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Francesco Giannone
Professor Peter Sarram
CMS 316
26 June 2015
Nick Drake, Pink Moon

Pink Moon is the third and final studio album by the English folk musician Nick Drake. It
was released in the UK by Island Records on 25 February 1972 and 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, acoustic guitar and a brief piano riff overdubbed onto the title track. Released when

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Drake was twenty-four, two years before his death in November 1974, the LP contains shorter
tracks compared to his previous two albums, with a total album running time of just over twentyeight minutes.
For the contemporary listeners, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which Pink Moon
would be released by a corporate record label. Drake's two previous works are now critically
acclaimed, but they didn't sell well at the time of their release. Island was also growing weary of
Drakes behavior: he did not play live and had no established fan base, nor would he promote his
albums with interviews. He was becoming reclusive and falling into a downward spiral of
depression and drugs. The fact that Island accepted and released Pink Moon untouched is often
considered as one of pop music's most bewildering choices in the context of the fragmentation
and hyphenated rock of the time. Actually, thanks to this album Drake certainly made his special
contribution of integrity and authenticity to rock culture (Garofalo considers appropriate to talk
of a larger musical culture, rather than different genres, which are often marketing categories
rather than musical distinctions in pop culture).
1972 was indeed a great year for pop music. The day of Pink Moons release, the numberone album on the UK charts was Cat Stevens Teaser and the Firecat. That same year, the
Eagles, Tom Waits, and Loudon Wainwright III would release their debut albums and Bruce
Springsteen and Aerosmith would both sign to Columbia Records, while David Bowie was ready
to transform into Ziggy Stardust. Elvis Presley released Burning Love, his last top-ten single,
and Paul McCartney who had split from the Beatles was now making his live debut as
frontman of Wings. It was a complicated landscape in which to launch an apparently unassuming
folk record like Pink Moon. On the one hand pop music was growing brash and sexual, on the
other confessional singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, Carole King, and Joni

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Mitchell were amassing considerable audiences thus saturating the market for folk music. No
wonder Island was trying its best to discover a viable way to market Drake, struggling to cast his
reclusive tendencies as mysterious rather than frightening, intriguing rather than dysfunctional.
Island had first planned a standard cover with the musicians photo for the album but
given Drakes physical and psychological conditions, the shots taken by well known
photographer Keith Morris (who had handled Drakes first covers) simply turned out unflattering
and unusable for any promotional purpose. Island resorted then to a surrealist cover by Michael
Trevithick (a friend incidentally of Drakes sister Gabrielle). The cover itself became
emblematic of Drakes new departure with regard to his previous albums and his search for
authenticity. Trevithicks artwork with images that may appear unrelated (but only at a very first
glance) could actually refer back to the musicians efforts to negotiate inner and outer realities,
inner and outer emotional landscapes. In addition to an orange pink moon, for instance, in the
center a small sized US postage stamp figuring the Apollo (the first manned moon rocket was
launched in 1969) directly refers to the visual landscape described in Pink Moon. The formerly
untrammelled, unknown, pure and transcendent moon was now sullied: now it was just an object,
just another chunk of rock floating in the sky. The magic was gone. The lyrics to the second
track on Pink Moon, Place to Be are particularly significant in this regard: "When I was young,
younger than before / I never saw the truth hanging from the door / And now Im older see it face
to face / And now Im older gotta get up, clean the place. Drake is after demystifying
conventional realities and presenting the truth stripped bare, in sheer honesty, acknowledging at
the same time that the world is changing and everyone feels unrooted. The authenticity of the
Romantic vision of the moon has now to be balanced with scientific (and Modernist) truth: two
versions of authenticity have to be reckoned with.

