The most important song Roger Waters wrote for ‘Dark Side of the Moon’: “I was 29”
You might want to argue that Wish You Were Here or Animals are superior records, but the large majority of people are probably going to make the case for The Dark Side of the Moon being the most important album Pink Floyd ever made.
Incredibly advanced for its time, immediately impactful in its influence, and still holding up as a marker of 1970s psychedelic and progressive rock to this day, the significance of the album shouldn’t be overlooked, and even if you’re not part of the target audience for the album, whether then or now, it’s hard to make the case for it not having impacted others.
From the perspective of a fan, The Dark Side of the Moon is pretty much flawless from front to back, with many of the songs bleeding into one another and there being repeating motifs scattered throughout as part of an overarching concept. There’s so much in there that others have tried to emulate since, but the fact that what Pink Floyd created in 1973 still serves as such a landmark work of art today only goes to show how singular it is.
Even though bassist, vocalist and primary songwriter for Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, inexplicably chose to re-record the album in 2023 for its 50th anniversary, almost completely destroying its legacy in one self-serving display of bitter arrogance, even he knows how important the album is to people. Without his contributions to the original album, it wouldn’t have been quite as succinct or adventurous, and would have made far less of a cultural impact on the wider music industry.
In fact, one of the people it is most important to is Waters himself, and while some of his finest compositions feature on the record, there’s one that stands out above the rest as having been hugely pivotal to his life then and now.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2019 about the importance of the song ‘Time’, he proclaimed that nothing comes close to it in terms of what it means to him as an example of his own work.
“For me, personally, it’s a very important song.”
Roger Waters on ‘Time’
“I wrote that when I was 29 years old,” he recalled. “The bits in the song where it goes, ‘No one told you when to run/You missed the starting gun,’ it’s about my experience of being 29 years old and certainly going, ‘Fuck me. It’s the middle of life. I’ve been told that I was preparing for something.’ But suddenly. I realised that I was aimless.”
However, while he began to experience some sort of existential crisis around the time of the song’s creation, he realised that there was still plenty to be taken from his experiences and life despite rapidly ageing. Waters added, “The reason it’s a good song is because it describes the predicament of anybody who, growing up – if we’re grown up at all – suddenly realises that time is going really, really fast. It makes you start to philosophise about life and what is important and how to derive joy from that.”
It’s a beautiful exploration of the passage of time and how to establish your place within it, no matter how confusing it all is, but if Waters really understood how to preserve the most important things in his life regardless of how much time has passed, re-recording this classic should unquestionably have been shunted to the bottom of the pecking order.
