Nick Drake - Pink Moon: The Album Review

Where there is temporality, and beauty in simply being alive, there is Nick Drake.

Nick Drake: vocals, guitar, piano, principle songwriter

Produced by John Wood

Author’s note: This post corresponds to the Pink Moon episode of Vinyl Monday, originally posted 4/22/2024. Save for audio/editing jokes that cannot be included in a text format, this is a faithful adaptation of the review chapter. To watch the full episode, scroll to the bottom of this post or visit my YouTube channel here.

“The beauty of Nick Drake’s voice is its own justification. May it become familiar to us all.” – Stephen Holden for Rolling Stone, as quoted from its full-page ad for Pink Moon

Familiar to us all it is. Though that recognition didn’t come as immediately as Island Records or Nick Drake had hoped. His 3rd LP, Pink Moon, was released in February 1972 to...nothing. As far as sales went, anyway. Producer John Wood was baffled. Him and Nick made a simple, timeless body of work; like Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan. It could’ve, and should’ve, succeeded anywhere. Especially in the States: Island took a huge gamble in selecting Pink Moon as the first of Nick’s records to be released on this side of the pond. Island were at a loss as well. They were convinced Pink Moon could be a hit, if only Nick were willing to promote it. But after a disastrous tour, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, the label took out those full-page ads in publications like Melody Maker and hoped for the best. You can lead a horse to water...

It’s not that Nick had an ego about his work. Quite the opposite. Sure, he knew his worth as an artist. He was an idealist; truly believing his work could succeed on merit alone. He just didn’t have it in him to self-promote. Nick only accepted one sit-down interview to promote Pink Moon, with Jerry Gilbert of Sounds. Jerry was a fan, having given Bryter Layter positive marks. But Nick was so stiff and awkward that he bombed what should’ve been a softball. The album was reviewed by several publications, including Melody Maker and Creem. The Pink Moon Wikipedia article boils down the latter review to “not awfully good.”

However, I’m subscribed to Creem and have access to the print archives and can easily disprove this. Here’s what Colman Andrews really had to say:

“The longer songs do less with more words. They’re not awfully good, most of them. There’s a lulling repetitiousness to a lot of what he sings. But no matter. That’s the point, in fact. His music is a triumph of style over sententiousness, of sound over sense. It’s not what he sings, or even for that matter how he sings. It’s that he sings at all, that he opens up this world to us at all.”

(Colman Andrews, "Pink Moon" Creem Magazine, 10/1972)

Though the language is offputting, Colman’s basically saying Nick being a sparse lyricist and phenomenal guitarist instead of fluffy and pretentious like other folk artists works in Pink Moon’s favor.

That being said, this is a comically lukewarm review: “...he never fails, and he never really flashes.” Colman gives exactly as much praise as he does little swipes that he thinks are oh-so-clever. See: “It’s seductive music. The voice is deep, firm, covert, and binding. He very nearly croons, god save us.” (Insert useless tangent about Robert Plant here,) “He very nearly croons his enigmatic, endearingly weak little songs, and always with the smirk of the all-seeing ‘I.’”

But he makes up for that with a closing line that’s right on the money: “He knows more about us than we know about him.”

In a way, the Creem review reflects the spectacular cognitive dissonance Nick felt at the end of his career. You had Joe Boyd and the cats at Island who truly believed in him, the audiences of the day who didn’t respond, and sensitive, withdrawn Nick, who didn’t know what to believe and at this point had very little faith in himself. He didn’t want to be famous, but he wanted his work to be heard and make a difference forpeople.

This dissonance tore him apart. In the years following Pink Moon, Nick’s already-fragile mental health was on a steady decline. According to family and friends he was physically there, but just not present. He was in good enough spirits in 1973 to get a job programming computers and write new material. But quit that job and spiraled again after failing to deliver in the studio. By his last session, a once-formidable guitarist was too weak and skittish to play and sing at the same time; see the fabled “Black Eyed Dog.”

Hearing about the twilight of his life, it comes into focus that Nick Drake’s worst enemy was Nick Drake.

In November of 1974, Nick overdosed on his prescribed medication. He was 26 years old when he passed, with a career lasting all of 4 years. Thus, Pink Moon was Nick’s last artistic statement. Gabrielle Drake doesn’t believe her brother’s death was an accident or premeditated; she described it as an impulse. An “if I live I live, and if I die I die” kind of thing.

