My least liked song on the album when I first heard it in the early 90s has turned into one of my favourite ones. I guess that I was simply prejudiced against guitar finger picking and that I was the product of heavy electric 1990s guitar riffs, and not an ear familiar to guitar picking. But perhaps not.
I remember struggling to picture what the song was about too. I only remember enjoying the overall effect, with its bluesy lamenting drone, although feeling rather at a loss.
And now this is a song I can have on for three hours running – dreaming my time away. Perhaps the context in which you hear music matters a lot more than you think. I am now much more familiar with acoustic guitar than I was then. I’d lived surrounded by electric jazz and rock guitarists (a dad and a brother) but this is possibly just an excuse of sorts.
But now I can see the fingers on the fret. I can see the slow acceleration at the beginning, the steady rhythm, broken up at some point by a somewhat different landscape, only to pick speed up again, somehow propelled forward again. And the deep soulful guitar playing.
I can now clearly hear the double-bass’s sudden injectures, beautifully counterpointing the driving tempo.
I now find meaning in visualising a journey of sorts, on an empty road, possibly. It has been suggested that Nick Drake loved driving and that it took three hours to get to London. And this music seems to agree with that.
And so it takes me back to long car journeys in the back of a car, as a kid, looking out the window, the engine droning away, in a pleasant purr.
If a journey of motion, where does it take you?
Somewhere where some try to assert themselves, others prefer to pass unnoticed? Is this what the allusion to master and slave allude to?
So, the journey is the fabric in which you make your life.

A beautiful mood piece, in the fashion of the best Asian or Arabic, or even jazz tunes where you can lose yourself at will.