By 1971, the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake was reaching the end of his metaphorical tether: depression, insomnia and the near-crippling shyness that marked his earlier career combined with an increasing dissatisfaction at the poor sales of his two previous records, (1969’s Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, released in 1970) and culminated in an almost total withdrawal from public life. This withdrawal, however, also resulted in the recording of his final album, Pink Moon, a collection of songs of such beguiling, unique beauty as to place them amongst the finest ever written. Put to tape over the course of two, two-hour long sessions beginning at midnight, Pink Moon is, quite literally, extremely

sparse: across its twenty eight minutes, the only thing interrupting Nick’s singing and guitar comes in the form of a piano lightly decorating the title track. What’s left behind, after all else is stripped away, are the winding, ever-shifting melodies that struggled to escape over-orchestration on Drake’s previous work.

On Pink Moon, the focus is squarely upon eleven intricately written guitar parts, and the lilting, haunting

softness of Drake’s voice. It is, without wishing to descend to hyperbole, a completely realised, utterly cohesive set of songs: each perfectly complementing both the track previous and the song to come.

Lyrically, too, the album coheres around two central themes: recurrent images of nature, and of a continuous, quiet hope for the future. It’s tempting, as with any artist that dies young, to view any final

work as a kind of ‘early warning sign’ of things to come, (and, indeed, Nick Drake passed away in 1974, two years after Pink Moon’s release, overdosing on anti-depressants) but to do so in this case is to do the album a great disservice. Its gentle, understated feel, though conceived in a state of increasing

turmoil, stands as testament to the ability of an individual artist to create something moving. As Nick sings on the final track ‘From The Morning’: “the day once dawned / and it was beautiful”. A simple statement, but sometimes it’s the simple things that are the most powerful - and therein lies Pink Moon’s ineffable power.

Mathew Pitts