Nick’s legacy is incredible. And despite the whole “dying an unknown” narrative, his influence was pretty immediate. Songwriter Robin Frederick had a crush on Nick and wrote “Sandy Grey” about him. Nick and contemporary John Martyn met a year after John recorded “Sandy Grey” via Paul Wheeler and had somewhat of a bromance.

John looked up to Nick...not just literally. He was quite tall. The title track of John’s 1973 LP Solid Air is about Nick. John’s whole sound there is a love letter to him, really.

A lot of sources cite the Fruit Tree box set as being an instrumental release in building Nick’s following. And it was. It was the first major reissue of his work. Robert Smith heard of Nick that way, as did Kate Bush. I haven’t seen as much about the Way To Blue comp. It brought in a one-and-a-halfth wave of new fans, including a familiar face to the Vinyl Mondayverse.

After critics savaged their 1993 release Souvlaki, OG shoegazers Slowdive were set adrift. Creation Records, having been bankrupted by My Bloody Valentine, basically said “you’re on your own kids!” They backed out of paying for Slowdive’s US tour, and shoegaze was thoroughly out of fashion. After eeking out 1995’s Pygmalion, Slowdive ended their original run not with a bang, but with a whimper. Frontman Neil Halstead first turned his attention to ambient music, which thoroughly informed Pygmalion. Around the time banddissolved, Way To Blue came out. Enter the next 30 years of Neil’s career! He completely overhauled his sound and the way he wrote. You hear hints of Nick in Mojave 3, but where you really hear him is on Neil’s solo records. The lo-fi Sleeping On Roads, and especially Palindrome Hunches. If you haven’t heard either, what the fuck? Go fix that! It’s timeless, utterly beguiling folksy goodness.

The second wave of the Nick Drake revival came in in 1999. Volkswagen commissioned Arnold Advertising to make an ad for their Cabrio model. It was originally titled “Milky Way,” as it was supposed to use “Under the Milky Way” by The Church. But some young gun in the office brought in a record from their personal collection: Pink Moon. The ad was reworked at the last minute, was a smash hit, cue a rush of interest in Nick. VW Dealerships were getting calls not about the car, but about the song in the commercial! Nick’s been part of the sensitive-type’s album collection ever since.

Going in: Nick Drake’s work was a casual companion of mine through my college years. If my Spotify likes are any indication, I would’ve first stumbled upon his work and liked most of Pink Moon in wake of the worst breakup ever.

...makes sense.

But, like Nick’s personality in life, his music “barn-catted” me. Popped in, stayed a while, then quietly left without me noticing before returning unannounced half a decade later. And together, we sat in quiet. Studying Pink Moon this week completely changed my relationship with Nick and his work. In the beginning, I hadn’t yet cried because he left our world too soon. I just appreciated him from afar. I appreciated him being such a pure artist. It hurt to know a creator like him gave so much and saw so little in return.

Then I watched Jeroen Berkvens’s 2002 documentary A Skin Too Few for the first time, looked in his eyes, and I don’t know what came over me. I was a blubbering soggy mess on my couch.

Seeing how he resembled his mother, how they sounded alike too, and hearing his sister Gabrielle call him “Nicky” really didn’t help. It sank in that Nick wasn’t just some artist who lived and died decades before I was born. And he wasn’t some tortured artist as one very popular, very poorly-researched video essay on YouTube would have you believe. Nick was a loved son and brother. A friend to many even if many of those friends didn’t meet until his funeral. He wasn’t some mythical creature, not the Van Gogh of anything. He was a multifaceted, real guy. Here’s a quote from the Island Records press release Joe Boyd wrote for Pink Moon, which swiftly dispels the myth that his label “didn’t believe in him”:

“...we believe that Nick Drake is a great talent. His first two albums haven't sold a shit, but if we carry on releasing them, maybe one day, someone in authority will stop to listen to them properly and agree with us, and maybe a lot more people will get to hear Nick Drake’s incredible songs and guitar playing. And maybe they’ll buy a lot of records and fulfill our faith in Nick’s promise.
 Then we'll have done our job.”

I don’t think it’s intentional, but those who call Pink Moon one of the saddest albums ever made apply the end of Nick’s life to his work. And that robs him of his legacy. This photo, shot by Tony Evans, is how I imagine him.

With this review, I want to show you that Pink Moon, and in turn its creator, are multifaceted.

