Listening to My Life

The guy sure knows how to pick ’em. Classical pianist and rock fan Christopher O’Riley has released yet another album sure to tweak the purists and delight the hipsters. This one is called Second Grace: The Music of Nick Drake, and features solo piano treatments of 14 of the melancholic troubadour’s best-known songs. As with his previous Radiohead and Elliott Smith covers albums, the original melodies are clearly discernible amidst O’Riley’s trilling arpeggios and the rumbling bass of his left hand.

Let it be noted that I’m a Christopher O’Riley fan and a Nick Drake fan. I’ve followed O’Riley’s career in both its classical and classical-pop incarnations, and I love his PBS show From the Top. And Nick Drake’s collected work, captured on the Fruit Tree box set, has been my late-night listening companion for more than 25 years. So this ought to be a marriage made in musical heaven, and in some ways it is. It’s certainly lovely stuff — Nick Drake as filtered through Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, by way of the hazy hippie romanticism and New Age piano works of early George Winston. The danger of this approach, as in any such experiment, is that it may blunt the edges of the original songs and transform them into placid, innocuous elevator music. For the most part, O’Riley’s prodigious technique allows him to avoid such traps, and to explore the sorrowful heart of Drake’s music without descending into the maudlin or the saccharine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s at his best when he plays the bare, unadorned songs of Pink Moon and Time of No Reply. The moody grace of “Place to Be” and the exquisite “From the Morning” are particularly noteworthy, and are fleshed out with lovely impressionistic strokes. But the lush, heavily orchestrated songs of Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter don’t fare quite as well. At 65 minutes, O’Riley’s album is also a little too long. But it’s a tasteful and frequently surprising ride all the same.

The liner notes are another story. O’Riley tries to suss out Drake’s appeal: “Was it the hypnosis of the harmony’s opiate haze, a Debussian ambient quality, a lazy equilibrium, the respirative Yin-Yang between major and minor antipodes, the ambiguously luminescent harmony reminiscent of Bill Evans a la Miles Davis Kind of Blue vintage?” he asks. Whew. He carries on like that for another seven hyperventilating pages before recalling Drake’s untimely death and breathlessly praising his “sacrifice,” as if an accidental overdose was some sort of expiation to the antidepressant gods. So now I ignore the liner notes and simply listen to the music, which is often startling in its shimmering beauty, but just as frequently disappoints because of its lack of depth. Consider “Pink Moon,” probably Drake’s best-known song:

I saw it written and I saw it say
Pink moon is on its way
And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon gonna get you all
Its a pink moon
Its a pink, pink, pink, pink, pink moon.

O’Riley, of course, has to convey this sense of impending doom without the use of lyrics. And he turns what is in its original incarnation a pensive cautionary tale into a piece of confection, blanched of all sense of dread. It’s exquisite puffery, but it’s puffery just the same.

It’s instructive to compare O’Riley’s approach to that of another prodigiously talented pianist and Nick Drake fan — Brad Mehldau. Mehldau, working in a jazz-piano-trio format, starts “River Man” with a straightforward statement of Drake’s haunting melody. But by the second chorus he’s moved into a jagged, discordant riff that stretches and pulls at the song, pushing it in directions that suggest the river man may hide a heart of darkness. O’Riley, in contrast, takes a much more quiet, impressionistic approach to the song. With Mehldau, you’re reluctant to hop on the river man’s ferry. With O’Riley, you’re content to blissfully float downstream.

It’s not that one method is necessarily better than the other, but it does illustrate Christopher O’Riley’s basic approach, and why it ultimately falters when faced with the lovely but conflicted fragility of Nick Drake’s music. There is loveliness everywhere. What’s lacking are the unsettling, spooky qualities that often made Drake’s songs so haunting. This is the pink moon removed of its portent and danger. It’s just the moon, the same one that rhymes with “June” and “spoon,” the subject of a million sentimental ballads. And it’s the flaw that transforms what could have been an essential album into a merely good and pleasant one. I’ll still pull this one out when I need unobtrusive background accompaniment. But it’s no substitute for the real, pink deal.