I’m walking down University Terrace, a road that cuts through the heart of Ohio University. An autumnal paradise surrounds me. The air is crisp and light. The grass is a lush green, bearing remnants of rain from the prior evening. Tall trees stretch massive trunks into a pale blue sky, as branches arch over the sidewalks and delicately drop leaves of gold, brown, and orange.

A soft, kind voice, singing above acoustic guitar, organ, and piano, accompanies my steps. “I never felt magic crazy as this / I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea / I never held emotion in the palm of my hand / Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree / But now you’re here / Brighten my northern sky.” The husky voice belongs to Nick Drake, a British folk artist from the late 60s/early 70s; he provides the perfect soundtrack for autumn.

The first way Drake harnesses the beauty of autumn is with his lyrics, which summon the tradition of Romanticism. Romanticism had three key traits: an appeal to basic human emotion, a wonderment of nature, and the communication of these topics with simple, unpretentious language. Romantic literature was also steeped in autumn; the poets of Romanticism found constant inspiration from the autumn season. John Keats wrote a legendary poem, titled “To Autumn.” Before Drake became a full-time musician at the tender age of 20, he was a student of English at the University of Cambridge. His lyrics clearly reflect this education.

Consider this lovely passage from “Cello Song,” a song from Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left: “You would seem so frail / In the cold of the night/ When the armies of emotion / Go out to fight/ But while the earth sinks to its grave / You sail to the sky / On the crest of a wave.” In “Things Behind the Sun,” a track from his third album, Pink Moon, Drake sings: “Don’t be shy you learn to fly / And see the sun when day is done / If only you see / Just what you are beneath a star / That came to stay one rainy day/ In autumn for free.”

Drake’s writing reflects Romantic principles, and his vocabulary is clear and pronounced. There is nothing jejune about it. We can feel the “cold of the night” and imagine the “crest of the wave” in “Cello Song.” We can envision faint light from the “star” and feel the hazy drizzles of the “one rainy day” in “Things Behind the Sun.” In “Northern Sky,” we can see the light of the moon. We can feel the breezes from those trees. This basic appeal to emotion and simple observation of natural beauty is a hallmark of Romanticism, and Drake captures it in a remarkable way.

The second autumnal characteristic of Drake’s music is the instrumentation, which inspires the images of autumn. The one word that describes Drake is gentle. His voice floats over the soft, finger-picking style of his guitar playing, which he couples beautifully with lovely strings and reserved woodwinds. Songs such as “The River Man,” “Cello Song,” “At the Chime of a City Clock,” and “One of These Things First,” and especially “Bryter Layter” positively sparkle with these characteristics.

Drake’s voice in “At the Chime of a City Clock,” with its understated quality and hushed, husky sound, is like a cool October breeze blowing through the listener’s hair. The piano of “One of These Things First” plays rolling arpeggios with the nimbleness of falling leaves. The strings of “The River Man” have a foreboding darkness; they anticipate the shorter days of autumn. “Cello Song,” as the title would indicate, utilizes the rich timber of cellos, which inspire pastoral images of brown earth and yellow harvest.

“Bryter Layter,” though, is the single greatest example of autumn as music. An instrumental, the track begins with Drake on guitar. Joining him is a light, jazzy drumbeat, and then following that is a lovely flute, which states the melody of the song. When the song enters the second phase of the melody, though, light, imperceptible strings join the flute, creating a heartbreaking beauty to the track. All throughout, Drake and the drums continue as the rhythmic foundation.

Listening to “Bryter Layter,” I am reminded of apple picking with my family. Drake plays guitar with the same deliberation of walking through a corn maze. The flute sways with the delicacy and preciousness of a pale, blue sky. The strings, with their rich harmony, feel like a bright sun streaming through the trees, or a tranquil breeze coolly caressing your cheek. And the entire song, a culmination of these elements, creates the innocent colors of the apple orchard—the yellow of the hay; the brown of the dirt; the green of the grass; the burgundy and orange of the leaves.

Drake’s albums were gorgeous and ahead of their time. The music was a highly unique brand of folk, jazz, and classical, and his lyrics recalled the poetry of Romanticism. Artists as diverse as Elliot Smith, the Black Crowes, and even Kate Bush have cited Drake as an influence.

Brilliant as they were, though, Drake’s albums generated little response from critics or the general public when they were released. Bryter Layter, the second of the three, barely sold 1,000 copies. Overcome with depression and consumed by failure, Drake overdosed on sleeping pills in 1974. He was 26 years old.

This sense of shortcoming seeps through the seams of Pink Moon, the last full-length album Drake recorded. Emphasizing his singing and guitar playing, Drake recorded the album as a response to his previous failures, stripping his sound to its foundation and wasting little time with the glitz and tinsel to attract an “audience;” yet, the album is still autumnal.

“And I was green, greener than the hill,” sings Drake in the song “Place to Be.” “Where the flowers grew and the sun shone still / Now I’m darker than the deepest sea / Just hand me down, give me a place to be.” In the song “Harvest Breed,” this sense of loneliness and despair is even stronger: “Falling fast and falling free you look to find a friend / Falling fast and falling free this could just be the end / Falling fast you stoop to touch and kiss the flowers that bend / And you’re ready now/ For the harvest breed.” The inherent sadness of the recordings is exacerbated by Drake’s singing, which sounds torn, tired, and exhausted. He sounds ready for the harvest breed. Though nature is still mentioned, it is no longer Drake’s inspiration. The kind, caring nature of his first two albums—the nature of a Romantic—is replaced by the nature of a cynic, of a modernist: a nature of cold indifference.

The one element of Pink Moon that retains the excitement of Drake’s first two albums is his guitar playing, which was never sharper, more precise, or more masterful; however, this is a double-edged sword. By better, I mean sadder—each strum of Drake’s guitar digs deeper into agony and self-loathing.

Autumn is the fatal, unavoidable chime of the city clock, a reminder that life does not stop and we must move on, changing like the colors of the leaves.For Drake, life moved on until it finally stopped in the fall of 1974. Since his death, Nick Drake’s words and music have grown in prosperity, and record companies have seized on this growing hysteria for all things Drake.

Three additional albums of b-sides and rarities have been released the last 20 years, including a collection of home recordings from when Drake was a teenager. While these recordings provide further insight into Drake the artist, his first three albums—the three he was alive to see released—remain his definitive statement of Romantic, agonized passion; today, almost 40 years after their release, they remain the definitive autumnal soundtrack.