Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain was the lead singer and the guitarist of an American
grunge band called Nirvana. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington, on 20
February 1967. His birth name was Kurt Donald Cobain.

When Cobain was eight years old, his parents divorced. This divorce
gave bad impact on his life. He became more withdrawn. As a teenager, he
usually went to the punk rock shows in Settle. He even spent his time by
singing and painting rather than going to school. He usually sang and listened
to the Beatles, Kiss, Black Sabbath, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash.

At his fourteenth birthday, his uncle gave him a guitar as the gift. Since
that, he began work on his own songs. He and his friend, Krist Novoselic
usually practiced music in the upstairs room of a salon own by Novoselic`s
mother. In 1986, they formed a grunge band named Nirvana. Cobain was the
vocalist and guitar and Novoselic played bass. They released their first album
titled Bleach in 1989. In 1991 they released the second album, Nevermind. It
was their greatest album which made them a kind of popular superstar. This
album included popular songs like Smell Like Teen Spirit, About A Girl, Come
as You Are, In Bloom and Lithium.

However the popularity was intimidating to Cobain. At the early `90s,

he began addicted to drugs. His marriage with Courtney Love on 24 February
1992 and the presented of their daughter named Frances Bean made Cobain
a bit calm. In these years Nirvana released the third album, Incesticide.

However, in 1993 Cobain`s addiction became worse, even he

overdosed on heroin. On the 1st March 1994, after performed in Munich,
Germany, he was diagnosed with bronchitis and laryngitis. On March 30, he
went to a rehabilitation place for recovered his addiction. But, on 1 April
1994, he ran away from the rehabilitation place. He was reported missing for
a few days. Then on 8 April 1994, he was found dead in his house in Lake
Washington. He had shot himself.
Nick Drake (1948-1974) was an English singer-songwriter known for his gentle, autumnal songs and his
virtuoso right hand finger picking technique. Although he recorded only three albums, critics and fellow
musicians hold his work in very high esteem. Drake failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime, which
fed his severe clinical depression. Since his death, however, Drake’s music has gained a significant cult
following. Born in Burma on the 19th of June 1948 Died November 25th 1974

Biography
Drake’s father worked as an engineer. Although he was born in Rangoon, Burma, Nick’s family moved back
to England soon afterward, and Drake was brought up in Tanworth-in-Arden, a small village in the English
county of Warwickshire. He went to public school at Marlborough College, where he learned to play the flute.
As a young adult, Drake enrolled in Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge to study English. His older sister,
Gabrielle Drake, is an actress.

Drake was a fan of British and the emerging American folk music scene, including Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs.
While a university student, Drake began performing in local clubs and coffee houses. He was discovered by
Ashley Hutchings, the bass player of the folk rock group Fairport Convention. Hutchings introduced Drake to
the other members of Fairport Convention, folk singer John Martyn and producer Joe Boyd.

Drake’s associates convinced Island Records to sign the young singer/songwriter to a three-album contract.
At the age of twenty, he released his first album Five Leaves Left (1969), which featured a chamber music
quartet on several songs and had a light, breezy sound. Drake’s second album Bryter Layter (1970)
introduced a more upbeat, jazzier sound, with keyboards, horns and several brass instruments. Both albums
were produced by Boyd and featured several members of Fairport Convention.

Many accounts of Drake focus on his mythology, but a large part of his enduring popularity is due to his
meticulous songwriting, prosody, odd guitar tunings and lyricism.

Drake was pathologically shy and resented touring. The few concerts he did play were usually in support of
other British folk acts of the time, such as Fairport Convention or John Martyn and were often brief and
awkward. Partially because of this, his work received little attention and sold poorly. Whilst in the recording
studio, he was so shy that he’d always play into the wall so as to avoid people’s gazes.

Severely clinically depressed and doubting his abilities as a musician, Drake recorded his final album Pink
Moon (1972) in two two-hour sessions, both starting at midnight. The songs of Pink Moon were short (the
album consists of eleven of them and lasts only 28 minutes) and emotionally bleak. Drake recorded them
unaccompanied, in the presence of only a sound engineer (a piano was later overdubbed on the title track).
Naked and sincere, it is widely thought to be his best work. After recording the album, Drake dropped off the
master tapes at the front desk of Island Records’ office building and then swore he was retiring from
performing music, planning to train to be a computer programmer and possibly write songs for others to
perform. The master tapes lay on a secretary’s desk over the weekend and were not noticed until later the
next week.

