The Making of Five Leaves Left
Nick Drake
Island
25 July 2025
“Fame is but a fruit tree, so very unsound. It can never flourish ’til its stock is in the ground,” sang Nick Drake on “Fruit Tree” from his perfect debut album, which recently received the four-disc retrospective, The Making of Five Leaves Left. Initially released in 1969, Five Leaves Left found Drake planting that aforementioned stock in the ground of popular culture, but his career wouldn’t flourish until the turn of the century, when a 2000 Volkswagen commercial featured his tune, “Pink Moon”. That song’s eponymous album subsequently went platinum, 26 years after Drake died by suicide at the age of 26.
Now, almost 26 years after that VW Cabrio commercial, Island Records are taking listeners back to the very beginning with a box set that chronicles the formation of Nick Drake’s debut, from early recordings in late January 1968 to the completed album, released 3 July 1969. It’s the first “new” release of Drake’s material in over a decade (since the limited release of The John Peel Session), and it took nine years to assemble, collecting demos, alternative takes, and outtakes with a variety of arrangements. Instead of exhaustively including every discovered tape and take, the Drake estate (managed by Cally Callomon with Nick’s sister, Gabrielle) selected the tracks that best laid out the evolution of Five Leaves Left and honored Drake’s vision for it.
Taking its title quite literally, it works beautifully as a kind of found-footage audio documentary of the soft-spoken Drake and how he, producer Joe Boyd, arranger Robert Kirby, and others created one of the outstanding English folk records. In fact, the wonderful 60-page booklet that accompanies the four discs subtitles the collection as “A documentary chronicled in print and music”.
For fans of Drake’s music, The Making of Five Leaves Left is absolutely essential and has no parallels in his discography; we can only wish for the same loving work to be applied to Drake’s two other official records. Newcomers and novices are better off starting with those records, but considering this set contains the entire original debut in its best remaster, this set is the ideal way to approach Five Leaves Left.
The aforementioned song “Fruit Tree” is a hauntingly beautiful standout in Five Leaves Left, and this collection unearths a chilling version without the string arrangement the song is known for. It’s strange even to callany one Nick Drake song a “standout”, though, considering he only released 31 of them across three albums while he was alive.
In retrospect, they’re all standouts, standing apart from their contemporaneous pop music landscape and outside time itself. Blending sophisticated chamber music, celestial hippie folk, elements of jazz, and pastoral English ballads, all with his somewhat androgynous, melancholic voice, Drake’s music is too unique to be sequestered to a particular decade or genre, becoming timeless in effect. There’s a reason why he became successful decades after his death, after all.
From the multiple outtakes and the way The Making of Five Leaves Left lays out the album’s linear progression, one comes to appreciate Drake’s guitar picking more than ever. His complex alternative tunings, simultaneous voice types, and use of counterpoint were so different from other guitar folk from the time, something highlighted by alternate takes which feature Drake without any accompaniment. Of course, by the time the record was ultimately produced, the quasi-baroque string and woodwind arrangements perfectly complemented Drake’s playing.
The analog-to-digital reel transference, mastered by John Wood and Simon Heyworth, results in a warm, cozy, and crystalline sound throughout. Between that and the way Drake often recorded (“two mics with no mixing afterwards”, as the booklet notes), The Making of Five Leaves Left often sounds as if Drake is sitting on a stool five feet away. Ironically, though, perhaps the most welcome portion of this collection sounds the “worst”, taken as it was from a 0.25″ mono reel tape.
This so-called “Paul de Rivaz reel” (named after a fellow undergraduate at Cambridge who happened to own a 1960s Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder) is revelatory. It features just Drake on acoustic guitar, talking his way through several tracks as he explains his vision for their orchestral arrangements to Robert Kirby in his college flat. It’s staggeringly intimate and sweet, exuding Drake’s demur disposition and spirit throughout.
The booklet by Neil Storey and Richard Morton-Jack (who wrote the invaluable biography Nick Drake: The Life) is more meticulous than you might imagine. Aside from a lengthy, carefully researched chronology of Drake’s college years at Cambridge and the creation of his debut album, the booklet also charts all known recordings of the songs from Five Leaves Left, noting the session dates, track times, studios, engineers, musicians, and so on. It also contains comprehensive photographs of the original masters’ material and Drake’s handwritten lyrics for the songs, which were always strange in their syntactical simplicity and emotional wisdom, sort of like nursery rhymes sung by a Zen master.
Drake’s music here captures a feeling of melancholic contentment, a mixture of solitary resignation and acceptance in the face of the world’s overwhelming beauty and confusion. It’s one of music’s great tragedies that he passed away so young, but a collection like The Making of Five Leaves Left delivers a kind of karmic justice, a corrective footnote to life’s long list of losses and cruelties. As Nick Drake sang in “Fruit Tree,” it ensures that, “They’ll all know that you were here when you’re gone.”