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 recording career not even three years long. It had begun in 1969, with the debut Five Leaves Left. If listeners of the late nineties curious enough to pick it up — or, as had just become possible, download it from file-sharing networks — could hardly have been disappointed, they still wouldn’t have been prepared for its second track, “River Man.”Described by Ian MacDonald as “one of the sky-high classics of post-war English popular music,” the song combines Drake’s hauntingly evocative lyricism and unconventional guitar tuning with a rich layer of orchestrated strings that stops just short of cloying, all in jazzy 5/4 time.As music YouTuber Charles Cornell points out in the video at the top of the post, you’ll no doubt recognize that time signature from Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” which makes that highly unusual rhythm feel natural. So does “River Man,” though the more closely you listen to it, the more musically daring it sounds, even if you don’t have the theoretical language to explain it as Cornell does. There is, for example, no chorus, which couldn’t have helped its chances of radio airplay at the time, nor could the song’s somber and reflective mood. “The counterculture was carnivalesque, its optimism compulsory,” MacDonald writes. “Drake saw deeper.” It’s hardly implausible, in fact, to read the song as a Blakean and Buddhistic allegory of an individual faced with a choice between the concrete, cyclical reality of human affairs and the unknown realms beyond.Drake composed “River Man” during his brief time at Cambridge, and the books written about him quote acquaintances from that period describing it as a remarkable step forward in his artistic evolution. During the Five Leaves Left sessions, he sang and played guitar live with the orchestra, whose arrangements (by the bandleader Harry Robinson, then known on British TV for his novelty band Lord Rockingham’s XI) filled space Drake had deliberately left in the composition. The strings, in other words, weren’t an incongruous attempt at sweetening, as Phil Spector would perform on the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road” the following year, but an integral part of the song. Drake’s solo performance of it on BBC Radio 2’s Night Ride (a broadcast hosted by none other than John Peel) sounds captivating, but incomplete. On the Five Leaves Left version, every element works together to make “River Man” enduring — and, in every sense, transcendent.Related content:A Documentary Introduction to Nick Drake, Whose Haunting & Influential Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago TodayHow John Lennon Wrote the Beatles’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Woodstock,” the Song that Defined the Legendary Music Festival, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)How Grace Slick Wrote “White Rabbit”: The 1960s Classic Inspired by LSD, Lewis Carroll, Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, and Hypocritical ParentsPaul Simon Tells the Story of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970)How a Fake Cartoon Band Made “Sugar Sugar” the Biggest Selling Hit Single of 1969Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.