Why I'm not going to cover Nick Drake

and the wondrous world of covering songs in general

I recently posted something on my Instagram story prompting people to let me know what songs they would like me to cover.

About 20% of the answers asked for something by guitar genius Nick Drake.

For the uninitiated, I am a fingerstyle guitarist who specializes in a genre I’m calling “math folk”: melodic lines in open tunings and often disorienting time signatures. I love to cover songs that are not in this genre. I reharmonize them completely and try to arrange something surprising on the guitar, over which I sing the original melody.

A lot of artists, especially those on short-form video, cover songs and intentionally stay true to the source material. Think about every bass cover of Tool that you’ve seen or the guitarists playing “Sweet Child”. This is all well and good, but one of my favorite things to do is to take a song that I really love and recontextualize it. I spend hours practicing this skill as it’s the perfect blend of exercising my creativity and getting to sing whatever song is stuck in my head.

But there is one thing that the suggesters of Nick Drake failed to notice:

My strategy only works if the song doesn’t have a busy, recognizable, and iconic guitar part already.

In my covers, I hold steadfast to a song’s vocal melody, and although Nick Drake’s songs have amazing vocal melodies, their interactions with the lines in the guitar parts are often what make them soar. I admire writing like this so much and strive to do it with my own material.

If I played a completely different instrument, it would be another story. I’d love to hear “Three Hours” on a cello or a set of synths… but not with another, different but just as busy guitar part.

It’s kind of like asking a realistic cake artist to make a cake that looks exactly like a cake.

Would there be value in learning a Nick Drake song exactly how he played it and recording it for social media? Sure. A lot of people would probably like it. But my interest lies in making something new. That’s the long and short of it.