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Nick Drake was 20 and still at Cambridge when Island Records signed him. The producer Joe Boyd had heard a demo he’d recorded in his college room. He made three albums in three years. The last, Pink Moon, took two late-night sessions with just his guitar and an engineer. Together they sold fewer than 4,000 copies while he was alive. He moved back to his parents’ house in Tanworth-in-Arden and died there in 1974. He was 26. Twenty-five years later, Volkswagen used Pink Moon in an advert, and its sales in America jumped from about 6,000 a year to 74,000. He’s buried in the village churchyard, and the last line of the album is carved on his headstone.

Song: Fruit Tree, from Five Leaves Left.
Photos: Keith Morris; Tanworth-in-Arden by P Gaskell and the grave by Mike Parker (both CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons. by @onrhune

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Leonard Cohen moved to the Greek island of Hydra at 25 to write, buying an old stone house with money his grandmother left him. In the island’s grocery shop he met Marianne Ihlen, who was crying; her husband had just left her alone with their baby son. They spent most of the 1960s together. At 33 he released his first album, with a song for her that began as “Come on, Marianne.” She’s on the back of the next one, at his typewriter on Hydra. Not long after, they parted. In July 2016, Marianne was dying in Oslo. He wrote to her within hours: “I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand.” A friend read it to her, and she died days later. Three months after that, so did he.

Photos: Riksarkivet (National Archives of Norway), no restrictions, and Kaethe17 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons; Hydra 1960 by James Burke; back cover of Songs from a Room (Columbia, 1969). by @onrhune

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Sufjan Stevens was one when his mother, Carrie, left. When he was five she married Lowell Brams, and the children spent three summers with them in Eugene, Oregon, where Lowell played him his records. They split when he was eight. At 24, his first album came out on Asthmatic Kitty, the label he started with Lowell (named after Lowell’s cat). Carrie died in December 2012. He recorded Carrie & Lowell in friends’ studios across America, and some of it on an iPhone in a Klamath Falls hotel room. Five years later, he and Lowell made Aporia together.

Photos: Garrison Reid (CC BY 2.0), Oslomonsoon (CC BY-SA 4.0), Bobjgalindo (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. by @onrhune

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Joni Mitchell had polio at nine; it left her left hand weak, so she invented dozens of her own guitar tunings. At 21, in Toronto, she had a daughter, Kelly Dale, and gave her up for adoption. On Blue, in 1971, Little Green was about her, but no one knew until a college roommate sold the story to a tabloid in 1993. In 1997, her daughter, renamed Kilauren Gibb, found her. In 2015 an aneurysm left Joni unable to walk or talk; in 2022 she played a surprise set at Newport. She relearned guitar by watching videos of herself. by @onrhune

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6 years of Adrianne Lenker’s songs.
In spring 2020, Big Thief’s tour was cut short. Adrianne Lenker rented a one-room cabin in the hills of western Massachusetts and asked the engineer Phil Weinrobe to help her record there.
“The one room cabin felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar - it was such a joy to hear the notes reverberate in the space.”
Setting up took almost three weeks. For a while the only working recorder was Phil’s battery-powered Sony Walkman, until a friend dug an Otari eight-track out of storage. They recorded from late April to late May, all to tape.
The rain, the wind, the wood stove, the chimes on the porch, birds and insects are on the record too. Each day began and ended with an improvised guitar piece; the best of them became instrumentals, released alongside songs in October 2020. by @onrhune

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At 24, Justin Vernon moved to North Carolina with his band. Within a year he’d had mono and a liver infection, been pushed out of the band and broken up with his girlfriend.

At 25 he drove home overnight to his father’s hunting cabin in Wisconsin and stayed three months. He hunted, stacked wood, and recorded on a 1964 Silvertone guitar, stacking his falsetto into a choir. He named it after “bon hiver”, French for “good winter”, which he’d seen on Northern Exposure, and dropped the h. He self-released 500 CDs.

