"Northern Sky"
Bryter Layter, 1970

Nick Drake is an immensely powerful singer-songwriter who can talk about things like love and depression (generally his own) through music that doesn't sound depressive - the above track is about feeling totally alienated from the world, and it's dressed up as a love song.

"Man In A Shed"
Five Leaves Left, 1969

Some of his other work is more obviously melancholic, yeah, particularly this jaunty number about coping (or possibly not coping) with the onset of depression and simultaneously needing people in one's life and thinking that your presence worsens theirs. I've been there. It's not a happy place. But then, life wasn't a happy place for Nick Drake either.

"Pink Moon"
Pink Moon, 1972

The thing about Nick Drake is that, well, he was the kind of genius that cannot stay for very long. He overdosed on antidepressants and died in 1974, after a long battle with depression. But depression isn't a battle, really; it's a war of attrition, a meat grinder, and someone like him couldn't stay in there long. He suffered, and died, and was forgotten, and it's up to us to remember him.

Though he also features on a Volkswagen-branded mixtape.

Make of that what you will.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

"Now we rise and we are everywhere."
--"From the Morning", Nick Drake, Pink Moon, 1972