FEATURE:
Place to Be
Nick Drake’s Pink Moon at Fifty
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THERE are quite a few classic albums…
celebrating big anniversaries this February. Although it is not fifty until 25th February, I wanted to write about Nick Drake’s third and final studio album, Pink Moon. Sparser and shorter than his other two albums, over eleven tracks spanning just over twenty-two minutes, we get this incredibly beautiful album that features Drake without a backing band. It is just him, an acoustic guitar and a bit of piano on the title track. Pink Moon is definitely a great album to have on vinyl. Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary, I wanted to pay tribute to one of the best albums ever. Drake sadly died in 1974 at the age of twenty-six. It is fascinating to think what he could have gone to create if he had lived. Whilst some prefer his 1969 debut, Five Leaves Left, other pip for 1971’s Bryter Layter. I think that his most affecting and memorable album is Pink Moon. It is the gravity and focus on his voice and acoustic guitar that makes it such a spellbinding listen. Rather than it being haunting and morbid, it is an album that is so evocative and nuanced. You need to play it through a lot so that all of the songs can reveal their layers. Sadly, Drake's first two albums with Island Records sold poorly. This, together with Drake's reluctance to perform live or engage in album promotion, meant that the label was not confident of another album from him.
The songwriter was suffering from severe depression, so it is understandable that he did not want to tour or conduct interviews. Many associate Pink Moon with depression and this very bleak time. Cally Calloman of Bryter Music, which manages Drake's estate, has stated Drake could not write whilst badly depressed. He was not in a bleak state whilst writing Pink Moon. In fact, he was hugely pleased and proud of the album. There are a range of articles that I want to pepper in (well, they are actually quite long!), to give us an idea of how Pink Moon came to be. This first piece actually nods to Drake’s mental-health issues prior to recording Pink Moon:
“By 1971, the 23-year-old was overwhelmed by depression and had lost all confidence as a live performer. His final public gig, at Ewell Technical College, in Surrey, in June 1970, had been abandoned halfway through the song “Fruit Tree” before a disconsolate Drake walked off stage.
With no immediate plans to make a new record to follow 1969’s Five Leaves Left and 1971’s Bryter Layter, Drake spent time recuperating at Chris Blackwell’s Spanish villa, at the personal request of the concerned Island Records chief. Drake then snuck away with producer John Wood to lay down a new album, which was recorded over just two late-night sessions at Sound Techniques in London’s Chelsea, in October 1971. Wood later said that “it felt like there was a kind of urgency about it.”
Pink Moon is Drake’s music at its starkest and most uncompromising: no other musicians, no arrangements, just Drake and his acoustic guitar and one piano solo on the title track, with its ill-omened pink moon a portent of disaster. Drake did not know what he wanted on the cover of his new album, except that it had to feature a pink moon. In the end, a surrealist painting by Michael Trevithick, who was the boyfriend of Drake’s sister Gabrielle, was chosen and seems fitting.
The album, which is only 28 minutes long, has an unsettling simplicity. Drake said he didn’t want it arranged, just to stand “naked.” In the brilliant and bleak “Parasite,” Drake uses the device of a journey on the Northern Line of the London Underground to offer a chilling view of the emptiness of contemporary life.
Pink Moon received good reviews, but its intimations of darkness (“Now I’m weaker than the palest blue,” Drake sings in the masterful “Place To Be”) left people feeling uncomfortable. Nevertheless, Island Records kept faith in the young singer, and the company knew that with such exceptional songs (“Road,” “Which Will”) they had something special on their hands. One of the highlights is “Things Behind The Sun,” on which Drake plays some beguiling picking guitar as he sings:
Please beware of them that stare
They’ll only smile to see you while
Your time away
And once you’ve seen what they have been
To win the earth just won’t seem worth
Your night or your day
Drake was a talented technical guitarist and a painstaking musician. For example, he tuned his bottom string down to a low A just so he would get the right fret on one line of “Free Ride,” to emphasize one of the lines. Danny Thompson, who worked with Drake on Five Leaves Left and played bass on John Martyn’s classic Solid Air, which is an album about Drake, said: “Ultimately, it’s the real beauty of his music that draws people in, and his stunning guitar playing, which was so clean.”
