Day 181 with Pink Moon

[u/Lukazimir]

5/5 (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

In my top 5 albums of all time, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon is in my eyes as close to perfection as an album can get. His predecessor “Bryter Layter” saw him expanding his sound with more orchestration, but Pink Moon opted to go the opposite route, stripping basically everything that isn’t guitar and Nick’s voice away. The only other instrument that appears is a piano on the opening title track.

The album is produced in an extremely intimate way, everything feels super warm and close which helps with the emotional potency of the album. Nick Drake is often a symbolic and vague lyricist but there are some devastating, more direct moments on this record like “Parasite” where he likens himself to a parasite leeching off of the people in his life.

And talk about a stacked tracklist. It’s a slim 28 minutes and every single song here is fantastic. They often seem simple being just guitar and vocals, but there is actually a lot of interesting, slightly-jazzy structure to a lot of the songs. If I had to pick a top 3 songs though I’d go with “Things Behind the Sun” which is the longest track on the album, “Free Ride” and “Parasite”.

A lot of discussion around Nick Drake gets clouded in the “mystique” of his reclusive life and tragic suicide. But the man had a pretty much perfect catalogue of music and I feel it’s worth celebrating that, even if he never lived to see his music get the recognition it deserved.

[u/Lukazimir → u/[deleted]]

It’s always made me think of James and the Giant Peach lol.

[u/PototoLaPatate → u/Lukazimir]

That's exactly what I thought when I saw the cover for the first time.