How Nick Drake’s “River Man” Has Captivated Generation after Generation of Listeners

How Nick Drake’s “River Man” Has Captivated Generation after Generation of Listeners In 1999, Volkswagen aired a television commercial for the Golf Mk3 Cabrio. Dealerships were soon inundated with calls, as popular culture history remembers it, but not from people inquiring about the car. Rather, they were desperate to know the name of the song soundtracking the ad’s footage of a top-down night drive to a house party. For all they knew, it was a new single from an up-and-coming young man with an acoustic guitar and sensitivity exquisite enough to cut through the sound and fury of turn-of-the-millennium pop. In fact, the song had come out 27 years before, and the artist had been dead for 25 of them. Thus began the obscure English singer-songwriter Nick Drake’s belated ascent to stardom. “Pink Moon,” the song from the VW Spot (a late replacement for The Church’s eighties hit “Under the Milky Way”), was the title cut from Drake’s third and final album, which closed a recordin

Added 10 Jun 2026