The lack of sales for Pink Moon disappointed Drake, whose depression was deepening. He died on November 25, 1974, at the age of 26, from an overdose of anti-depressants. It was a tragedy that passed largely unnoticed at the time.
The three albums which Nick Drake had made in his short lifetime were all, in commercial terms, unsuccessful, even though leading musicians such as Martyn and Richard Thompson urged people to listen to Pink Moon. Eventually, long after his death, people took notice and Pink Moon posthumously went Platinum”.
There is a genius to Drake’s guitar playing throughout 1972’s Pink Moon. A lot of people remark on his vocals and lyrics, though I do not often see people commending his inventive and expressive guitar style. Guitar were in awe of Drake’s playing when they revisited Pink Moon in 2020:
“After his great bid for commercial success, Bryter Later, was met with a slightly perplexed critical reception and commercial failure, Drake vowed to strip his sound down to its basic elements of guitar and voice. In the one interview with the press he did in his life, he told Sounds that for his next release: “I had the idea of just doing something with John Wood, the engineer at Sound Techniques.”
Reenergised by time recuperating in Chris Blackwell’s villa in Spain, Drake returned to London in October 1971 and recorded the entire 11-track, 28-minute album across two nocturnal sessions that began at 11pm. And apart from the luminous 10-second piano part he played on its title track, that’s all Pink Moon is – one man playing his guitar and singing.
Legend has it that Drake wordlessly dropped the album’s masters off at Island’s reception in a bag and scurried away. Island’s press officer David Sandison recalls that in fact, he saw Nick at the reception with the masters under his arm and invited him up to his office, where he stayed for half an hour before leaving. “About an hour later, the girl who worked behind the front desk called up and said ‘Nick’s left his tapes behind.’ So I went down and it was the big 16-track master tape and it said ‘Nick Drake Pink Moon’, and I thought, ‘that’s not an album I know.’”
The press release that accompanied the album’s release recounted the incident, bluntly adding: “His first two albums haven’t sold a shit. But if we carry on releasing them, then perhaps someone authoritative will stop, listen properly and agree with us.”
Supernatural picking
By all accounts, Drake was a faultless studio performer, the fact that he rarely dropped a note testament to the hours he would (cue montage) smoke weed and repeat and cycle complex riffs in his dorm room at university, in his bedroom at Far Leys, in his bedsit in London. Despite the hours of hypnotic repetition this implies, according to Robert Kirby, a friend from Drake’s uni years who contributed string arrangements for his earlier albums: “Don’t think for one minute that Nick lacked artistic spontaneity. He could dazzle for hours with electrifying improvisations in many styles (including his own) and play many authentic blues styles.”
He was a musician whose music, for all its approachable outward simplicity, possesses a level of detail and inner complexity that renders it essentially uncoverable. As with his lyrics, there are so many paradoxes in his guitar playing alone: diverse alternate tunings facilitate simple, often single-finger chords; classical sensibilities meld with the physicality of the blues; the ambiguity between major and minor in his chord voicings hover, unresolved; he could orchestrate complex fingerpicking (Road) or just repeat four rattling notes (Know). That last song is even constructed of oppositions: (‘Know that I love you, Know I don’t care…’).
His producer Joe Boyd summarised his playing in the A Skin Too Few documentary: “When you listen back to the records one of the things that’s most extraordinary is the guitar. Because it’s so clean and so strong and all the notes are so equally balanced. It’s so unusual to have such complicated fingerpicking parts played in such a clear and strong way – every note – so that you really can construct the whole recording around the guitar”.
