“Great song”: The song Roger Waters would’ve given his right arm to write
Any songwriter can look at their craft as an out-of-body experience some of the time. Even though there are many instances where getting the exact lyric for a tune can feel like pulling teeth, there can also be a few tunes where the music can pour out of someone without them even realising what’s going on. Although Roger Waters has worked on every piece of music he’s ever written, he knew there were some pieces he wished he got to before anyone else.
Then again, music shouldn’t necessarily have to be a competition. Many people might look on in envy at some of the biggest names in the genre, but the mission behind any great rock and roll song is to say what’s in your heart rather than try to piggyback off of what someone else had said years before you. And listening to Waters’s music, there’s something about each phase of his careerthat is genuinely human.
Does that mean everything is great? Absolutely not. There are occasionally tunes that could have been massive mistakes, like the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon Redux, but when looking at projects like Amused to Death, it’s clear that he has a passing knowledge of what a good melody sounds like. He can write fantastic tunes, but he would much rather say what was on his mind at the moment.
And while that might make him less money sometimes, Waters’s vision isn’t all that dissimilar to what Neil Young has been doing his entire career. There are moments when his music lined up with the cultural zeitgeist, but if the charts didn’t have time for him, he couldn’t have cared less, normally playing the same music he wanted regardless of whether there was a market for it.
That did make for some strange detours like Trans and Landing on Water, but Waters always found certain magic in revisiting Rust Never Sleeps. This was Young still in his prime, delivering the most punishing rock and roll he could, and while Crazy Horse deserves as much attention as he does, the version of ‘Powderfinger’ is the kind of tune that will most likely never go out of style.
Despite having an abundance of classic songs in his repertoire, Waters would have loved to have written ‘Powderfinger’ in his prime, saying, “‘Powderfinger’ – Neil Young, I think is from Rust Never Sleeps, but I could be wrong. ‘Look out ma, there’s a white boat coming up the river’. Great song, there are many songs, obviously, which I could have given my right arm to write, but that’s the first one that popped into my head.”
Young definitely has more miles put in in terms of songwriting, but there are a few commonalities between ‘Powderfinger’ and Waters’s signature writing style. It’s obvious that Young is speaking from the heart on this track, but the way that he sets up a scene isn’t all that different from how Waters does, often explaining everything in detail and painting the audience a picture rather than letting the music do the talking.
While both Waters and Young can get a bit too wordy for some people and kneecap their tunes, ‘Powderfinger’ is a perfect example of that kind of format working perfectly. It was not going to be everyone’s first choice for a single, but both of them knew that it was better to serve themselves than cater to whatever the charts wanted.
