I have learnt that the most wonderful way to listen to Nick Drake’s Pink Moon is to be alone at night, with a window cracked open. It’s definitely a solitary exercise. Drake’s is a story painted in a suffocating loneliness, so to look up at the sky as he may have done thousands of times, brings a sense of connection and comfort, of sharing something with him even if that moment is almost 50 years apart.
The 1972 album Pink Moon was Drake’s third and final record.
It’s short and intense, barley a half hour long. It’s remarkably mundane, unsettling, naked. Yet there is a magic about it, something I can’t quite articulate; it sounds like the morning. Perhaps a Sunday morning, where a bittersweet acknowledgment of an ending is nigh, balanced with the arrival of a new start. It’s an intermediary of something, there is a sense of grief for both what has been lost, and for what is yet to come. The term ‘pink moon' itself refers to the harbingers of spring, rendering this record at my first glance, as being one about loss, failure, and death, but also about hope, renewal and repair.
I saw it written and I saw it say
Pink moon is on its way
There is a melancholia which comes through the tone of Drake’s vocals, the timbre of which is extraordinarily soft. Drake’s wobbly voice mumbles atop lyrics that depict a commentary of a world removed from my own, yet speaking to the universal anxieties of growth and resignation to an end. Yet Drake has been able to explore these morbid ideas without being explicitly miserable about his experience; at least that’s my take on his work. I’ve never tired of his songwriting, purely because it’s never as dull or monotonous as one may think.
Drake’s songs are painfully concise, both in prose and instrumentation. I suppose this sparsity of content is what catalyses this excruciating longing for knowledge and understanding. Many this simplicity of texture within Pink Moon. Aside from a single piano overdub appearing as a whisper on the title track, there is a closeness and intimacy about recording one voice and one guitar in a room.
The melodies Drake wrote were unbalanced, they don’t begin or end where you’d expect them to. Whilst he played with subverting natural musical assumptions, the fading in and out of his voice isn’t jarring, it seems like spoken word at times, which in real life, do allude to rhythm and pitch, just not as robotically. In doing this repeatedly, the harmonic undertones shift more conventionally, but because they aren’t always matched with melodic movement, there is a heightened sense of ephemerality, of freedom.
The album’s feigned simplicity is overruled by Drake’s capacity to disguise genius and virtuosity as effortlessly unadorned melodies, which exist within a flowing rhythmic sphere, organic and dizzy, like water.
This said, this is purely based off of my own inference; there is very little empirical evidence of Drake’s musicianship. There are no interviews, no live recordings, nothing. I suppose that adds to the elusiveness of his work, the idea that whilst there is a yearning for understanding the theoretical, the mechanisms by which his emotion, tone, and experience marry so well with his playing, are absent of objective truths.
Drake’s music is just as riddled with paradox as is his reappearance in the 21st century.
Sunday morning, November 24 in 1974, Drake played Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos on his turntable, curled into bed, emptying 30 doses of a prescribed antidepressant into his stomach as he lay down. Nick Drake passed away at around 6am that morning, he was 26 years old.
Now, nearing 50 years on, the elusive and mysterious Nick Drake has returned.
The periphery of his music to his tragedy is the mechanism for which a rekindling interest in Drake has sparked. His story, having now been ended for a while, can be sold. Sure, music tastes change over time, but what other than his tragedy, has changed? When he was alive, his music resonated with only a few people. Now, his music resonates with people all over the world. Why?
Nick Drake is a forgotten phenomenon.
It is shamefully simple to idealise the demise of a character, there is this morbid attraction to view tragedy from the perspective of a survivor. That is to say we delve into these narratives, submerge ourselves in the gloom and conspiracy of an other’s experience, feel as though we understand it fully, yet we remain completely on the outside. It is our interest and perceived understanding of a tragedy not our own, that allows us to survive it. In Drake, when we hear him sing about anxiety, emptiness, and death, we trust that what we are listening to is an artefact of mental illness.
Now I'm darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be
From the perspective of a fan, and thus a survivor of Drake’s narrative, we believe these mumbled phrases wholeheartedly. Regardless of the fact that close friends and family documented Drake as being proud, happy and confident of Pink Moon, there is an unbelievable amount of literature that allow for a morbid curiosity to repaint a truth fundamentally misunderstood.
This is not to say that Drake’s struggle with mental illness was never represented in his music, of course it was. Mental illness can shape how people see the world, and how people see the world with themselves in it. Albeit the commercial obsession with treating Pink Moon in particular as the last souvenir of a tortured mind, seems at least to me to be totally missing the point of the album, and almost insulting to ignore the fact that Drake was non-verbal during the last months of his life — this is the brutal truth of depression, not lyrical allusions on an equally bleak yet beautiful record.
Yet this enigma will forever remain. In Drake’s death, his separation from the world is strengthened, and our individual understandings of his music and life are shaped no longer by him, but by what our intrigue is hungry for.
We can’t turn back time. What we can do, is accept and celebrate that Drake’s music has survived. Perhaps this resurgence softens the blow of his contextual unpopularity, using tragedy as a conduit for finally understanding and acknowledging Drake’s music is a form of blessing, even if we were too late.
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