There are a couple of reviews that I want to finish off with. The first, from Beats Per Minute is extremely extensive. Every song on Pink Moon is outstanding. The music provokes so many emotions! An excellent and informative feature, I wanted to use quite a bit of it:
“Pink Moon” is a song with a straightforward message, but an uncertain meaning. Sung in Drake’s distinct smooth soulful voice, he tells us that our fate is coming soon: “Saw it written and I saw it say/ Pink moon is on its way/ And none of you stand so tall/ Pink Moon gonna get you all.” Like most of his songs off this album, they come off as poetic and bleak, like a dark sorrowed soul that lived within him. This song might be about a malicious feeling infecting the people who surround him, or it could simply be a metaphor for death coming for them no matter how tall they stand. As terrible as that sounds, he doesn’t sing it in just a sad way, but more haunting with a heavy heart, like he’s given up on saving himself and others, which reflected well on his own life at the time. Similarly, his guitar gives a chord-filled, harmonic melody while the piano break in the middle of the song offers a nice break and sets the mood for this depressing outlook into the near future.
“Place To Be” is a much more structured song than the previous track, with three stanzas describing three different parts of his life: naivety, rejection, and desperation. The love for this girl that Drake missed so much makes this one of the more emotional tracks on Pink Moon. In each verse, he compares moments of times before when he was happy to the moments present where he is in need for the girl he has lost. In “Road,” he takes a different approach about love where it makes him seem okay with the loss, as opposed to felling heartbroken about it, telling her “You can take the road that takes you to the stars now/ I can take the road that’ll see me through.”
After “Which Will,” a mellifluous song about indecisiveness with life’s given choices (clearly another page ripped out of his book), Drake plays his only instrumental of the album, “Horn.” Although the entire album is done with his acoustic guitar, and this is no different, the delicately strummed, soft guitar of “Horn” can act as the beautiful transitional period in between the album.
Following the short piece, “Things Behind The Sun” clocks in at just under four minutes, making it the longest song on the album. Here, Drake again sings about the shallow people who surround his life (“them that stare”) and how they can be however they want, but he can see past the sense of semblance and see that they’re all still sad inside. The depression that slowly filled his own life made it that much easier to see how everyone else in the world is just as depressed as him, with only their phony façade covering up their real feelings. The way he describes it all in song is extremely poetic and mysterious, ultimately asking “Who will hear what I say?” which makes everything look even more desolate.
“Know” is the least difficult song to understand, but also one of the most clever. There are no complex guitar chords, but just a simple two-second long bluesy beat played repeatedly over the course of the song. For the first half, he hums to himself for awhile, then declares painfully “Know that I love you/ Know I don’t care/ Know that I see you/ Know I’m not there.” These unsettling lyrics need nothing more to say to get the point across. Lines one and three are the role of him, while lines two and four are told from the point of view of the one he desires. The juxtaposition of these lines not only show how he is so rejected from the people he loved, but it can also be interpreted that it’s “no” instead of “know” for the opposite’s lines. It is brilliant lyrics like these that make this one of the strongest songs on Pink Moon.
Further on in the record, he relates himself as being a worthless bug, better off dead (“Parasite”), and an effortless weak soul who contributes to nothing (“Free Ride”), but what finishes his deed is “Harvest Breed.” While some of the songs featured prior to this one develop some slight chance of hope, “Harvest Breed” is without question the song about his acceptance and acknowledgement of his impending death. Singing simply that “he’s ready” and that “this could be the end” makes this a dramatic finish to his life through song. His hopelessness clouds any positive thoughts he might have had before and, as if the previous nine songs projected his outlook on the unwelcoming life he lived, this is the point where he lets go and starts “falling fast and falling free.”
After what can only be assumed as a strikingly ominous, eerie ending to the album, along comes the real last track of Pink Moon “From the Morning,” which takes on a completely different change of pace. After hearing ten tracks of depression, emotionally sick times, and anguish, “From the Morning” is sung with the most upbeat approach imaginable for Drake. The guitar is colorful and rhythmic and Drake’s lyrics reflect this as well, clearing up his cloudy mind and singing about what life has to offer that is beautiful: “So look see the days/ The endless colored ways/ And go play the game you learnt/ From the morning.” It’s as if the Pink Moon shone over Drake during the gloomiest moments of his life and throughout the album, while the sun rising in “From the Morning” represents a new life, a new direction to take. It may even just be Drake’s soul ascending to the heavens and relaying how this might not be the place for him, but don’t give up your own life for what he couldn’t appreciate. It’s such an impressive way to end an album that seemingly acts as one big story for Drake’s disheartened life at the time and still giving himself that extra message to keep on going, because the sun will rise again.
