The “most meaningful” Pink Floyd record Roger Waters ever made
It took a long time for Roger Waters to figure out what empathy was when working with Pink Floyd.
The journey from them becoming one of the biggest prog rock bands in the world wouldn’t have happened without Syd Barrett leaving the group, and even if they had a lot of baggage to unpack when he cut himself off from the rest of the band, Waters could do whatever he could to remember the kind of person that he was through his music. But after making masterpieces for the better part of a decade with the band, there were always going to be ones that resonated a lot more with him.
But that’s not to say that Waters was the be-all and end-all in the group by any stretch. Half of the band were responsible for making Dark Side of the Moon into a masterpiece, and even if Waters insisted that he was the frontman and conceptual artiste behind all of their greatest works, his redux version of the band’s magnum opus only serves to prove how wrong he is when he claims to be one of the biggest presences in the band.
He knew how to bring many ideas to life, but it took David Gilmour to help refine many of the tunes. Even when they were working on different pieces that Waters wrote from top to bottom, Gilmour was the one throwing in the occasional idea that would define the entire track. The guy only needed four notes to make ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ sound so ominous, and Animals wouldn’t have been the same without the basis of ‘Dogs’ at the beginning of the record.
If Waters was coming up with the ideas, though, he was going to make sure that no one came anywhere close to what he did on The Wall. This was practically his autobiography in song form for the better part of an hour and a half, and while he could have done without firing band members halfway through the production, it was all in the service of making the kinds of songs that he felt could have a significant impact on people.
He needed to see his musical baby become a massive production, and even years after he quit the group, Waters felt that The Wall held a special place in his heart, saying, “I think as a group, we peaked with Dark Side of the Moon. And I think my most meaningful contribution was sometime after that was maybe writing The Wall.”
“I mean, by the time The Wall happened, it wasn’t really much of a band anymore.”
Roger Waters
You can see where he’s coming from, but it’s not like the album was a one-man operation by any stretch. There were a lot of moving parts going into making the record, and even if Gilmour didn’t walk away with a ton of writing credits this time around, the fact that he could make something as effective as ‘Comfortably Numb’ or ‘Young Lust’ is more than enough to consider him an essential part of the record.
But the real meaningful part of The Wall came more from how the band played a lot of their tunes live. Waters had grown tired of the same spectacle every time they played, and the idea of making an entire theatrical experience based around the album is still one of the most interesting concert tours that anyone has ever attempted.
It does feel a bit strange to see Waters having such warm feelings over a project that effectively destroyed the band, but by this point, he wasn’t thinking along those lines anymore. He was looking to make a record that could touch people and see the vulnerable person he was behind everything, but I’m sure he didn’t foresee all of the baggage that came along with it once he became a star.
