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.”