Nick Drake

The last record. In October 1971, a few months after Bryter Layter had failed to sell, Nick Drake went back to Sound Techniques in Chelsea with engineer John Wood and recorded a new album over two late-night sessions. No band, no strings, no producer in the room: just his voice, his acoustic guitar and, on the title song alone, a piano part he added himself. Island released Pink Moon in February 1972. It runs to about twenty-eight minutes.

The brevity is the point. Eleven songs, most under three minutes, written in open tunings and played with the same exactness he had shown on the first two albums, only now with nothing around them. Place to Be and Road are plain and close to the microphone, Things Behind the Sun is the longest and most searching, and Horn is a short instrumental of single notes left to hang in the air. Parasite and Know are darker still, built on a few repeated figures.

The cover painting is by Michael Trevithick, a friend of Drake’s sister Gabrielle, a dream collage of a teacup, a clown and a looming pink sphere. Pink Moon sold little at the time, Drake gave almost no interviews and played almost no concerts, and he died in November 1974 at twenty-six. The closing song, From the Morning, supplied the line carved on his gravestone at Tanworth-in-Arden.

The album found its audience decades later, and is now heard as one of the purest solo records of its era. This CD digipack edition returns it in a compact, durable form.