Nick Drake – Pink Moon (1972)

Pink Moon is often read as a suicide note, proceeding as it did Nick Drake’s fatal overdose, with three years of inactivity in between. It’s certainly vastly different tonally and instrumentally from Bryter Layter (1971), and the decision to go from an ensemble of guest players (including Richard Thompson and John Cale) to a roster consisting of, in alphabetical order, Nick Drake, certainly tracks with the already introverted man’s increasing insularity. However, the idea that the album maps 1:1 onto the man’s psyche is an appealing but reductive narrative popular among people who didn’t know the man (which I didn’t either) that oversimplifies the creative process. The title track isn’t the work of a mind at ease with itself, Drake’s folky lilt casting a pleasant but thin veneer over its ominous lyrics, and it’s impossible to imagine a song called ‘Parasite” on Bryter Layter or Five Leaves Left (1969), but the album is no monolith. “From the Morning” in particular is a straightforward celebration of life, the universe and everything with no obvious hidden agenda. Pink Moon is an album of contradictions – an album serene enough to have a VW commercial use “Road”, yet one inextricably bound to its creator’s increasingly fraught relationship with his own existence.