lyrics

Three hours from sundown
Jeremy flies
Hoping to keep
The sun from his eyes
East from the city
And down to the cave
In search of a master
In search of a slave

Three hours from London
Jacomo's free
Taking his woes
Down to the sea
In search of a lifetime
To tell when he's home
In search of a story
That's never been known

Three hours from speaking
Everyone's flown
Not wanting to be
Seen on their own
Three hours is needed
To leave from them all
Three hours to wonder
And three hours to fall

Three hours from sundown
Jeremy flies
Hoping to keep
The sun from his eyes
East from the city
And down to the cave
In search of a master
In search of a slave

musicians

Nick Drake - Guitar

notes

"There certainly was a dark side to Nick, right from the start...I remember the first time I heard 'Three Hours' - at Madingley, the American cemetry - we'd gone out there one night, and it was very scary, just to hear him play that there. I'm not saying that dark side was all based on drugs, or him reading 'The Myth of Sisyphus'...I think Nick did look into these things like Wittgenstein, Camus, structuralism...That sort of blank, negative, nihilist side of life...but he wasn't unique in that. Walking around Cambridge in those days, there were fifty people worse than Nick that you would pass on the pavement every hour ..."

Robert Kirby

" 'Three Hours', one of the album's most beguiling tracks, is the only song we know to be directly inspired by someone Nick knew. Jeremy Mason, Nick's old friend from Marlborough, accompanied him on that pivotal trip to Aix in 1967, but hadn't seen him for some time after that: 'I bumped into a chap called Robert Kirby, at the George in Bishop's Sortford. We were talking about Nick, and he said: 'Oh, so you're Jermemy Mason...Nick wrote a song about you on this LP we've just been doing; it's called 'Three Hours''. This would have been 1969.

Patrick Humphries