Audible Greg

Did it take probably suicide to make Nick Drake compelling to a mass market? Are Drake's songs ultimately peripheral to his mythology? Did Island fumble the marketing of his first three records so completely that Drake never got a fair shot at the marketplace? "I think the failure of his music to be successful in his lifetime was Nick's tragedy and the source of his unhappiness," Joe Boyd tells me, when asked about the irony of Drake's considerable posthumous success.

In this stunning debut, Shawn Vestal transports us to the afterlife, the rugged Northwest, and the early days of Mormonism. From “The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death”, an absurd, profound vision of a hellish heaven, to “Winter Elders”, in which missionaries calmly and relentlessly pursue a man who has left the fold, these nine stories illuminate the articles of faith that make us human.