Nick Drake - Time of No Reply - Alternate Version (1969)

Nick Drake's music is special. The three albums released in his lifetime - Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and Pink Moon - are perfect as they are. But... all the music that has been released since his death have come out in ways that need serious rearranging.

I'm greatly puzzled by the musical decisions of the Drake estate. For instance, Drake recorded five essential songs with vocals on them in one last recording session in 1974. Four of them were released in 1979. The fifth one "Tow the Line" wasn't released until 2004. Why?! I could go on and on about puzzling decisions like that. If it's because they only discovered some recordings later, that's strange too since he's had such a small body of recorded work, and no career of recorded concerts.

It seems to me the rest of his music needs to be organized in a more logical fashion. I'm keeping the album title "Time of No Reply" from his most well known posthumous release, and keeping about half the songs. But I'm repurposing it to contain all of his original songs (plus one song - "Been Smoking Too Long" - by a friend) that aren't on the three albums released in his lifetime or from his 1974 recording session. If I do that, the album is 42 minutes long, which is a fine album length for that era.

The other songs from the original "Time of No Reply" will be moved to other albums that will follow here soon. I have four more albums from him on the way (plus the original three) that should logically sort out the rest of his catalog.

I've included a few short instrumentals that are widely available on bootlegs but have inexplicably remained officially unreleased. These were recorded on a tape recorder, and each of them comes to a sudden halt in mid-song when the recorder gets turned off. So I faded the songs out at the very end of each, rather than have the mellow mood of his music jolted by the loud click of the recorder being turned off.

I included the version of "Time of No Reply" with strings because I plan to put the string-less version on a different album where it will fit better. You'll see what I mean soon.

01 Time of No Reply [String Arrangement] (Nick Drake)
02 I Was Made to Love Magic (Nick Drake)
03 Joey (Nick Drake)
04 Clothes of Sand (Nick Drake)
05 Brittle Days I [Instrumental] (Nick Drake)
06 Mayfair (Nick Drake)
07 Been Smoking Too Long (Nick Drake)
08 Strange Meeting II (Nick Drake)
09 Brittle Days III [Instrumental] (Nick Drake)
10 They're Leaving Me Behind (Nick Drake)
11 Blossom (Nick Drake)
12 Far Leys [Instrumental] (Nick Drake)
13 Bird Flew By (Nick Drake)
14 Rain (Nick Drake)
15 Come into the Garden (Nick Drake)
16 Brittle Days II [Instrumental] (Nick Drake)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15111067/NickDr_1969_TimeofNoRplyAlternateVersion_atse.zip.html

Note that the album cover is the same as the original, but cropped slightly to remove some text at the bottom touting the number of previously unreleased songs and so on. 

Also, I year or so after I first posted this album, I colorized the black and white original.