Pink Moon is the third and final studio album by the English musician Nick Drake, released in the UK by Island Records on 25 February 1972. It was the only one of Drake's studio albums to be released in North America during his lifetime. Pink Moon differs from Drake's previous albums in that it was recorded without a backing band, featuring just Drake on vocals and acoustic guitar, the only other instrumentation being a single piano melody overdubbed onto the title track.
Pink Moon, like Drake's previous studio albums, did not sell well during his lifetime, and its stripped-back, intimate sound received a mixed response from critics. However, the album has since garnered significant critical acclaim, retrospectively being named one of the greatest albums of the 1970s.
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.
Although critics often associate Drake's music with his depression – especially the perceived melancholy of Pink Moon – Cally Callomon 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."
Recording
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. 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".
After a brief hiatus in Spain spent at a villa belonging to Island Records' head Chris Blackwell, Drake returned to London refreshed. In October 1971, he approached record engineer and producer John Wood, With the studio being booked during the day, Drake and Wood arrived at the studio around 11:00 p.m. and simply and quietly recorded half the songs. The next night, they did the same.
Contrary to popular legend that Drake dropped the album off in a plastic bag at Island Records reception and then left without anyone realising it, Drake delivered the master tapes of Pink Moon to Chris Blackwell at Island.
The tapes of the Pink Moon session also included Drake's recording of "Plaisir d'amour" ("The Pleasure of Love"), a classical French love song written in 1784 by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. "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. However, a note in reference to the song was included which read, "Spare title – Do not use", so the song did not make it onto the album. The recording, less than a minute long and featuring guitar with no vocals, 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 Drake did not write himself.
Music and lyrics
Characterized as a fusing of "beauty and melancholy," the tracks on Pink Moon explore themes such as lust, depression and "the slimmest rays of hope," according to Josh Jackson of Paste Magazine. 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.]]
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.
Pink Moon received more attention from the UK music press than Drake's first two albums had, but most critical reviews were still brief.
In 1971, Jerry Gilbert of Sounds had conducted the only known interview with Drake. Gilbert had championed Drake up to this point, but expressed his disappointment with Pink Moon and his frustration at Drake's apparent lack of motivation, saying, "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."
In Melody Maker, Mark 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."
Referring to Drake's recorded output, Fred Dellar noted in Hi-Fi News & Record Review that "the LPs hardly sell, thanks partly to Nick's reluctance to play promotional concerts and one is left with the feeling that his only ambition is to play the lead in the Howard Hughes story should anyone ever decide to make it as a musical. In the meantime, he employs his deliciously smokey voice in making these intimate, late-night sounds that I find myself playing time and time again." Duncan Fallowell of Records and Recording said that "his songs are infinitely soothing and infinitely similar", calling the album "even more unassuming than the others", and stating "Nick Drake will never strike it big. It is not in his nature or in the nature of his music. And that is another good thing too." In the London edition of Time Out, Al Clark observed that Drake "writes striking and evocative songs and always has done, but most of the magic is in the delivery: a smoky, palpitating voice, reminiscent of the jazzier Donovan, gliding wistful words over the chord changes and creating moments of perfect stillness". Clark stated that "several of the more substantial songs are very lovely", but concluded presciently, "Sadly, and despite Island's efforts to rectify the situation, Nick Drake is likely to remain in the shadows, the private troubadour of those who have been fortunate enough to catch an earful of his exquisite 3am introversions".
Reviewing the album in the October 1972 issue of Creem, Colman Andrews described the songs as "not awfully good" and "weak", and that the music was "a triumph of style over sententiousness, of sound over sense" with "a lulling repetitiousness to a lot of what he sings", but that this was the point: "he knows precisely what emotional limits to impose upon his self-accompaniment. It's seductive music."