A song from a final album – that’s what Jim is inviting us to play for Song Lyric Sunday this week, as you can see from his post Everything Comes to an End. There are plenty of reasons as to why an album became the final one for an artist or band, such as break ups or retirement, or the lead singer going solo, but of all the reasons I think that death counts as the most final of all, and that is what I’m going with for this week. My chosen album is Pink Moon, the last of the three released by Nick Drake before his untimely death at just 26 in November 1974.

I’ll tell you more about Nick later but let’s get some music going. This is the album’s opening, and title, track:

As befits a song that runs for just two minutes the lyrics are also quite brief:

I could tell you a lot about Nick Drake, but others have done it far better than I could. There is an excellent biography, Nick Drake: The Life, by Richard Morton Jack, which has a poignant foreword by Gabrielle, Nick’s sister (you may know of her as an actor). And his Wikipedia article is very informative, and can be found here. It boils down to a sad tale of an extremely sensitive and intelligent young man who, frankly, just couldn’t cope with life. He was painfully shy and eventually withdrew from live performances, to which he was never suited anyway, and was diagnosed with depression shortly after the February 1972 release of this album. He had high hopes of being successful in music when he set out, but his records sold poorly – the three between them only achieved 4,000 UK sales in his lifetime, but have all gone on to receive posthumous Gold Discs in the UK, as have some of the compilation discs that have been released: just the fifteen of them so far, with an impending release of one of those ‘everything we recorded’ versions of his first album, Five Leaves Left, a four disc collection due out shortly.

There is a simplicity and beauty to Nick’s music which I have always found attractive, ever since I first heard him on a sampler album Island Records released in 1969, and on another in 1970. For his first two albums he was persuaded into having orchestral backing added to some of the tracks, but he preferred to keep things simple and for Pink Moon it was just him and his guitar, the sole exception being his piano overdub on the track you just heard. Critics have said that his music reflects his battles with depression, and this album in particular was accused of that. But maybe they weren’t listening properly? I found this description of what ‘pink moon’ stands for:

“The pink moon is most famously named after the soft pink wildflowers that bloom in early spring, signaling the vibrant return of the season. But it’s also known by other names like the “budding moon” and the “egg moon,” both of which celebrate the new growth, fertility, and fresh beginnings that spring ushers in.”

So it is actually a time of hope for the coming season and Nick’s lyrics should, I think, be seen in that context. To further make my point I’m going to play you another track from the album, the one that closes it. This is From The Morning:

Although Nick couldn’t have known it at the time, this final song that he released was a lovely piece of positivity to counter the naysayers: