Pink Moon

Pink Moon
Studio album by Nick Drake
Released	25 February 1972
Recorded	30–31 October 1971 at Sound Techniques, London
Genre	Folk, acoustic
Length	28:22
Label	Island
Producer	John Wood
Nick Drake chronology
Bryter Layter (1971)[1]Bryter Layter1971 Pink Moon (1972) Fruit Tree (1979)Fruit Tree1979

Pink Moon is the third and final studio album by the English folk musician Nick Drake, released in the UK by Island Records on 25 February 1972.^[2] It was the only one of Drake's studio albums to be released in North America during his lifetime: the only previous release there had been a 1971 compilation simply entitled Nick Drake featuring tracks from both his first two albums, which were not released in North America in their original forms until 1976. Pink Moon differs from Drake's previous albums in that it was recorded without a backing band, featuring just Drake on vocals, acoustic guitar and a brief piano riff overdubbed onto the title track.

Released two years before Drake's death in November 1974, at the age of twenty-six, the lyrical content of Pink Moon has often been attributed to Drake's ongoing battle with depression.^[3] The songs are shorter than on his previous albums, with a total album running time of just over twenty-eight minutes.

Pink Moon, like Drake's previous studio albums, did not sell well while he was still living but has since gained in critical acclaim and record sales.

Background

Nick Drake's first two albums with Island Records, Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1971), had sold poorly, and combined with Drake's reluctance to perform live or engage in album promotion, Island was not confident of another album from Drake.^[3] Additionally, Drake had isolated himself in his London apartment and was suffering from depression. In 1971 he saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed antidepressants which he was reluctant to take due to the stigma associated with depression and his fears concerning the medication's interaction with marijuana, which he smoked regularly.^[3] Although critics often associate Drake's music, and especially the perceived melancholy of Pink Moon, with his depression, Cally Calloman of Bryter Music, which manages Drake's estate, remembers it differently: "Nick was incapable of writing and recording while he was suffering from periods of depression. He was not depressed during the writing or recording of Pink Moon and was immensely proud of the album."^[4] After facing disappointment with various aspects of his first two albums, Drake sought a more organic sound with Pink Moon.

Recording

	"Pink Moon Recording" BBC Radio 2 documentary from 2004 with John Wood about the two nights of recording Pink Moon.[5]
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Drake appeared to have made a decision before recording his third album that it would be as plain as possible and free of the numerous guest musicians that had been employed on Bryter Layter. In his autobiography Joe Boyd, producer of Drake's first two albums, remembered that as they were finishing the recording of Bryter Layter Drake had told him that he wanted to make his next record alone,^[6] and in his only interview, published in Sounds magazine in March 1971, Drake told interviewer Jerry Gilbert that "for the next [album] I had the idea of just doing something with John Wood, the engineer at Sound Techniques".^[7]

After a brief hiatus in Spain spent at a villa belonging to Island Records' head, Chris Blackwell,^[8] Drake returned to London refreshed, and in October 1971 approached record engineer and producer John Wood.^[3] Wood had worked with Drake on his previous two albums and was one of the few people Drake felt he could trust. Wood has worked with other artists such as Fairport Convention, Cat Stevens, and Pink Floyd, and he often worked in partnership with record producer Joe Boyd. Boyd produced Drake's first two albums with Wood acting as sound engineer. Although Wood primarily focused on the engineering of an album, he often contributed as a producer.

When Drake reached out to Wood in 1971 expressing his interest in recording another album, the ensuing process was significantly pared down compared to Drake's other two albums. The album was recorded at Sound Techniques studio in London in late October 1971 with just Drake and Wood present.^[9] The studio was booked during the day, so Drake and Wood arrived around 11:00 p.m. and simply and quietly recorded half the songs. The next night, they did the same. In only two late night sessions, with just his voice and acoustic guitar, Drake created what is considered by many to be one of the "most influential folk albums of all time".^[10]

Contrary to popular legend that Drake dropped the album off in a plastic bag at Island Records' reception and then left without anyone realising, Drake delivered the master tapes of Pink Moon to Chris Blackwell at Island.^[3] In an interview for the Nick Drake fanzine Pynk Moon in 1996, Island's press officer David Sandison recalled that Drake's arrival at the record company had certainly not gone unnoticed, although there had been no indication that he was delivering them a new album:

