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"And now we rise, and we are everywhere..."

-Nick Drake

Few things can be said about Nick Drake that a person couldn't immediately realize upon listening to one of his songs. He was a genius, he was sensitive, and there certainly was a hell of a lot going on in his mind. Drake is one of the most tragically beautiful figures in modern music, his story only made all the more melancholy when accompanied by the strikingly heartbroken songs that make up the final proper album of his short career.

Drake faced a continual uphill battle against depression, often subsiding to his feelings of sadness by isolating himself from others. The poor sales of his first two records only catalyzed his despair. Distraught and steadily declining into his tormented psyche, he went into his recording studio at midnight and recorded a two-hour session with only his sound engineer, John Wood, present. He did the same the next night. The result of these swift and quiet night-sessions is what many consider one of the greatest folk records ever, Pink Moon.

The production was stripped down from his previous two albums, leaving only Drake's wistful voice and guitar remaining, aside from a small piano accompaniment on the titular cut. It is the naked quality Pink Moon emanates that creates its magnetic aspect, leaving Drake emotionally bare with only his most intimate thoughts facing dissection. "Pink Moon," the album's opener, immediately screams silently for attention with Drake's labyrinthian right hand finger-picking gymnastics choreographing the gentle cadences of his whisper-soft voice. His exploration of exotic and original tunings created the groundwork for an inventive and previously unheard guitar technique that simply can't be duplicated.

Drake's barely-there, astral vocals drench the album with a ghostly beauty. His off-beat vocal timing on "Place to be" makes it nearly impossible to sing along without having to memorize the entire song front to back. These subtle technical gestures are what give Pink Moon its gravity and put Drake's greatest faculties on display. One of the album's greater standouts, "Which Will," dichotomizes his frenetically graceful guitar pickings with his angelic voice. "Know," a two-and-a-half minute ballad consisting of four notes and Drake's voice humming through most of the song, shows how much he could create out of so little.

Pink Moon closes with "From the Morning," the album's most upbeat song contrasting the bleak feel draping it up until that point. A Spry picking pattern dances with some of the most beautiful lyrics Drake has ever composed ("A day once dawned/ and it was beautiful/ a day once dawned from the ground/ then the night she fell/ and the air was beautiful/ the night she fell all around.")

Every great songwriter shares a common trait that binds them to their folkloric mythologies. That is the sense that they know something that most people don't; they know something about life that everyone else is dying to find out. Nick Drake died two years after the completion of Pink Moon from an overdose of anti-depressants, cutting short his brilliant, yet tragically little-known, career. Whether or not the death was suicide or accidental is easily debatable. But ever since his death his music has become more and more well-known, finally receiving the attention that Drake so desperately needed in his lifetime. Now, after being added to numerous illustrious "best albums" lists, Pink Moon has become a critical benchmark to which all singer-songwriters have been compared since. For Drake it is a manifesto, but for the listener it is a graceful swan-dive into his pool of creativity.

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