For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver. Jagjaguwar, 19 February 2008.

Photos: Bon Iver by Moses (CC BY 2.0) and Pedro from Lisboa (CC BY 2.0); Wisconsin forest by Tony Webster (CC BY-SA 2.0).

#boniver #foremmaforeverago #skinnylove #justinvernon by @onrhune

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Phoebe Bridgers was nine when Elliott Smith died. Years later he was one of her heroes. She picked up the guitar at 13 and grew up busking at the Pasadena Farmers Market.

Punisher’s title track imagines meeting him, as the fan who won’t stop talking. “Kyoto”, written on tour in Japan, is about her dad; they started talking again in lockdown, the year it came out. He died in January 2023.

Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers. Dead Oceans, 18 June 2020.

Photos: Phoebe Bridgers by David Lee (CC BY 2.0) and Thomson200 (CC0); Elliott Smith by Constintina Trainwreck (CC BY 2.0); Elliott Smith memorial wall by MacLeod (CC BY 2.0); Kyoto by Kanchi1979 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

#phoebebridgers #punisher #kyoto #elliottsmith by @onrhune

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Cameron Winter said he recorded his first solo album in Guitar Center stores, moving on each time he got thrown out. He didn’t. The singer in Geese made it with an engineer he knew, playing most of it himself, and put it out in December 2024 with little fanfare.

A year later, Pitchfork ranked it the third-best album of 2025. In December 2025 he played Carnegie Hall alone, and Paul Thomas Anderson filmed it on 35mm.

Cameron Winter, Heavy Metal, 2024.

Photos: Cameron Winter by Lygonstreet; Guitar Center by BrianReading; Carnegie Hall by Yair Haklai (all CC BY-SA 4.0).

#cameronwinter #heavymetal #geese #partisanrecords by @onrhune

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6 years of Adrianne Lenker’s songs.

In spring 2020, Big Thief’s tour was cut short. Adrianne Lenker rented a one-room cabin in the hills of western Massachusetts and asked the engineer Phil Weinrobe to help her record there.

“The one room cabin felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar - it was such a joy to hear the notes reverberate in the space.”

Setting up took almost three weeks. For a while the only working recorder was Phil’s battery-powered Sony Walkman, until a friend dug an Otari eight-track out of storage. They recorded from late April to late May, all to tape.

The rain, the wind, the wood stove, the chimes on the porch, birds and insects are on the record too. Each day began and ended with an improvised guitar piece; the best of them became instrumentals, released alongside songs in October 2020. by @onrhune

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The bedroom on the cover of Titanic Rising is real. Weyes Blood built it at the bottom of a swimming pool. by @onrhune

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Gus Van Sant asked Elliott Smith if he could use his songs in Good Will Hunting. Smith gave him several, including a new one for the end credits, Miss Misery. In 1998 it was nominated for Best Original Song.

Smith hadn’t planned to perform. The Academy’s producers told him the song would be played live either way, by him or by another musician of their choosing. Beforehand he told reporters, “Mainly I just want to go so I can wear my white suit.”

On 23 March 1998 he played a shortened version at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Jack Nicholson was sitting about six feet away, so he looked up at the balcony at the back instead.

Miss Misery lost to My Heart Will Go On, from Titanic. Reading out the winner, Madonna said, “What a shocker!” Smith later called the night “surreal”, and said he threw himself into it “because it seemed to make my friends happy”. by @onrhune

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11 years of Max Richter’s Sleep.

Max Richter spent two years writing Sleep, a piece of more than eight hours meant to be heard while asleep. He called it “a personal lullaby for a frenetic world. A manifesto for a slower pace of existence.”

It came out on 4 September 2015. Later that month, on the night of 26 September, it was played in full for the first time in the Reading Room of the Wellcome Collection in London: Richter on piano and electronics, the soprano Grace Davidson and five string players, from midnight to 8am, to an audience in beds. BBC Radio 3 broadcast all of it live, the longest live broadcast of a single piece of music. by @onrhune

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