Artist · chart history · #109 in indie & aaa artist polls
Nick Drake
Solo artist Yangon United Kingdom English singer‐songwriter
Nick Drake is an artist from Yangon. Nick Drake has 38 chart appearances on 26 radio countdowns from 9 stations on RockLists, spanning 2000–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Pink Moon”, which appears on 22 lists with a best position of #47. The station that charted Nick Drake most often is WXPN (Philadelphia, PA), with 9 appearances.
Nick Drake, the English songwriter born in Yangon in 1948, was still a student at Cambridge when Island Records signed him. Five Leaves Left came out in 1969, and it sounds like a room with the curtains half drawn: acoustic guitar played with rare, dexterous grace and a voice that barely rises above a murmur. Bryter Layter, in 1971, dressed the songs in brighter clothes, with "Northern Sky" glowing like a lamp left on in a window. Then came Pink Moon in 1972, stark and stripped to the bone.
Hardly anyone was listening. Drake struggled with depression and could scarcely bear to play in front of a crowd, and once Pink Moon was finished he gave up performing and recording and retreated to his parents' house in rural Warwickshire. He died on 25 November 1974, at the age of 26, of an overdose of antidepressants.
The records stayed available through the mid-'70s, and Fruit Tree, the 1979 retrospective, gave the world a second chance to hear them. This time it paid attention. The acclaim he never saw arrived after all, his influence spread far and wide among other musicians, a biography appeared in 1997, and two documentaries, A Stranger Among Us and A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, followed.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Nick Drake on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pink Moon | 22 | #47 | – | – | |
| 2 | One Of These Things First | 3 | #210 | – | – | |
| 3 | Cello Song | 2 | #260 | – | – | |
| 4 | Northern Sky | 4 | #43 | – | – | |
| 5 | Chime of a City Clock | 1 | #826 | – | – | |
| 6 | Poor Boy | 1 | #1318 | – | – | |
| 7 | Time Has Told Me | 1 | #1518 | – | – | |
| 8 | Things Behind The Sun | 1 | #733 | – | – | |
| 9 | Which Will | 1 | #1817 | – | – | |
| 10 | From the Morning | 1 | #482 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
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