Released - February 1972
Genre - Folk
Producer - John Wood
Selected Personnel - Nick Drake (Vocals/Guitar/Piano)
Standout Track - From The Morning
Just the other day a work colleague happened to get me onto the subject of music and asked me which bands I liked. He asked me whether I was a Nick Drake fan and we got talking about his music, with me telling him that he was one of my major musical discoveries of the last few months. He then revealed that a friend of his had actually studied alongside Drake at Cambridge and that he was a very kind, quiet and fun guy. It's an assessment of his personality that chimes well with the softly spoken breathy dreamer that Drake comes across as in his brief recording career. But it's one that, history informs us, came to be less and less the sum of his own mindset as he grew older. The mysterious circumstances surrounding Drake's death in 1974 means to this day reports of just what his own outlook and mindset were like are conflicting and hazy at best. Certainly, we know that in his last few years of life he struggled with severe depression, and his feelings of shyness and inadequacy that had been evident in his music all along came to drive him to even greater extremes of isolation and self-criticism. That his troubled mental state should be hidden behind his kind-hearted and friendly outward performance (although, admittedly, this colleague's friend knew him years before his depression reached its extreme) corresponds tragically well to how the incredible simple beauty of his music could obscure some of the darker and more desperate content in the lyrics.
After Drake's two previous efforts at launching himself as a musician, 1969's Five Leaves Left and 1970's Bryter Layter, failed to strike any sort of chord with the public or the press, the depression that had been lurking behind his music for years took full hold of him. It seems at odds with Drake's quietly withdrawn persona that he desperately wanted fame and fortune and success, but rather it seems more that all he wanted was validation - some sense that he wasn't as alone as he felt and that his music did something to inspire people. When this sense of validation was so non-forthcoming, it drove him to become ever more withdrawn and desperate. His record label wanted nothing else from him, having seen the failure of his two albums as proof of his lack of commercial stock, and for the next year he sought the company of nobody but himself, avoiding friends and family and travelling around Europe to try and straighten out his thoughts. On returning to the UK, he contacted producer John Wood telling him he wanted to record again, and perhaps even then he knew this record wouldn't be another stab at proving himself to people, it would be a resigned goodbye to the world of music before fading away. It was recorded quickly in just two late night sessions (the studio being fully booked during the day), and this time Drake knew he had no interest in finding a mainstream audience so there would be no concessions to chasing a mainstream sound, no instrumental overdubs or strings or full band arrangements. This time he would stick to the impulse he had wanted to follow way back on Five Leaves Left, to record with nothing but his own voice and acoustic guitar (and one overdubbed piano part, also played by Drake himself, on the title track).
The result is by far and away the most mesmerising and beautiful thing Drake ever produced, and perhaps one of the most mesmerising and beautiful folk albums of all time. The idiocy of Joe Boyd for imposing stark, overly dramatic strings and band arrangements onto every single song on his previous two albums is made all the clearer when one hears just how compelling Drake could be with nothing but his own strumming. Despite the sparseness and bareness of the way these songs are composed and arranged, there is never a sense of fatigue listening to this album, or of songs beginning to sound familiar to one another. Each one is a masterclass in concision and simple elegance, each one quietly, softly but insidiously burning its unforgettable melody into the listener's brain. By and large, the music is so beautiful, and Drake's vocal delivery so characteristically soft and hazy that the utterly bleak desperation of the music can pass one by.
Things start positively enough with the title track (the only song to be really given a different sonic palette via the aforementioned bright chimes of the piano), which seems to be little more than an ode to natural beauty, with nothing to particularly make one worry about Drake's mental state. The beautiful yearning of "Place To Be" starts to chart a downward descent as Drake sings of how lost and unsure he feels in his adulthood compared to the hope and innocence we all have of children, and longing to find some place where he can feel truly himself. "Which Will" is desperately lovely, apparently a heartfelt plea to the world to help him understand how he can achieve the admiration and respect of people around him. The song is nothing but a torrent of questions and pleas, and one begins to sense the flailing uncertainties of his mindset. "Things Behind The Sun" and "Parasite" are similar in that they both see Drake examining himself in the context of the society around him, and his feelings of persecution and isolation caused by the judgmental and accusatory way he perceived society in general. "Parasite" is by far the more affecting of the two, seeing him chart the unhappiness and frustration of people in their day-to-day lives before proclaiming "I am the parasite of this town," as though blaming himself for the misery he saw around him. It's an uncomfortably sad moment, and perhaps the emotional lowpoint of the album. Things recover a little with the fantastically powerful closing track, "From The Morning," which sees some semblance of hope creep back into Drake's songwriting as he sings of the effort to find the beauty in night and in darkness by approaching it with the same positivity with which we approach light - "So look see the sights, the endless summer nights, and go play the game that you learned from the morning." In the midst of all the bleakness and darkness that surrounds it on this album, the homespun optimism and faith of that song is enough to bring a tear to the eye and perhaps even to restore our faith in Drake's own health, until we remember his tragic death not long after this album's release. Still, that timelessly beautiful song has gone on to be one of his great legacies, with the lyrics "And now we rise and we are everywhere" inscribed on his gravestone.
Upon completion of the album, Drake delivered it to his record label, who weren't expecting or planning on ever receiving another product from him. (A persistent urban legend concerns Drake dropping the final tapes of the album off anonymously in a plastic bag - it's not true, although one suspects that the non-committal sense of finality and unimportance that story conveys is probably close to Drake's genuine attitude to the album). Again, Pink Moon would struggle to achieve notable sales or anything more than passing critical notice. Drake's downward spiral continued over the next two years, with him becoming increasingly withdrawn from everybody except his immediate family and increasingly irritable and angry at the lack of attention his music had achieved. In early 1974, Drake contacted Wood again suggesting he wanted to record a new album, and Wood was shocked at the short-tempered irrationality of the man he went to start working with. Although a few tentative sessions were commenced, Drake passed away due to an overdose of antidepressants before work could be completed. To this day, whether or not this overdose was suicide or merely an accident resulting from the negligent attitude of somebody who no longer particularly cared if he lived or died remains unclear. Drake remained a long way from anybody's musical radar throughout the 70s, though by the mid-80s the liks of R.E.M. and Robert Smith of the Cure were beginning to cite him as a musical influence and gradually his work came to be revisited reassessed and slowly found its wider audience. Today, Drake is rightly heralded as one of the great doomed heroes of folk music, and one of its most talented and beautiful minds. His tragic death, suicide or not, robbed music of one of its greatest potential talents, and nowhere is that fact more purely and succinctly distilled than on the magical music of Pink Moon.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Nick Drake.
1. Pink Moon
2. Place To Be
3. Road
4. Which Will
5. Horn
6. Things Behind The Sun
7. Know
8. Parasite
9. Free Ride
10. Harvest Breed
11. From The Morning
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