The Sixty Seconds That Found Nick Drake

In October of 1999, a sixty-second commercial for a Volkswagen Cabrio runs on American television. Four young people drive at twilight through country hills, headlights low, the dashboard glow on their faces. They arrive at a house party — loud, lit, crowded — pause at the edge of the driveway, look at each other, and pull away. The screen fades. A line of text reads, Drivers Wanted. Underneath the whole thing, almost whispering, a man's voice and a single steel-string guitar. The song is "Pink Moon." It was recorded in two nights at Sound Techniques in London in October of 1971, by a twenty-three-year-old named Nick Drake.

Drake made three studio albums in his lifetime. None of them sold more than a few thousand copies. He died in November of 1974 at twenty-six, in his childhood bedroom in Tanworth-in-Arden, from an overdose of amitriptyline. Through the eighties and most of the nineties, Pink Moon — the third and final record he made, the one he is said to have left at the front desk at Island Records in a paper bag and walked out of without speaking to anyone — sold maybe six thousand copies a year, to a small congregation that traded the rumor of him.

Then the ad ran. Within months, Pink Moon sold seventy-four thousand copies. Within a year, the album moved more units than it had in the previous twenty-five years combined. A generation heard Nick Drake for the first time through a sixty-second commercial for a German convertible.

It is easy to roll one's eyes at this. The cynic's reading is that art was conscripted into commerce; a quiet song was paid to sell a car. The more useful reading is the opposite. A creative director at an ad agency in Boston named Lance Jensen heard "Pink Moon" in his own car one night, knew the song would not survive any focus group or algorithmic taste-test, and made the call anyway. He cleared the publishing. He held the door open. The song found a room it had never been built for, and a quarter of a century after it was made, the song won.

Sync is the third room. Not the room the writer built the song for, not the room the gatekeeper curates, not the room the artist could have walked into on his own. It is the room a stranger in a different industry, in a different city, decides the song belongs in. Moby licensed every track on Play because no one was buying the record, then sold ten million copies. "1234" by Feist reached a generation through an iPod Nano spot. "Mad World," covered by Gary Jules, traveled the world through Donnie Darko. Each one was placed by someone outside the band, in a room the band would never enter, with a decision the band did not control.

The work of the independent artist in this century is not only to write the song. It is to keep it findable in rooms one will never enter — clear the publishing, register the masters, answer the email when the music supervisor writes on a Tuesday afternoon. The art of the work is private. The math of the work is hospitality. Leave the door open. Some night, headlights low, the convertible is coming.

He never knew. He never had to. The song he made in two days in 1971 was waiting, for twenty-eight years, in a room he could not have imagined, for an evening he was no longer alive to see.