Unfortunately, the sun never did rise for Nick Drake again. Pink Moon had worse initial sales than his first two albums originally sold, which sent him into a worse depression and insomnia. On November 25, 1974, at the young age of 26, he died of an overdose of his prescribed antidepressant. Whether it was an accident or suicide was never determined, but looking back on the songs he sang, it acted more like what was to come of Drake than anything. Two years before his death, he knew he wasn’t going to last very long.
More importantly though, his fame slowly rose as big artists from the ’80s and ’90s, such as R.E.M., The Cure, Jeff Buckley, and Elliot Smith began recognizing him as a big influence for their music. He hit an even bigger audience when his song “Pink Moon” was used for a Volkswagen Cabrio commercial in 1999 titled “Milky Way” and eventually led his album to receive huge sales. Slowly he became a more noticeable figure in the music world and by the end of the ’90s, he was a household name to fans and critics, receiving high honors from multiple acclaimed sources, such as the 13th best album of the ’70s by Pitchfork and 320th best album of all time by Rolling Stone.
For a man who felt so small in his time, looking back on it now, Nick Drake created for many more people what is considerably one of the most emotionally draining and most influential folk albums of all time. This is the classic example of how one person can pour every last bit of themselves into an album with such raw despondency and without all of the unnecessary amounts of overproduction to make up for it. No one at Island Records or his producer expected him to make this album, but it’s possible he did it to preserve his life and dying wish before he knew he’d soon be gone. He may have died a tragically early death, but it’s great to see that he became recognized for his genius lyrics and albums like Pink Moon, even if he thought it was certain it would never go his way”.
I am going to round off with a final review. There are others who will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Pink Moon before 25th February. They might look at the album’s legacy, or the position it occupies alongside Nick Drake’s other studio albums. I wanted to give a more general overview of one of the 1970s’ most astonishing albums. This is what AllMusic had to offer in their review:
“After two albums of tastefully orchestrated folk-pop, albeit some of the least demonstrative and most affecting around, Drake chose a radical change for what turned out to be his final album. Not even half-an-hour long, with 11 short songs and no more -- he famously remarked at the time that he simply had no more to record -- Pink Moon more than anything else is the record that made Drake the cult figure he remains. Specifically, Pink Moon is the bleakest of them all; that the likes of Belle and Sebastian are fans of Drake may be clear enough, but it's doubtful they could ever achieve the calm, focused anguish of this album, as harrowing as it is attractive. No side musicians or outside performers help this time around -- it's simply Drake and Drake alone on vocals, acoustic guitar, and a bit of piano, recorded by regular producer Joe Boyd but otherwise untouched by anyone else. The lead-off title track was eventually used in a Volkswagen commercial nearly 30 years later, giving him another renewed burst of appreciation -- one of life's many ironies, in that such an affecting song, Drake's softly keened singing and gentle strumming, could turn up in such a strange context. The remainder of the album follows the same general path, with Drake's elegant melancholia avoiding sounding pretentious in the least thanks to his continued embrace of simple, tender vocalizing. Meanwhile, the sheer majesty of his guitar playing -- consider the opening notes of "Road" or "Parasite" -- makes for a breathless wonder to behold”.
Whilst its creator is no longer with us, the sheer majesty and perfection of Pink Moon lives on. It is gentle yet powerful; it is hushed yet carries so much weight. Everyone will have their own words to describe Pink Moon. My favourite lyrics are at the end of the final track. From the Morning: “So look see the sights/The endless summer nights/And go play the game that you learnt/From the mornin’”. There are so many beautiful and standout lines and moments through Pink Moon. It is an album that will be cherished and discussed…
FOR so many years to come.