drake all the time - there is no other singer whose company I feel so comfortable in. Most of his songs are not miserable at all - far from it, they're wry and magical, full of hope and wonder, but there is something so overwhelming about the clarity and honesty of his despair on some of 'Pink Moon', and in those few songs he recorded after that.

Well, in any case, I'm not going to go on for long about it, it's just listening to this song got me thinking about the saddest songs of all. Not the performatively sad, not the ecstasy of heartbreak, but songs which have the stamp of truth about them, of human loss and empathy.

These are the ones I came up with for starters: it's a bit monochrome genre-wise, I know. 

Danny Callahan - Conor Oberst

Girl in Amber - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Caroline No - The Beach Boys

Fourth of July - Sufjan Stevens

Broken Wave - James Yorkston

Black Eyed Dog - Nick Drake

Floating in the Forth - Frightened Rabbit

Happy Birthday Johnny - St Vincent

Carissa - Sun Kil Moon

I Loved Being My Mother’s Son - Purple Mountains

Casimir Pulaski Day - Sufjan Stevens

Over the Rainbow - Judy Garland

Trellick Tower - Emmy the Great

How - Regina Spektor

Boulder to Birmingham - Emmylou Harris

Losing You - Randy Newman

Does Not Suffice - Joanna Newsom

The Chalet Lines - Belle and Sebastian

It’s a Motherfucker - Eels

No Surprises - Radiohead

There we go. Any suggestions welcome.

I hope everyone right now has got a good place to be and a good place to stay put.