Nick Drake
Pink moon

THE REVIEW

"Pink moon". It is the name of a demon and, according to the lunars, a sign of doom. Whispered with a disconnected and almost childlike voice, it is instead the refrain of a folk tune, two minutes of gentle guitar, punctuated only for a few moments by a blinding moonbeam which is then a piano, melancholic and luminous that will not return. This, in fact, is track one and from two to eleven there is only voice and guitar.

Nick Drake recorded Pink Moon in 1972 at twenty-four years old. A prodigy boy, he had invested a large part of his mental energies into music and, pampered by Joe Boyd, one of the most intelligent producers of the time, had the opportunity to record two albums with the cream of the English folk/rock scene musicians. The result was a series of timeless songs, even if here and there weighed down by too baroque arrangements. Those records, albeit beautiful, sometimes give the impression of betraying the fragile and touching simplicity of his songs, for which it is almost always preferable, when it exists, the demo version for only voice and guitar. And this should not be surprising, because Nick, just like the great blues men of the past, made a single man of voice and guitar, so much so that many have written that there was something supernatural in this, an idea I find quite sensible, especially if one considers another of his gifts, which was creating such intimate and hypnotic atmospheres that it almost gave the impression to every single listener that he and he alone is the interlocutor of that voice and that guitar. A bit like what happens with certain movies, aided by the darkness of the theater, when you are without a girlfriend and without friends and the off-screen voice is only telling you its story. And of confidants, as everyone knows, one is enough, two are already too many. As are too many, returning to Nick, certain violins, or that damn jazzy saxophone that, just to give an example, defaces “At the chime of a city clock”, a wonderful song where Nick whispers that it's cold and one needs to get on their knees and pray for some warmth. Sure, there are cases where the arrangements are even successful, but most of the time the effect is that of annoying interference. Do not worry though, there is still plenty of magic in those records. My grievances are just quirks.

Magical records then, but it's not their time and they go almost unnoticed. Furthermore, Nick, affected by almost pathological sensitivity and shyness, cannot perform live. He tries, yes, but on stage he barely manages to mumble something without being able to look people in the face.
Not accustomed to the life of a big city like London, he gets lost and withdraws into himself until something breaks. So he returns to his parents convinced he has failed.
At home, the situation deteriorates with psychiatric visits, psychotropic drugs, a void that becomes total. Yet those from the record company continue, despite the absolutely unexpected failure, to pamper him. The boss, Chris Blackwell, gives Nick the keys to his apartment in Algesiras, Spain, hoping for a positive break from the usual patterns. It’s the beginning of summer and Nick leaves.
Upon returning in October, he calls John Wood, the record company’s sound engineer, saying he wants to record a new album. And John Wood says OK, also because he had a precise mandate, to record at any time anything Nick wanted. So they arrange for a night session.
Nick arrives and his appearance is spectral. He enters the studio and, eyes turned to the wall, records one after another the songs of Pink Moon. Then to a stunned Wood, he says that the songs are fine the way they are, only voice and guitar.
"No cotton wool and frills"
He will limit himself to adding the piano solo I have mentioned. That’s it.
In just two days Pink Moon is ready. The recordings of the previous records had lasted months and months.

In the end, one could say that in Pink Moon there is nothing but a guy singing and playing the guitar. And it is true in a certain sense. Also, keep in mind that when I listened to it the first time, I had no idea what the words meant. But the fact is that the words must come out well from the mouth, as someone said, and they must do nothing but convey a feeling. And the feeling is grasped even without translation.
Sure, with a few quotes from those sparse lyrics, such as “you see me, but I’m not here” "give me a place to stay" "I’ve grown old and I have to clean up," you perhaps get a clearer idea.
And my idea is this: Pink Moon is the album of the crossroads, of when you have to decide what to do and cannot tell lies, the junction, the intersection of wind-swept roads where according to the blues legend a benevolent deity protects you from the dark and helps you to make things clear in your mind, spelling the word destiny for you. And where the sacrificial pyre of past mistakes is made, and all those guitar flights are nothing but the sparks of fire. But all this is intuited even without understanding the meaning of the words.
Listen to the slightly disconnected, almost childlike voice, especially when compared to that of previous records. In the homonymous song, this effect is almost incredible, Nick doesn’t even seem able to pronounce the words well. "It’s as if a four-year-old child, while playing with some stones, suddenly received a message from Mars and began to repeat pink moon, pink moon, pink moon," says that someone again (who is then a very wise guy named Robyn Hitchcock).
Then comes that piano solo and it says it in another way, as if it was really a moonbeam entering suddenly through the window. But I don’t feel like being a music critic. So enough.
Let’s just say that the old Robyn compared Nick’s songs to butterflies, butterflies tied to an anchor. I say instead that his voice is the morning that sings the night. And that "Pink Moon" is a masterpiece, an absolute masterpiece.