You don’t get that from the first listen. Like Joe Boyd said, you have to persevere with this guy. Sit down and really listen to what he has to say. Getting active listening in for this album was hard, because Nick is such good “nothing music.” Before you freak out over that wording: “nothing music” is not empty music! It’s just music that you don’t have to laser-focus on to celebrate. It can soundtrack your everyday life. Butsomewhere along the line, when you buckle down and actively listen a time or five, you get sucked into Nick’s beautiful world. It happened to me.

To begin with: the album title. For the life of me I’m not sure why I don’t talk about titles more! I loved doing it with Neil Young’s Harvest so we’re doing it again here. One of my favorite things A Skin Too Few did was illustrate the seasons of Nick’s life with nature’s seasons. His writing was always very in-tune with nature, soit’s appropriate to tie that in here.

What is the pink moon? Here in the northern hemisphere, it’s the first full moon after the spring equinox. Spring equinox marks the beginning of the light half of the year; a time of rebirth and renewal after months of cold and darkness. Spring is a transitional season. The world thaws out. After 1971, a weird and bad year in Nick’s life, a dark season with a good amount of upheaval, Pink Moon may very well have been his way of trying to pull himself out of the dark and into the light half of living.

“Pink moon is on its way. None of you stand so tall, pink moon is gonna get ye all”

Pink Moon: Whatever the pink moon represents in actuality, in this interpretation – the procession of time – it’s looming and inescapable. See the striking album art by Michael Trevithick. It’s easy for one to imagine the writer saw the painting and was inspired to create. In fact it was the other way around! Michael was given an advance copy to work from; like Karl Ferris was for his take on Are You Experienced?

Pictured: the original Pink Moon album art, hanging in the Drake family home.

In meaning and sound, the title track sets the tone for the rest of the album. For those who find peace in stargazing, that’s the mood of “Pink Moon.” But it’s also a major deviation: after 2 minutes with sparse, tiptoeing piano, from here on out it’s just a man hunched over his guitar. These chords sparkle, and Nick sings to us sweetly in unbelievably hushed tones. He sings below his register on the pseudo-chorus! I can almost see what Creem critic Colman Andrews was saying when he said Nick “very nearly croons.”

Place To Be: Gorgeous, glistening strums decorate this tune about coming of age and grappling with all that comes with it. Growing old is in part not being as optimistic, not as open as before. “Now I’m weaker than the palest blue, oh-so-weak in this need for you.” It can be scary to be vulnerable. This is where I noticed the latent surface noise present throughout Pink Moon. It gives this sometimes-vacuous stuff a homey feel.

Road is our first display of Nick’s one-of-a-kind finger-picking style. This rolling, tumbling melody, somehow playing rhythm and harmony at the same time, gets stuck in my head just as much as the vocal does. They dance with each other. Nick’s style was classical but with some key differences. While we’re still not totally sure which guitar Nick played on Pink Moon, it’s pretty well-known amongst fan circles that Nick strung all his guitars with nickel strings and played them until they were black. Dead-ass strings. He kept his thumbnail long, medium-length fingernails on the rest. The one thing that throws me is that, when I asked my resident guitar correspondent Trevin of Humble Fish about guitar tone, he said Nick didn’t have a lot of low end. Then what is “Road”? The lyrics are clever, giving the listener a knowing wink: “You can say the sun is shining if you really want it to, I can see the moon and it seems so clear. You can take the road that’ll take you to the stars, now I can take a road that’ll see me through.”

Which Will is so underrated. For one, the guitar part is gorgeous. I’ve brought this term up more than a few times in the past, but in Italian Renaissance art there’s this thing called chiaroscuro. Light and shade. The “Which Will” guitar is just that; a blend of warm, earthy low tones and tinny glittering highs. In the lyrics, Nick asks us in his thin, feather-soft voice to look within ourselves and consider not just which things and people we chase, but why.

“Which will you love, which will you chose from, from the stars above?”

Being a hopeless dreamer and someone who routinely chases the unattainable, whether that’s people or material things, I do feel called out in this moment!

Horn is one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard...ever. I did my first listen-through of this record while getting ready to photograph the Live Through This episode’s thumbnail. When “Horn” came on, I dropped the runny mascara, stood there in silence, listened, and replayed it. It is very rare that I stop a listen-through, even less common that I replay something. To my memory, I’ve only ever had this reaction one other time: to “4 + 20 “off Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Deja Vu. Striking in its apparent simplicity, so much deeper when you dig in.

