Day is Done — Nick Drake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2jxjv0HkwM

Once, on the subway, I read sonnets over the shoulder of (presumably) a Columbia student. She was reading not from a book but off sheets of paper, and her hand was blocking the header, so I didn't know who had written it or what it was titled. Reading it, the sonnet was awful. It was bland and flowery, it meant nothing, it didn't evoke. And, reading it, I thought: why aren't sonnets as good as they once were?

Then she moved her hand, and uncovered the title: it was a sonnet by Shakespeare.

So I read it again. And on second reading, it was excellent. It had subtleties I'd missed, it had rhyme schemes that made sense given their age, it was brilliant. How could I have been so foolish the first time through?

So poetry is dated. Things are dated. I think that's what Day is Done is about. It's poetry, arranged and produced and recorded 44 years ago, and it still stands. I think that's the difference between pop and folk: pop is music in the present tense, but folk addresses human themes. Mortality was relevant in 1969, it's relevant in 2013, it'll be relevant in 2057. Pop rarely has that shelf life.

I discovered Nick Drake two summers ago, on a college campus, and the pastoral themes matched the new environment. I was reading pastoral horror literature and listening to pastoral music. The landscape up in Ithaca was pastoral, and it set this very clear two-month period, and Nick Drake is tied to that.