When we learned that Nick Drake wasn’t dead, it obviously came as a shock. When we learned that he had faked his death and spent the next fifty years anonymously singing backup on everything from Ginuwine to Blondie, we nearly shit ourselves. The baritone vocoder at the beginning of Pony? Nick Drake. The low harmony on the chorus of Heart of Glass? Nick Drake. The response on the pre-chorus of Take On Me? Nick Fucking Drake. He broke the news on Twitter, announced a world tour, then he took to the podcast and late-night circuits. Imagine the astonishment we felt hearing that tender voice on Rogan, entertaining the possibility of a fake moon landing? Or seeing his lank frame on Kimmel, making projections about Pete Davidson’s dating prospects? We couldn’t believe it. Everything we’d known about anything had been shattered. Nick Drake. The ghost-singer. The phantom-guitarist. The man who stopped performing live because it was too painful to tune between songs. The man whose sister hypothesized he’d died a virgin. The man of whom there is—was—a single known video, thirteen seconds long, walking away and disappearing into a crowd. See you for yourself. Here’s the link: Nick Drake 70's festival. But now he was back. He was on our laptops, in our phones, smiling and laughing and turning those legendarily pale cheeks rosy. We couldn’t go on. This was the uncrossable line. So we called our friend at UPS and obtained his address. Then we drove under the cover of night and shot him through his bedroom window. He was on Zoom call with Mike Pence. Who the hell knows why? It only served to validate our decision. The way we saw it, we had returned a small amount of order to the world.