There is an argument to be made that Five Leaves Left is the loneliest record ever made in Britain, and it isn’t even a close argument.
Nick Drake recorded it at Sound Techniques in Chelsea across several sessions in 1968 and early 1969, mostly at night, which feels exactly right. The studio was a converted dairy — low ceilings, wood paneling, a room that absorbed sound the way good rooms do. Engineer John Wood, who would work with Drake on every record he made, understood almost immediately that the microphone had to sit very close. Extremely close. You can hear the room breathing around Drake’s guitar, hear the body of the instrument as much as the strings, hear him the way you would if he were sitting on the other end of a sofa and it was two in the morning.
The Guitar
Drake’s tunings were his own system, borrowed in part from players like Davey Graham and Big Joe Williams but mapped onto something no one else has fully decoded. He played a Guild M-20 — a small-bodied mahogany parlor guitar, no spruce top brightness, all warmth and wood — and his fingerpicking had a quality that sounds simple until you try to replicate it and realize you cannot.
Robert Kirby arranged the strings. He was twenty years old, a friend of Drake’s from Cambridge, with no professional experience. Producer Joe Boyd hired him anyway, partly because Drake trusted him and partly because Kirby heard the music the way Drake needed it heard. The string writing on “Way to Blue” in particular — no guitar at all, just Drake’s voice against Kirby’s small ensemble — is the kind of thing that makes you hold still.
Richard Thompson played lead guitar on a handful of tracks, including “Time Has Told Me.” He was a founding member of Fairport Convention and already one of the best guitarists in England. He plays here like a guest who knows not to overstay.
The Record
Joe Boyd was running Witchseason Productions out of an office in Covent Garden. He had already produced the early Incredible String Band records, and he understood folk music the way an outsider sometimes understands it better than insiders do — as something that could be expanded, complicated, made strange. He gave Drake unusual latitude and spent real money on the orchestrations, which for a debut on a small label imprint of Island Records was not obvious.
The album did not sell. Island pressed around 5,000 copies and the critics, when they bothered, described it as pleasant. Nick Drake gave almost no interviews, refused most live performances, and had no particular mechanism for being known. He made two more records and died in 1974 at twenty-six, an accidental overdose of antidepressants, though the word “accidental” has always sat uneasily with people who knew him.
What happened afterward is what happens to certain records. Five Leaves Left found people one at a time, slowly, across decades. It was licensed to a Volkswagen commercial in 1999 and sales of Pink Moon jumped overnight — which is an ugly way to be discovered and also the way things go.
The title comes from the warning printed in Rizla cigarette rolling papers when you’re near the end of the pack. Drake never explained it. There’s a self-portrait in the liner notes, a photograph he took himself in a mirror. He is looking slightly past the camera.
The sound on the original Island pressing is remarkable, warm and dimensional in a way that the early CD transfers never quite found. The 2000 Hannibal remaster by John Wood himself got much closer. What you want is to hear the room, hear the distance between Drake’s voice and the microphone, hear the guitar the way Wood heard it that first night at Sound Techniques — as something fragile that had to be captured without being changed.
Put it on after the kid is in bed. Give it the room.