Horn doesn’t have words, so all the feeling is in these few deliberately chosen notes. Not unlike a horn solo. Could just as easily soundtrack your world crashing down as it could the sweetest most comforting morning of your life. It’s barren AND tender, utter devastation after a storm AND the dewdrops on grass in the morning. That last note is such a gut punch. Like the resolution was an afterthought.

Things Behind The Sun: It’s somewhat impenetrable: in both intricate playing – perhaps my favorite here – and loaded content. Nick warns us not to cast judgement on society’s downtrodden. Life is pretty unpredictable, everything is temporary, it really doesn’t take much for one to lose everything. Furthermore, you’d never know who’s struggling behind their sunny exterior. This is one of those songs that’s especially connected to Nick’s circumstances. He wasn’t afraid to play around with song structure; “Things Behind The Sun”’s coda is unstable, anxious in feeling. It leaves the door ajar just so.

Know: Like the album I originally covered the week before this, The Zombies’ Odeyssey and Oracle, Pink Moon is a heavyweight collection of lightweight tunes. What I mean by that is, none of these songs are over 4 minutes long. This thing takes a short run time – 28 minutes of music – and maximizes it to brilliant effect. This is easy when you’re a sparse writer like Nick. Saying the most in the least amount of words is a rare and remarkable skill; which he exacts with knife-sharp precision on “Know.”

“You know that I love you, you know I don’t care. You know that I see you, you know I’m not there”

Way to beckon with one hand and shoo with the other. He validates our adoration, then casts us away just as soon.

Parasite: The opening line is a goosebumps moment:

“When lifting the mask from a local clown, feeling down like him. Seeing the light in a station bar and traveling far in sin.”

And it doesn’t ease up. This is some of Nick’s greatest lyricism; equal parts real-life observations and swirling, dream-like scenes of sad clowns, jesters, and drifters. Those who put on the happiest faces are in reality at their lowest. Parasites feed off life. This is a song about those who keep themselves occupied with worldly things to fill a void; that which Nick cannot bring himself to do. Our narrator floats around these establishments, utterly destitute and detached.

I hate to say it but Free Ride and Harvest Breed are where the fatigue kicks in. This sound has been explored at great length over the past 20something minutes. After “Parasite” wrecked our comfy-cozy illusion, we just can’t go back to how things were before. Which is a shame, because “Free Ride” is quite charming. Nick puts a 2ndsyllable in the word “ride” (“rah-eyd”) in a playful sing-songing way

From The Morning: After a somewhat bumpy ride, we’re swept back up in loving cozy arms. It’s earthy and gentle like the smell of rain, the most joyful track here. “The day once dawned and it was beautiful” acknowledges the happiness of the past. Then finds solace even in dark times: “Then night fell, and the air was beautiful.” The chorus “So look, see the days, the endless colored ways,” encourages us to find beauty in all seasons of life. “Look see the sights, the endless summer nights” urges us to live in the moment. Hope for the future is hinted at in the all-time great line:

“And now we rise, and we are everywhere”

It’s not the last line in the song, but Nick’s family saw it emblematic enough to have it written on his headstone. And that connection to all that surrounds us is where I want to end things.

When I first wrote this episode, in early April, we got two days of unseasonably warm weather to break up the New England rain slog. It was nice enough where I could sleep with an open window and wake up tothe sweet smell of fresh air. It was colder than I thought it’d be overnight, so I woke up before all my (many)alarms. It was quiet, it was cool. I was surrounded by this scent I wish I could bottle because I can’t bear the thought of one day never smelling it again, and the first thing my morning brain thought was, “...I have to listen to Nick. I have to listen to ‘Northern Sky.’”

I know it’s not a cut off Pink Moon, but I promise those followed. The point is: I didn’t do anything but prop myself up and listen. No scrolling, no drafting posts up, no texting anybody. Just me, the morning streaming in through my window, and Nick. Who is...so wildly different from the music I gravitate towards in my everyday life. He forces me to stop and listen. Not just to him, but the world around us. That’s what Pink Moon is. An observant, insightful, quaint but no less powerful, singular, gorgeous album. That yes, carries a lot of sadness in the lyrics. But there’s cleverness too, and there’s joy. There’s beauty in all seasons: comfort in darkness, anxiety in the light.

I realized that morning that where there is temporality, and beauty in simply being alive, Nick Drake is there.

Personal favorites: “Pink Moon,” “Place To Be,” “Which Will,” “Horn,” “Parasite,” “From the Morning”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!