The Company a Song Keeps
A Bit of Finger
About a month after taking a sliver off my right forefinger with a mandoline slicer, I started playing again. Fingerpicking still hurt, so I reached for Nancy's short-scale Mustang bass and a pick. Before long, the descending figure from Nick Drake's "At the Chime of a City Clock" surfaced under my hand.
I'd known the song since college, when it seemed one of Bryter Layter's jauntier tracks. It had a shuffle and an urban saxophone, almost cheerful beside "Fly" and "Northern Sky." Later I learned it as a karaoke number and could sing every word. Working it out on bass, note by note, I realized for the first time how lonely it is.
What the hands found
The verse came by ear: an open A, then a run of notes I half stumbled into, then F-sharp down to E and into the chorus, where I got stuck. Transcriptions put the chorus in G-sharp, moving through major seventh, dominant seventh and sixth chords. An AI assistant suggested a descending major scale.
It isn't one. A single voice slides down by half steps, from major seventh to flat seventh to sixth, over a root that never moves. It's a line cliché, the same device George Harrison used in "Something." Then came a second puzzle. My ear had heard A, but the charts said G-sharp. Published transcriptions don't agree on the song's tuning or where it sounds, so I've left the question open. It had already done its job by sending me back to listen.
None of this is hidden. It's simply invisible until your hands have to find it. And once mine did, the words began arriving differently too.
The second person and the city
Three other city songs came to mind. In Françoise Hardy's "Tous les garçons et les filles," the singer watches couples pass and hopes her turn will come. In the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset," Ray Davies' narrator watches Terry and Julie from his window and insists he's content. In "Eleanor Rigby," McCartney narrates loneliness from outside. For years I misheard Eleanor as tidying up after her own wedding. She's cleaning up after someone else's, which is bleaker.
Drake does something different. His song is written in the second person, a manual of advice for surviving the city: stay in, guard yourself, keep your armour on. The "you" could be the listener, a friend or Drake himself. It's hard to say whether the voice is wise, frightened, amused or trapped.
Hardy's Paris and Davies' London make room for their narrators, even as onlookers. Drake's city doesn't. When the song finally imagines you escaping to the city walls with a bride, the refrain snaps straight back to barricades.
Arrangement is interpretation
It's tempting to hear Bryter Layter's arrangements as packaging over Drake's real, solitary voice. Allister Thompson leans that way, hearing most of the album's upbeat tracks as forced while exempting "Chime." The case has substance. Drake's next record, Pink Moon, stripped nearly everything away, and his home demos persuade many listeners that the bare songs are closer to the writer.
There's a case the other way. Robert Kirby, quoted in Pete Paphides' essay, suspected the stark Pink Moon songs were unfinished: perfect in their raw state, but not yet developed. When I learned to sing "Chime" over an instrumental version, the saxophone kept stepping on my phrases. I finally learned to ignore it and follow the rhythm section, which gave me somewhere to stand. That shuffle isn't camouflage. It builds a city that sounds lively, and the narrator plainly isn't at ease in it. The irony lives in that gap.
Two basses wouldn't uncover a truer song. One holding a pedal while the other walks the chromatic line would make different things audible. Or it might just be a lovely sound, which is reason enough.
Reading backward
Drake's death pulls every interpretation toward it. Songs become portents, and professional setbacks become symptoms. Withnail & I offers a parallel. Made in 1987 and set in 1969, in the north London Drake knew, it gives its dealer Danny a speech about the sixties ending. People in 1969 could feel the era fraying, but the film's 1987 vantage gives the speech a certainty only hindsight supplies. We bring the same hindsight to Drake.
There's a counterweight in his only known interview, with Jerry Gilbert for Sounds in March 1971. It's brief, and Drake gives little away. But he's already planning his next record, saying he had the idea of making it with just John Wood, the engineer at Sound Techniques. That's an arrangement decision, made by a working musician rather than a myth.
Listeners fill songs in, too. I hear the verse about Sonny boy, selling smokes before vanishing pale-faced, as a dealer getting busted. Maybe. It also fits the song's thread of faces and lowered armour. Like my misheard "Eleanor Rigby," such readings say as much about the listener as the song. They aren't errors to purge. They're part of how a song stays alive.
The unrecorded version
I haven't recorded a single measure of the two-bass arrangement. It may stay in my head, a small cousin of Jodorowsky's Dune, the film that never got made but whose storyboards seeded others. The unmade thing has already done its work. It sent me into the harmony, then the lyrics, then other songs about cities and couples, then my own mishearings.
A song I'd known for decades became a different song because I started doing something different with it. Nothing about my college hearing was wrong. The shuffle really is buoyant, and that pleasure kept the song around long enough to be heard again.
That's the company a song keeps: the players around Drake, the people in his lyrics, the songs we set beside it, and the listeners who go on living with it. It suits a song about someone unsure how much company he wants.