Nick Drake / Bryter Layter / 1971
One of These Things First
wistful, quietly devastating, resigned
A quiet catalog of unrealized selves, sung by someone who lists all the modest, useful things he might have become instead of what he is. The song never says what went wrong, only that it did, and the gap between conditional and present tense becomes the whole emotional content.
unfulfilled potential self-doubt longing for ordinariness paralysis regret
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses someone close to him (a lover, friend, or possibly himself), reflecting on all the roles he failed to occupy. The voice is gentle but unreliable in its self-assessment, since it never states what actually happened, only what didn't.
What happens
The song doesn't move through events; it moves through hypotheticals. Each verse offers a fresh set of humble objects and roles the speaker imagines he could have been, building toward a repeated question of how any of it could be achieved, before collapsing into the same unresolved admission that closes each verse.
How it's built
Three verses built from paired couplets of concrete nouns, each followed by a short bridge-like turn from conditional to modal verbs (could, would, should) that tightens the emotional screws, then a refrain that repeats the title phrase twice, as if trying to convince itself. The lack of a bridge or key change keeps the song circular rather than developing, reinforcing stasis.
Section by section
Verse 1
The speaker opens with occupations and objects that suggest utility and steadiness rather than glamour—professions and household items instead of romantic ideals. This sets the song's central image system: worth measured in reliability, not achievement...
First bridge
“I could be here and now”
The turn from list to direct address introduces urgency and a question that goes unanswered. The rhetorical 'how' exposes the gap between wanting and doing, functioning as the song's emotional crux even before the refrain arrives.
Refrain
The doubled repetition of the title phrase reads less as resignation than as rehearsal—someone trying on the sentence until it sounds true, without ever quite landing it.
Verse 2
Here the objects become explicitly relational—things that support, shelter, or accompany another person. The catalog escalates in intimacy, ending on the stark possibility of being the terminus of someone's whole life, which raises the emotional stakes without changing the song's passive grammar.
Verse 3
The final verse returns to the earlier imagery of small useful objects, but the bridge shifts from 'here and now' to being merely 'near,' a diminishment that suggests exhaustion rather than resolution. The song ends where it began, structurally underlining its theme of arrested motion.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated opening of lines with the same conditional phrase drills in the sense of endless possibility that never resolves into action.
- catalog/list
- Pairing ordinary objects and roles (a cook, a clock, a door) flattens grand ambition into humble domestic imagery, suggesting the speaker isn't even asking for greatness, just function.
- synecdoche
- Objects like a pillar or a door stand in for entire relational roles—support, entry, permanence—compressing complex emotional functions into single, plain nouns.
- modal verb progression
- The shift from 'could' to 'would' to 'should' across the bridges traces a movement from possibility to obligation to guilt, without ever reaching actual accomplishment.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about depression's arithmetic: the speaker can imagine every steady, useful, connected version of himself in exact detail, which only makes the failure to become any of them more acute. The specificity of the list is not whimsy but proof he has thought about it exhaustively. A secondary reading takes the song as addressed to a former or potential lover, an apology for absence and inconsistency in a relationship, with the domestic objects doubling as images of care he didn't provide. Both readings agree on the central mechanism: capability rendered inert by some unnamed obstacle, possibly internal.
Context
Bryter Layter (1971) is often described as Drake's most outward-facing, arranged record, sitting between the sparse intimacy of Five Leaves Left and the stark bareness of Pink Moon. This track is one of the album's most minimal, largely just voice and guitar amid more orchestrated surroundings, which places its emotional plainness in relief against the album's lusher production. Biographical readings connecting the song directly to Drake's own struggles are common but speculative, since he left little direct commentary on his own lyrics.
Listen for
- the stripped arrangement compared to the rest of the album, isolating the voice and guitar
- the modal verb shift from could to would to should across each bridge
- the way the refrain's repetition feels less like conviction than self-persuasion
- the contrast between mundane objects and their emotional weight as relational metaphors
- the absence of any resolution or change in tense by the song's end
About Nick Drake
Nicholas Rodney Drake was an English musician. An accomplished acoustic guitarist, Drake signed to Island Records at the age of twenty while still a student at the University of Cambridge.
1948 - 1974 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue