This, and the other 18 songs that make up Molly Drake's eponymous album, were recorded some 60 years ago in a parlor in England; we only have these songs today, of course, because she happened to be the mother of English folk demigod and gloom poet Nick Drake. Comparisons to him needn't drone on; she was, after all, a songwriter long before him. One can take her music as simple parlor ditties, but closer attention shows her writing to be complex and deeply insightful. "I Remember" may, at first, strike the listener as a catalog of pleasant memories; it may even be found humorous. By the time of the song's final lyric, though, Drake shows that she can encapsulate the essence of a fractured relationship in one haunting line. Like her son, she's left behind a relatively small canon, and one must remember that these songs were never meant to be heard by the public. That makes them no less compelling. Molly Drake died in 1993.
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