Like many people, I first heard Nick drake while watching a Volkswagon commercial in 2004. It quickly became my inayopendelewa commercial and I'd always turn it up when it came on. Eventually I decided to figure out to whom that beautiful voice belonged. I quickly found his name and several of his other songs on YouTube. My husband and I listened to them over and over, in awe of the simple beauty each one contained. The muziki touched something deep inside us and we eagerly went in tafuta of zaidi information about Nick. Since we had never heard of him before, we were thinking that he was a contemporary artist and figured that maybe he was playing shows somewhere.

Looking him up on Wikipedia was when the bombshell hit us.

He died in 1974. And not only that, he was only 26 years old when his life ended. The depth to which this rattled my husband and I shocked us both. We found ourselves weeping about it for the rest of the day. How could it be that this young man created an incredible collection of so profoundly moving muziki 30 years zamani and we'd never heard of him until now? It seemed incomprehensible that a talent that rivaled the likes of John Lennon could remain such a well kept secret for so long.

The tragedy that he died without any widespread recognition of his beautiful and haunting muziki left us with a grief so crippling that it was as if we had known him personally. It was all we could talk about for hours. We listened to his songs time and again and the tears flowed.

Time has softened the loss of something I never really had. I wasn't even alive when Nick was and yet I mourned his death 30 years after the fact as if I had known the man. I can listen now without the tears but his songs still pierce my moyo with their beauty and incredible ability to perfectly capture a mood.

Thank you, Nick.