"I saw him in reception after I came back from lunch and I was talking to somebody and I saw a figure in the corner on the bench, and I suddenly realized it was Nick. He had this big, 15 ips [inches per second] master tape box under his arm, and I said 'Have you had a cup of tea?' and he said 'Erm, yes', and I said 'Do you want to come upstairs?' and he said 'Yes, okay'. So we went upstairs into my office, which was on top of the landing, it was a landing that went into the big office with a huge round table where Chris and everybody else worked—very democratic—and there was a big Reevox (sic) and sound system there, and he just sat in my office area for about half an hour ... After about half an hour he said 'I'd better be going', and I said 'Okay, nice to see you', and he left. Now, he went down the stairs and he still had the tapes under his arm, and 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 sixteen-track master tape and it said NICK DRAKE PINK MOON, and I thought 'that's not an album I know'. The first thing to do was get it in the studio to make a seven and a half inch safety copy, because that was the master. So we ran off a safety copy to actually play, and I think twenty four hours later or so, it was put on the Reevox in the main room and we heard Pink Moon."^[11]

The tapes of the Pink Moon session also included Drake's recording of "Plaisir d'amour" (translated from French as "The Pleasure of Love"), a classical French love song written in 1784 by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. Although "Plaisir d'amour" was on the track listing of the Pink Moon master tape box as the first track of Side Two, when the tapes were presented they included a note in reference to the song which read, "Spare title – Do not use",^[12] so the song didn't make it onto the album. The recording was less than a minute long, featured guitar with no vocals, and was eventually included as a hidden track on UK editions of the Nick Drake compilation A Treasury (2004). Had "Plaisir d'amour" been included on the Pink Moon album, it would have been the only song on any of his albums that Nick Drake did not write himself.

Artwork

Keith Morris was the photographer who took Drake's photo for the cover of Bryter Layter (1971) and he was commissioned to photograph Drake for the cover of Pink Moon. However, the photos were not used as Drake's rapidly deteriorating appearance, hunched figure and blank expression were not considered good selling points. Island's creative director Annie Sullivan, who oversaw the shoot, recalled the difficulty in making a decision around the cover of the LP: "I remember going to talk to [Nick], and he just sat there, hunched up, and even though he didn't speak, I knew the album was called Pink Moon, and I can't remember how he conveyed it, whether he wrote it down ... he wanted a pink moon. He couldn't tell me what he wanted, but I had 'pink moon' to go on."^[4] Island picked a piece of surrealist Dali-esque art by Michael Trevithick, who was incidentally a friend of Drake's sister Gabrielle. Although Drake was not outspoken in his opinion on the cover art of Pink Moon, many close to him felt that he approved.

David Sandison stated that he found the original framed artwork for Pink Moon in among the debris of the basement room that Island later allocated to him as his office, and he took it home and hung it on the wall of his house for several years, before eventually presenting it to Drake's parents.^[11] An undated photo of Drake's music room at his parents' house in Tanworth-in-Arden shows what appears to be the artwork hanging on the wall.

Reception and legacy

Full page advertisement of the release of Pink Moon.^[13]

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[14]
Melody Maker	average[15]
Q	(1990 reissue)[16]
Q	(2000 reissue)[17]
Mojo	very favourable (2000 reissue)[18]
Pitchfork Media	10/10[19]
Rolling Stone	[20]
Rolling Stone	(2003 reissue)[21]
Sounds	unfavourable[22]

Island Records launched an unusual promotional campaign for the initial release of Pink Moon. They spent the entire promotional budget on full-page advertisements in all major music magazines the month of the record's release.

Initially, Pink Moon garnered a small amount of critical attention. Jerry Gilbert, who had conducted the only known interview with Drake the previous year, wrote the first review of Pink Moon; he was not impressed. Writing in Sounds in March 1972, Gilbert stated that, "The album consists entirely of Nick's guitar, voice and piano and features all the usual characteristics without ever matching up to Bryter Layter. One has to accept that Nick's songs necessarily require further augmentation, for whilst his own accompaniments are good the songs are not sufficiently strong to stand up without any embroidery at all. 'Things Behind The Sun' makes it, so does 'Parasite' – but maybe it's time Mr. Drake stopped acting so mysteriously and started getting something properly organised for himself."^[22] Another early review was written by critic Mark Plummer and appeared in Melody Maker in May 1972. Plummer appreciated the music, but was distracted by Drake's growing ascetic mythology: "His music is so personal and shyly presented both lyrically and in his confined guitar and piano playing that neither does nor doesn't come over ... The more you listen to Drake though, the more compelling his music becomes – but all the time it hides from you. On 'Things Behind The Sun', he sings to me, embarrassed and shy. Perhaps one should play his albums with the sound off and just look at the cover and make the music in your head reciting his words from inside the cover to your own rhythmic heart rhymes ... It could be that Nick Drake does not exist at all."^[15] Stephen Holden, in a more enthusiastic review for Rolling Stone magazine, said "the beauty of Drake's voice is its own justification. May it become familiar to us all."^[2]

