Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

“There goes another one. There are only five left now.”
“Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.”
“Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too.”
— O. Henry, “The Last Leaf”

Nick Drake released his first album, Five Leaves Left, five years before his death. Barely out of his teens, Drake wrote almost unnervingly mature songs, and married them with sympathetic backing by members of Fairport Convention and Pentangle, and string arrangements by Robert Kirby, a friend and classmate only two months older than Drake. The album featured some of his most expressive singing and playing, and his songs, so melancholy yet so light, wore their graveness like a black silk cloak. Painfully shy, he refused to tour behind it, and the album was poorly marketed. It was doomed to sink with barely a trace. But oh, that trace… Continue reading »