In 2005, classical pianist Christopher O’Riley had what he called the best rock and roll experience of his life at Royce Hall, performing his famed piano renditions of Radiohead and Elliott Smith songs to a noisy, enthusiastic crowd.
On Friday, O’Riley returns, courtesy of UCLA Live, to present the world premiere of his upcoming release, “Second Grace: The Music of Nick Drake.” The show will be more hushed than what brought students to their feet last year, but will feature O’Riley’s finesse over the intricate and bittersweet melancholy of Drake’s music.
“Even with spareness of guitar and vocal stuff, there is a very sophisticated and very resonant guitar-playing going on,” O’Riley said. “It’s partly just the way he gets the guitar to ring with his alternate tuning, which is larger than the instrument itself and therefore is served well by the larger-than-life sonority of the piano at times. I think it’s nice to bathe in his harmonies.”
Over the years since his death, Drake has acquired a position among the great singer-songwriters for his brooding voice and lyrics, adept fretwork on the guitar, and comforting shyness and candor about the things which pained him, qualities which are often likened to Smith’s legacy and to which O’Riley is attracted.
“What makes music or interesting music or art interesting is the juxtaposition or the coexistence of widely disparate ideas or feelings,” O’Riley said. “What Nick and Radiohead and Elliott do is create whole worlds that have good and bad in them and they’re able to do that in one song.”
Drake has influenced a myriad of musicians ranging from The Cure to José González. His status in pop culture, however, came about over 20 years after his death at 26 from an overdose of sleeping medication, a supposed (but still disputed) suicide.
His work got its greatest push into the spotlight when “Pink Moon” was featured in a Volkswagen commercial in 2000. The song, which is the title track of his final album, is a microcosm of his artistic sensibilities, with its soft optimism peaking through Drake’s pervading sadness.
This balance of haunt and hope is what O’Riley hopes to achieve in his renditions.
“I can decide to highlight the musical aspects which are more glorifying and trust that the people who know the song know that I’ve taken great pains to make the rhythm of the melody identical with what he’s saying, or as close to it as I could, and that in itself hopefully is that shuffling looking-at-your-shoes way that he had of putting the lyrics over the top,” O’Riley said.
O’Riley’s intuition for non-classical music was fostered in his youth when he studied both jazz and classic rock in high school. He then attended the New England Conservatory, where he fine-tuned his prowess with classical piano.
Since then, he has used his performances and his airtime hosting NPR’s “From The Top,” a popular classical music program on the radio, to merge the classical and “popular” music worlds, exposing to each the sophistication and true value of music beyond its genre label.
With “Second Grace,” O’Riley has added multiple layers to Drake’s songs, which often only consist of a guitar and melody, to pull out the songs’ ranges of emotion. Largely by incorporating “wrong note playing,” a style used by Thelonious Monk in which musicians jam notes together to imitate the sound of an instrument, O’Riley captures the texture of Drake’s precariously sweet voice and music.
“It probably would be too lush for some people, or too overboard,” O’Riley said. “But I tried to do what works without the lyrics and I tried to do what works, giving the fullest rein possible in terms of translating the guitar figurations … into piano textures which would be at once unique and faithful to the original.”
With his past three albums covering Radiohead and Smith tunes, O’Riley had immersed himself in recordings of the artists’ live shows to get a feel for the true potential of the songs beyond how they were put together in the studio.
But there are no known recordings of Drake’s few performances. In his lifetime, Drake released only three albums, none of which achieved commercial success and which he was too shy to promote through live shows.
But before taking them into the studio, Drake did record many of the songs in his parents’ house. These stripped-down versions were compiled on two widely circulated bootlegs, “Second Grace” and “Tanworth in Arden,” and it is from these particularly that O’Riley has attempted to extract and develop Drake’s true intentions with his music.
“It just sounds to me that, as dedicated and wonderful as those studio musicians are, they weren’t really inside his head, they were just doing their own riffing on mixed material,” O’Riley said. “In a way, that’s inspiring for me because I’m really trying to get to that place where he was when he did the solo version and maybe come up with something that in the end he might have liked.”