I watched a documentary about Nick Drake last week. It featured a bunch of folkie types spouting all kinds of flamdoodle about what made Drake’s guitar playing so unique. I’m sure many members of the musical fraternity found this technical brouhaha illuminating, but seeing as how I’m a guy who has difficulty distinguishing an acoustic guitar from a tuba, the documentary’s cumulative effect was to render me insensible.
I admit to never having much listened to Nick Drake, mostly because he sounded to me like an oh so sensitive soul singing about so sensitive stuff expressly designed to make my hardened heart cringe. In fact the only Drake song I’d ever heard before listening to Pink Moon was its title track, which Volkswagen used in an ad a while back. I really liked the song, even if I thought its opening line went, “I saw it written in the soy sauce.”
But seeing as how my girlfriend is always telling me what a poetic genius and doomed romantic figure Drake is, I finally broke down and gave his third and final LP, 1972’s Pink Moon, a listen. And turns out I love it, despite the fact that it’s the work of an oh so sensitive soul singing about oh so sensitive stuff designed to make my hardened heart cringe. Just goes to show you it’s impossible to know if you like something until you’ve actually listened to it. Which may sound like Philosophy 101 to you, but comes as something of a revelation to me.
Pink Moon followed on the heels on 1971’s lavishly orchestrated Bryter Layter, and its failure to make a dent on the pop charts led a disheartened Drake to say to hell with it and strip things down to voice, guitar and piano. The results are stark, in large part because Drake chose to work with a palette limited to varying shades of grey. And unlike Bryter Layter, Pink Moon is an intensely private affair. A writer for Melody Maker complained that the music on Pink Moon “hides from you,” which is precisely what I love about it. What I hear when I listen to Pink Moon is Nick Drake playing to an audience of Nick Drake, making you, the listener, an eavesdropper.
I see little reason to write in depth about the songs on Pink Moon; fans will know them by heart, and the best thing I can say to non-fans is these songs are unique both in mood and emotional depth. The phrase “naked honesty” is oft bandied about, but while I have an inherent distrust of the honesty part, the songs on Pink Moon are indisputably naked.
Some very brief words about side one. The title track sounds every bit as quietly lovely as it did in that Volkswagen commercial, while the melody of “Place to Be” is a delicate as gossamer needlepoint. “Road”’s rough strumming and minor key make it the template for every Crooked Finger song ever written, while “Which Will” brings to mind Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam at his Tea for the Tillerman best.“Things Behind the Sun” sounds too much like a traditional English folk song to me, and the brief instrumental “Horn,” raises my hackles, but otherwise side one stands right up there with Van Morrison when it comes to mystical mood music.
Only two songs on side two measure up to the first four tracks on side one; the delicate melody of “From the Morning” beguiles, while its lines, “And now we rise/We are everywhere/And now we rise from the ground” are as wonderful an evocation of rebirth as you’ll ever hear. And “Parasite”’s unrelenting guitar strum and disturbing lyrics (“Take a look you may see me on the ground/For I am the parasite of this town”) hint–perhaps mistakenly–at the descent into depression that led Drake to commit suicide some two years after the release of Pink Moon.
I suspect the reason many treasure Pink Moon is that it’s a solitary album meant to be listened to in solitude. That writer for Melody Maker got it right when he said Nick Drake’s songs hide from you–they’re every bit as shy as Drake himself. Some records give you the sense you’re alone in a room with the artist. Pink Moon gives you the sense you’re alone in a room with a ghost, playing with his back turned.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
