Pink Moon

Forty years ago Nick Drake's third and last album, Pink Moon, was released. None of his albums sold more than 5,000 copies, and this one is full of very sparse music--nothing but guitar and Drake's melancholy, near whisper vocals. But today, due to admiring musicians and a Volkswagen commercial, Drake is something of a legend.

I picked this CD up back in 1999 when the title track was featured in a VW commercial, and have been listening to it for the past few days. It's not a finger-snapping record, with all the songs in a minor key and overlaid with an almost ethereal sense of death, which of course, becomes more obvious when knows that Drake killed himself with an overdose two years after the release of this album, at 26.

Pink Moon is very beautiful music, though, and very calming--it could be played in a massage parlor. Drake, a musician in the mold of romantic poets who died young like Shelley and Keats, doesn't break any ground with this record, but it's spare sound kind of penetrates to the soul.

The lyrics are enigmatic and simple. The title track goes:

"I saw it written and I saw it say
Pink moon is on it's way
And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon gonna get you all"

Is the pink moon a representation of death?

There's more astronomy in "Road":

"You can say the sun is shining if you really want to
I can see the moon and it seems so clear
You can take the road that takes you to the stars now
I can take a road that'll see me through"

And "Things Behind the Sun":

"Don't be shy you learn to fly
And see the sun when day is done
If only you see
Just what you are beneath a star
That came to stay one rainy day
In autumn for free
Yes, be what you'll be."

Drake's song on this record or so delicate, as if spun from gossamer, that a listener feels like a stiff wind would scatter the notes. It's a shame that he died when he did, for he may have reached even greater heights. But it brings up the age-old question: if Drake were in a better state of mind, would he have produced music like this?