Nick Drake

Pink Moon (1972)

Recorded in two sessions with almost no overdubs, Pink Moon strips Drake's sound to just voice and guitar, the intricate fingerpicking of "Place to Be" and "Know" left completely exposed. The title track runs barely two minutes, its five-note piano line the only addition to the whole record, and says more in that time than most albums manage across a side. It sounds less like a folk album than a private ritual accidentally left running. Its influence — on Elliott Smith, on an entire generation of hushed singer-songwriters — is now impossible to separate from the myth of the record itself.

Sleeve notes

Pink Moon · 1972

Nick Drake released three albums in his lifetime — Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Layter (1970), and Pink Moon (1972) — and almost no one heard them. He gave a handful of interviews, played a small number of increasingly uncomfortable live shows, and by his mid-twenties had withdrawn from performing almost entirely, retreating to his parents' house in Warwickshire. His guitar playing, an intricate open-tuned fingerstyle learned partly from folk revivalists like Bert Jansch, was matched by a voice so quiet it seemed to require the listener's complicity to hear at all.

Drake died in 1974, and for a decade afterward his records were nearly impossible to find. Their rediscovery, gradual and then total, has made him one of the most cited influences in guitar-based songwriting of the last fifty years — audible in artists as different as R.E.M. and Radiohead. Pink Moon, recorded in two late-night sessions with no accompaniment beyond a single piano overdub, is now regarded as one of the starkest and most perfect records ever made.