From the start, Nick Drake was championed by his producer, the legendary Joe Boyd, who ensured Nick’s albums stayed in print via his Hannibal Records imprint. A distribution deal with Rykodisc in the early ‘90s resulted in the albums on CD in improved quality over their original budget releases a few years earlier in the U.K. He also took the opportunity to curate a compilation of music culled from the four albums. Way To Blue is presented as an “introduction” to Nick Drake, which is a tall order. But if anyone could distill two and a half hours of known official Nick recordings to a single CD in a fresh sequence, it would be Joe Boyd. Five songs each from the first two albums are shuffled among four from Pink Moon and two from Time Of No Reply—one of which is “Black Eyed Dog”, in a bold move.
Considering the quality of the music to begin with, Way To Blue certainly delivered on its agenda. It sold very well through the rest of the ‘90s, particularly in the wake of the “Pink Moon” Volkswagen commercial. But in 2004, in conjunction with another catalog revamp, a collection called A Treasury appeared in something of an attempt to upgrade Way To Blue, which didn’t need it, even in the SACD format. This was compiled by the estate, swapped out a few songs, and—most maddeningly—included a hidden track at the end of the European pressings. “Plasir D’Amour” was a brief instrumental recorded during the Pink Moon sessions but deliberately left off that album; it’s best known to Americans as the melody to Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love”. By then there were other, more convenient places to put this, and it was frankly careless of the estate, which has generally avoided exploitation, for not making it easier and cheaper for fans to find. Of course, whatever causes anyone to find and then ingest all of Nick’s music is a good thing.
Nick Drake Way To Blue: An Introduction To Nick Drake (1994)—4½
Nick Drake A Treasury (2004)—4
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