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To use Keir Keightley's words, Authentic designates those music, musicians, and
musical experiences seen to be direct and honest, uncorrupted by commerce, trendiness,
derivativeness, a lack of inspiration and so on (131)." Authenticity refers to music expressing
genuine and sincere feelings, as well as original creativity and conveying a sense of community.
It is not something in the music, it is rather a value, a quality we ascribe to perceived
relationships between music, socio-industrial practices, and listeners. In this regard, Pink Moon
definitely moves in the direction of authenticity. Soon after releasing Breyter Layter (his second
LP) Drake felt his next album should be free of much of the unessentials of production so as to
fulfill a documentary role, as if he wanted to offer a sincere representation of a musicians inner
states. Drake was also questioning the strategy of Joe Boyd, the producer of his first two albums.
While Boyd intended to gain him a larger audience by making his albums radio-friendly, he,
instead, intended to privilege honesty over commercial requirements. John Wood (the producer
he now teamed with) used a four-microphone setup for Drake's acoustic guitar, with an ambient
microphone stuck on the other end of the room. The final record's guitar sound both full and
spare, rich and uncluttered is one of the most unusual and hypnotic in pop history.
Drake, who wrote his own songs, was self-taught and achieved his guitar style through the use of
alternative tunings to create cluster chords. In many tracks the dissonant effect of such nonstandard tunings is enhanced through his vocal melodies. Because each track contains only
vocals and guitar, attention is focused simply on Drakes voice, lyrics and unusual guitar style.
Drake's voice - so open and suave at the same time, 'soft' yet intense is the guarantor of his
sincerity, the expression of his physical and affective being. Stephen Holden (one of the first
critics to recognize the value of Drakes Pink Moon) in a 1972 review for Rolling Stone
magazine pointed out, "The beauty of Drake's voice is its own justification. May it become

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familiar to us all." Drakes intimate yet charismatic delivery, with its hint of androgyny or
femininity, allows both men and women equal access to his persona, and somehow the messages
he conveys in that voice break through the internal dividing lines in all of us between male and
female, straight and gay. Of course Drake is far from belonging to cock rock" music making (to
use a Frith and McRobbie term) but neithet is he teenybop.
Pink Moon opens with a prickly brush of guitar that gives way to the melody. For the
album's opening title track, Drake tunes his guitar low and his voice labors to catch up. All over
the song, Drake's pronunciation is distorted and imprecise. The lines are mumbled and slurred.
He utters a warning to himself and the listener and the community at large: "Pink moon is on its
way," which to some may translate an involvement in the antinuclear protest. His inner and
intimate (confessional) world and visions are relevant to the community as they express the
mood shared by many.
Keightley further explains how authenticity can be constructed in a number of ways. He
shows how both Romanticism and Modernism inform contemporary notions of authenticity in
rock culture and popular music more broadly. Drakes music, with its complex qualities pertains
to both Romanticism and Modernism. The most obvious reading of ethos and textual features in
Pink Moon belongs to the tradition of Romantic authenticity: his lyrics and music, throughout his
work, speak through the singer himself rather than through invented characters, and in Pink
Moon in particular, the music seems so unmediated by the production process that it is hard to
see it as anything other than a document of one man and his guitar performing. However, as
Wiseman-Trowese points out:

The Modernist traits identified by Keightley also manifest themselves in Pink Moon: the
albums minimal ethos, and particularly tracks like Know and the instrumental Horn,

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point to a willingness to transcend traditional song structure, to mark out an interiorized
landscape that portrays the mind of the artist with little regard for commercial imperatives
or musical narrative (103).
Drake is, therefore, connecting to the cult of sensibility most fully on his final album, even
as he reconnects with Modernist impulses that most notably would have been found in the jazz
records that he had been so fond of since his youth. Significantly, the tensions between the past
and the present are negotiated in some form of conciliation through Drakes music. The sense of
movement and dynamism in his music reveals the tensions in English cultural life at the time he
was writing. As Wiseman-Trowese points out:
Drake, despite the idyllic setting of his childhood in Warwickshire and his education at
Marlborough College and the University of Cambridge, was, like many young men of his
class and era, negotiating a point of transition, a shift in the way that England was thinking
about itself, and this is reflected in his music and lyrics.
While in the US Vietnam kept making front pages, in Britain too, politically, the winter of
1972 was particularly turbulent. On the same day Pink Moon was packed and shipped, the
National Union of Mineworkers ended its seven-week long strike for increased wages which had
crippled the country's power supplies, and seen 1.2 million workers fired. Tensions between
England and Ireland were also violently exacerbated, with Northern Ireland seventh Bloody
Sunday that January, and the British Embassy in Dublin assaulted, not to mention IRAs car
bombs. On a broader perspective, it should be recalled also that after World War II the UK was a
disillusioned power having lost its world empire, starting with India. The parents generation of
rock musicians belonged to the defeated generation. (Drake himself was actually born in Burma,
where his father, an engineer, had joined the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation in the 1930s).
Compared to the victorious US, the UK was also culturally different on other grounds too:
not as Puritan, and with no social panic on the part of the parents, it was a highly class stratified

