"Drake could never see past his own ego"

I think that's a fairly bizarre thing to say. If you read the biography of Nick Drake, the picture you get is of someone who's painfully shy and soft-spoken. Hardly surprising, when you hear the music.

You do get a sense, in the book, of someone who was aware of his talents, and proud of them, as you'd expect, but certainly not an egotist.

If you're talking about the lyrics, well, he doesn't really sing about himself even when there are first-person lines. He wasn't really much of a lyricist - he tended to string vaguely poetic-souding, pretty phrases together, with a slightly melancholy cod-philosophical bent. It's what sensitive young men in their late-teens/early twenties have tended to do for centuries.

They suited his songs though. They conjure a mood. The lyrics on Pink Moon, while perhaps trite in themselves, are quietly rather devastating, in the music's context.