However, none of Drake’s plans materialized. In the next few months, Drake grew severely depressed and
maintained relationships only with close friends such as John Martyn, who wrote the title song of his 1973
album Solid Air for and about Drake and French singer Françoise Hardy. He was hospitalized several times
and lived with Hardy for a few months. Friends from that time have described how much his appearance
changed: his nails grown, his hair and frame long and thin.

In 1974, Drake felt well enough to write and record a few new songs. However, on November 24, he died of
an overdose of antidepressants. The coroner concluded that the cause of Drake’s death was suicide,
although this was disputed by friends and relatives. Antidepressants of that time were quite lethal if ingested
in any higher dosage than the one prescribed. His mother recounts that he must have had difficulty sleeping
and had got up in the night to have a bowl of cornflakes. It’s unclear whether he took more pills to help him
sleep or to take his own life.

His simple gravestone in the Tanworth churchyard bears the line ‘And now we rise/And we are everywhere’,
taken from “From the Morning”-the last song on the last album Nick lived to complete - a beautiful song and
one of his mother’s favourites.
Posthumous popularity
Since Drake’s death, his music has grown steadily in popularity. Several modern musicians, such as Lucinda
Williams, Badly Drawn Boy, Matthew Good, Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow, R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, Blur’s
Graham Coxon, and Belle and Sebastian, consider Drake an important influence. In early 1999, BBC2 aired
a 40-minute Nick Drake documentary, “A Stranger Among Us — In Search of Nick Drake”, as part of its
Picture This strand. The following year saw the release of a documentary by Dutch director Jeroen
Berkvens, titled A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake and featuring interviews with Joe Boyd, Gabrielle
Drake, audio engineer John Wood and arranger Robert Kirby. Brad Pitt is a fan of Drake and, in 2004, he
narrated a BBC radio documentary about the singer [1].

Island has responded to Drake’s popularity with several new releases including Time of No Reply (1986), an
album of unreleased material including four new songs recorded in 1974, Way to Blue (1994), a “best of”
album, remastered HDCD releases of his three studio albums in 2000, and Made to Love Magic (2004),
featuring one new track and some newly recorded orchestration for a previously released track. A
replacement for Way to Blue called A Treasury was also released in 2004 on Hybrid-SACD.

In 2000, Volkswagen licensed the title track of Pink Moon for a particularly serene car commercial in the US.
The advertisement caused a significant bounce in Drake’s popularity, bolstered by uses of Drake’s music on
a number of film soundtracks, including 1998’s Hideous Kinky and Practical Magic (featuring “Road” from
Pink Moon and “Black Eyed Dog” from Time of No Reply, respectively). In 2001, two Bryter Layter tracks
appeared in mainstream films: “Northern Sky” in Serendipity, and “Fly” in The Royal Tenenbaums. In the
same year, “’Cello Song” from Five Leaves Left was featured in Me Without You. In 2004, “One of These
Things First” appeared in Garden State and “Northern Sky” was featured again, this time in Fever Pitch.

Drake’s “River Man” has become quite popular among Jazz musicians. A piano improvisation based on the
melody was released by Brad Mehldau on the album “Art of the Trio: volume 5”, and a Jazz vocal version by
Claire Martin appears on the album Take My Heart.

Drake’s posthumous popularity has made many fans consider the lyrics to “Fruit Tree” a song from Five
Leaves Left prophetic: “Fame is but a fruit tree / So very unsound. / It can never flourish / Till its stalk is in
the ground. / So men of fame / Can never find a way / Till time has flown / Far from their dying day.” In 2004
two of his singles reached low positions in the UK charts - “Magic” and “River Man”.

Most recently, Nick Drake has emerged as a key influence in the resurgence of 1960’s and 1970’s folk
traditions known as the New Weird America. This label serves as an umbrella term for a variety of artists
including Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Six Organs of Admittance.

In 2005, performer Beck updated his website during Christmas time with covers of three songs from Pink
Moon: “Pink Moon”, “Which Will” and “Parasite.”

Family Tree, the next Bryter Music/Island record was released in July, 2007.