By the time of the album's reissues on compact disc in the 1990s and 2000s, Drake's fame and critical standing had improved considerably, and legacy reviews of the album were overwhelmingly favourable. Q's review of the 1990 reissue noted that "the mood is even more remote [than Drake's first two albums] with—finally—a defeated strain in both throat and words, but several of his most elegant melodies".^[16] The review of the 2000 reissue in the same magazine was more positive still, claiming that "many hold up Pink Moon as Nick Drake's best album" and saying, "The motivation of success had evaporated and Drake made a record so singular and uncompromising that, superficially, it beggars belief ... The truth is that Pink Moon's excellence shines through, irrespective of the endless speculation [regarding Drake's frame of mind during the making of the record and subsequent death]. Few records have ever sounded so intimate, or embodied the eternal human ailment known as Melancholy with such grace and assurance."^[17] Mojo claimed that "Pink Moon is his masterpiece and the Robert Johnson comparisons are fully deserved".^[18] Reviewing the 2003 North American reissue, Rolling Stone said, "The album unleashes a dramatic starkness and some breathtakingly pretty music".^[21]

Accolades

In the 2000s, Pink Moon was critically lauded, making it to the Melody Maker "All Time Top 100 Albums" as number 48.^[23] In 2003, the album was ranked number 320 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.^[24] In 2012, that ranking was revised to number 321.^[25]

American singer Meshell Ndegeocello recorded a cover of the title track "Pink Moon" for the album Time of No Reply by Misja Fitzgerald. The American indie band, Sebadoh, has also covered "Pink Moon", which appears on their album Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock. Lucinda Williams covered "Which Will" on her 1992 album Sweet Old World.

1999 Volkswagen Cabriolet advertisement

Promotional CD given to buyers of a VW in 2001.

On 11 November 1999 Volkswagen announced that it was debuting, for the first time, a television advertisement on the internet. The campaign, named "Milky Way", featured the Volkswagen Cabriolet with the title track of Pink Moon as the soundtrack. Ron Lawner, Chief Creative Officer of Arnold Communications stated in the press release, "The song is very special. It's an old song by a guy named Nick Drake. It's called 'Pink Moon' and is actually a very good introduction to Nick Drake if you're not familiar with him. It's very transporting. And to us seemed very fitting for a beautiful drive in the country on a very special night."^[26] The Volkswagen Cabriolet commercial, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and filmed by Lance Acord, led to a large increase in record sales,^[27] and a number-five placing for Pink Moon in Amazon.com's sales chart.^[28] The VW and "Pink Moon" pairing marked a new step in advertising. Bethany Klein, a professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Central England states, "The role of 'Pink Moon' in the success of "Milky Way" was interesting, in that it both added to the artistry of the commercial and was also protected by the visual artistry of the spot: because the ad 'worked' (it was an aesthetic success) the usual negative discourse surrounding the use of popular music in advertising was, if not stopped, at least reduced and accompanied by positive appraisals ... The linking together of the ad being a 'watershed' and being 'nicely done' is no coincidence; it is because the ad is so well executed and so aesthetically successful that the industry and the public reassessed the use of music in advertising around this example."^[29] In 2001, Volkswagen honored the music and advertising pairings they had made over the years by giving all new Volkswagen Cabrio buyers a compilation CD which featured "Pink Moon" as the first track.

Track listing

All songs written and composed by Nick Drake.

Personnel

All personnel credits adapted from the album's liner notes.^[30]

Performer

• Nick Drake – vocals, acoustic guitar, piano (1)

Production

• John Wood – producer, engineer

Design personnel

• Michael Trevithick – artwork
• Keith Morris – photography
• C.C.S. Associates – typography

Release history

References

External links

• Pink Moon at MusicBrainz
• VW Cabrio commercial (article + video)