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society. In addition, like other European countries, historically England relied on the public
service monopoly and had no established commercial mass media to promote music. Drakes
music also faces issues pertaining to negotiating both Englishness and Americanness. Since his
death, Drakes music has been situated as a particular kind of English artist that integrates
American counterculture, the English class system, and a nostalgic reimagining of the hippie era.
However, there are more facets to his art than that. In this regard, Tony Reif stresses how Drake
often wrote 'mythically', always symbolically, and sometimes with down-to-earth meanings,
veiled in a kind of transcendental Romanticism, but the temptation to mythologize him as an
example of the ethereal artist who tragically dies young should be resisted. His music and his
life, apparently so closely bound together, demand more justice than that clich can deliver.
On a final note, it may be ironic to consider that Pink Moon (which sold rather poorly when
it was first released) sold more in 1999 in one month in the USA than it did before since it was
released, this thanks to its visibility acquired in Milky Way, a praised television commercial for
Volkswagen. It may sound even more ironic and paradoxical considering also Drakes obstinate,
almost over unrealistic aversion and opposition to commercialism.Yet, as paradoxical as it might
be, it proves the power concealed in his music, which is rooted into rock and folk culture. Rock,
as that part of the counterculture vivifying the mainstream culture and challenging the rigidity of
the established system, was early coopted by the advertising industry. Milky Way, though, is an
instance of how such process can be reversed and revolutionized, at least for some time. Pink
Moon becomes then a true instance of art that is not only to be uncritically consumed and
massified but rather art through which consumers will be educated and will learn to pass value
judgments. Furthermore, the Volkswagen and Pink Moon pairing actually marked a new step in
advertising, showing also how rock culture can shape mainstream culture: as Bethany Klein, of

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the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Central England states, "The
role of 'Pink Moon' in the success of "Milky Way" was interesting, in that it both added to the
artistry of the commercial and was also protected by the visual artistry of the spot: because the ad
'worked' (it was an aesthetic success) the usual negative discourse surrounding the use of popular
music in advertising was, if not stopped, at least reduced and accompanied by positive appraisals
(46).

Works Consulted
Frank, Thomas. Why Johnny Cant Dissent. Commodify Your Dissent. New York: Norton,
1997. Print.
Frederick, Robin. "Nick Drake: A Place To Be," RobinFrederick.com, 2001. Retrieved 26
October 2006. Web. 26 June 2015.
Garofalo, Reebee. Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005. Print.
Keightley, Keir. Reconsidering Rock in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Frith,
Simon et al. Ed.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.
Klein, Bethany. As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising. Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate Publishing, 2010. Print.
Luikens, Ryan. VW Pink Moon Commercial. YouTube. YouTube, LLC, 7 May 2006. Web. 26
June 2015.
Negus, Keith Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction Cambridge: Wesleyan, 1996. Print.
Pink Moon. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 20 May 2015. Web.

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26 June 2015.
Reif, Tony. Nick Drake a Gay Perspective. The Nick Drakes Files. 21 Jen. 1997. Web. 26
June 2015.
Wiseman-Trowese, Nathan. Nick Drake: Dreaming England. London, Reaktion Book, 2013.
Print.