A Solitary Night
Nick Drake was an insomniac. He'd spend night-time hours endlessly playing his guitar, fingerpicking away, retreating into the calm of music to escape from the pain of living. You can hear it etched into his music, which is played so quiet, so gently, sung in a hesitant half-whisper, as if he doesn't want to wake those downstairs.
Pink Moon is an album enshrined in that insomnia. It was recorded in two separate sessions that commenced at midnight, merely Drake by himself playing with producer John Wood behind the desk. Island Records, Drake's label, had no idea he was making it. After two previous albums of rich orchestration (1969's Five Leaves Left and 1970's Bryter Layer), the songsmith wanted there to be none of that, this time. He wanted the purity of his craft. The sound he heard when by himself: spare and solitary, his voice feeling out the open spaces between his gently-plucked notes.
Just as it was recorded at night, Pink Moon is effectively a song-cycle charting one summer's night. And, beyond that, it makes this one night an entire life; the cycle of the turning planet, sunset to sunrise, matching a human's time on Earth, a spirit burning out like a flickering firefly. "I'm weaker than the palest blue," Drake sings, on the heart-wrenchingly beautiful "Place to Be." By the time the LP closes with "From the Morning," the narrator sings not simply from the morning, but from beyond the pale. "Now we rise, and we are everywhere," Drake sings. The words are doleful and beautiful and achingly poignant, even before you learn they're etched into his tombstone.
Last Call
Pink Moon is inextricably wed to Drake's imminent death. It was the last album he ever made; issued in 1972, two-and-a-half years before his death. It found him teetering on the edge of a void, but striking a moment of clarity; a final tribute to his quiet genius that would, years later, finally find Drake posthumous fame.
Drake barely sold a few thousand records during his life, and Pink Moon, for all its pitch-perfect tone and glorious wholeness, plays to that notion. For modern listeners familiar with Drake disciples like Elliott Smith, Iron and Wine, or Jose González, there's nothing to fear, here; but for 1972, this must have sounded bleak, airy, aloof, and distant. A cold valentine from a frigid frontier, with no concessions to a casual audience.
Where Bryter Layter tried to give Drake's melancholy, diffident folk music a pop-like gloss, Pink Moon lays it stark and bear: its 11 songs and 28 minutes completely unadorned, there not an instant of flourish throughout. There are no choruses, no peaks or valleys, no psychedelic splurges. Just a single sustained mood conveying a solitary night: one man alone with his isolation, his depression, and his magical music.
Record Label: Island
Release Date: February 25, 1968
