Pink Moon

Eleven tracks in about twenty-eight minutes, and the record is built to resist the subtractive test. Every song is voice and guitar with no introduction, solo or coda beyond what the figure needs. Road and Harvest Breed end almost as soon as they are stated, and the brevity is the argument: a speaker who will not say more than he can. The one addition, the piano phrase in the title song, is required, since it lets the record open on a second colour before closing to the bare form. The test bites twice. Horn, a single guitar line between songs, could go with small loss, and Free Ride and Which Will sit close in manner. Necessity is easier to keep in so small a form, and that holds it below Kind of Blue at 8.6.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: a man watching himself withdraw from other people, knowing the distance and unable to cross it. Place to Be sets it plainly against youth, “When I was younger”, from strength to a darkness the song names. Parasite places the self beneath the feet of others in the city; Know states love in four lines and withdraws it in the same breath. These songs state the condition, not only its mood, and what they state can be said plainly and holds. Sound discloses as much as the words and is credited fully: the voice, close, unforced and almost without vibrato, discloses exhaustion more truthfully than the words say it, and the absence of every other player is itself what the record says. Held short of the gate: Road, Which Will and Free Ride are oblique, and in them the record renders a condition felt more than one articulated.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Height comes often and in one kind: a quiet, cold beauty, never grandeur. The title song’s piano phrase, entering over the guitar, is a small summit in the record’s first minute. Things Behind the Sun rises across nearly four minutes, the guitar’s figure driving the voice to the record’s widest reach. Place to Be holds at height through its whole length on a voice barely above speech, and From the Morning closes in an elevation that is almost serene. Parasite’s slow descent is the dreadful form of the same height. Over twenty-eight minutes the frequency is high, and the axis counts frequency with height. What holds the figure from the top is the narrowness of the kind, and three tracks, Horn, Road and Free Ride, that hold the record’s level without rising from it; neither holds it far.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The archetypal is evoked through the natural order and the year: the pink moon as omen, said in the title song to be “on its way”; the sun and what lies behind it; the harvest of Harvest Breed; the morning of the last song. Those images organise the sequence. The record opens on an omen of coming harm and ends on morning and rising, and the man at its centre passes between them. That frame is partly built, by the order of the songs rather than by any one of them, and the building is credited: the year carries the record’s shape and does not only colour it. What holds the axis below the gate is that no figure bears the myth: the speaker has no story, the omen has no object, and the moon is a mood the songs gather round more than a structure they carry. The particular and the archetype touch, and the sequence brings them close to joining.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The turn is from Drake’s own previous record, Bryter Layter (1970), with its strings, horns, rhythm section and guest players, to one man and a guitar with almost nothing added. Against the field the departure is smaller: the solo record of voice and guitar was a common form of the folk and singer-songwriter years, and the records of 1970 and 1971 had already made intimacy a market. The swerve is in the degree of the stripping, the refusal of every frame and comfort a label of 1972 would supply, and in the brevity. The stake was real and was paid: two records had not sold, the third gave up the means by which a record might, and its maker would not tour or promote it. The axis scores the turn and the stake together, and this is a turn with a stake, not a stylistic accent. Held below the gate: the turn is mostly from his own path, onto a form the tradition already held.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and the record loses what it knows. Put the band and strings of the earlier records behind these songs and the isolation becomes a picture of isolation; here it is the condition of the making itself, one voice and one guitar in a room. The brevity is the same instrument: songs that stop as soon as they are said disclose a speaker who cannot go on talking. The sequence is counted here, once, and it bears load: the title song’s one added colour opens the record and is never repeated, each side closes onto the bare form, Parasite’s descent sits late, and From the Morning is placed last so that the record ends on rising. The guitar figures carry as much as the voice. Several songs would survive another setting nearly whole, and that holds it below Low and Kind of Blue at 9.0.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over about fifty years, and unevenly. For its first two decades the record was barely heard, and the return it can show runs mainly from the late 1980s: reissues, a biography and a documentary literature on Drake, musicians working out the guitar parts, and successive generations of listeners who come to it young. That return has now held for more than three decades without exhausting, each generation finding the record for itself. The tunings and fingerings have been studied in detail by players, and the formal depth, what so few means can do, keeps yielding. The semantic depth is narrower. The record is often reread through its maker’s death in 1974, which yields a story about Drake more than new meaning in the songs, and that rereading is charged rather than credited. The late start and the share of attention given to the life hold the figure below the long-studied works of the music desk.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is the singer-songwriter and folk album of the early 1970s. The intrinsic force is real if contained: the record did not reorganise what an album could do, but it showed how far a record could be stripped and still hold, and how the guitar could be a second voice rather than a support. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: at release it moved almost no one, and the rubric discounts delayed influence as it credits it; from the 1990s it became a model for the quiet, solo, close-recorded record, and later lines of intimate song are measured against it. That reach is wide and late, and the rediscovery that carried it was wide as well. Part of it is shared with Drake’s work as a whole and with the story of his life, and that part is discounted with the delay. What remains is this record’s own, and it brings the figure to the gate and no higher.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Survival is weighed over about fifty-four years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, eleven tracks in order, reissued and remastered. Presence is charged. For nearly two decades after release the record was out of wide hearing, a long near-silence, and its later presence, now wide and continuous, is in part the presence of a legend about its maker and of the title song’s use in advertising; popularity is not proof. The fabric is the record’s strength: a voice and a guitar recorded plainly carry almost no date, with none of the production of 1972 to fix them to their year. The silence now lies more than thirty years behind it, a gap in presence rather than a loss. Form whole and fabric undated outweigh it, and give a figure level with Songs of Leonard Cohen and above Nebraska, a record ten years younger.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium. The guitar playing is of the first rank in its idiom: in open and altered tunings Drake plays independent bass and melody with a steadiness that never sounds effortful, and the figures of Things Behind the Sun, Road and Parasite are composition, not strumming. The voice is placed exactly, soft, close and unhurried, with a control of breath and intonation that the bare setting exposes and that survives the exposure. John Wood’s recording is plain and true, voice and guitar close and clear, without gloss. The making bears load because nothing covers it. Held by the narrowness of the means, one instrument, one register of voice, one texture, and by songs whose guitar parts lie close in manner: mastery of a small instrument, well below Winterreise at 9.5.

Score: 8.5 / 10

One law governs the record without exception: one voice, one guitar, say it and stop. Take the two most distant elements, the piano-coloured title song at the opening and Parasite’s long descent late on side two, or Horn’s wordless line against the four lines of Know. They obey the same law, and the record never breaks its own rule. From the Morning’s turn toward light is the one place the range widens, and the law holds there too. But narrowness is not coherence. The range the law governs is small in instrument, register and tempo, and to hold one law over a narrow range is less than to hold it over a wide one. Within that range the record covers more than its means suggest: an omen and a morning, a descent and a rising, a song of four lines and one of nearly four minutes, a piece with words and one without. The coherence is complete and the span it covers is short but not slight, and that sets the figure.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully: a single mind, its withdrawal and its knowledge of its own state. The natural order is held more than in most records of its kind, moon, sun, harvest and morning, the turning year as the frame in which the mind moves. The two are held together, not listed: the withdrawal is measured against the year, and the turn to morning at the close belongs to both. Love is held at the edge, in Know and Which Will, as a question more than a relation; the city is glimpsed in Parasite. The family, labour, the state, history and the sacred are absent, or present only as the faintest evocation. Two orders held as one and two glimpsed, all in one voice: that small compass is what holds the axis lowest, and the figure describes the record, not a limit of the album.

Score: 6.7 / 10