“I loved that song”: the track that made Roger Waters play guitar
Anyone with a semblance of interest in guitars will know it’s far more than just an instrument. And for Roger Waters, its place as one of the most effective storytelling devices is absolutely undeniable, especially as someone who has always been intensely interested in world-building around themes that we experience every day, even if we try to push them far out of mind in blissful ignorance.
After all, that’s always been the thing about Pink Floyd from day one. It’s almost overwhelming, trying to dive into all the ways their music pushed past the usual expanse of expectation and limitation, and into realms you can’t even explain easily with words, like the grandeur of a sci-fi epic with all the nuances of each individual component constantly at play. An obvious case here would be The Dark Side of the Moon, but this has been ongoing since The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Any musician who has ever shown an interest in Pink Floyd usually focuses on their narrative components as the first talking point, or at least the crux of whatever it is they’re discussing that makes them so great, but few navigate the different phases of their discography that offer various kinds of worlds and realms, all while picking apart just how big a part the guitar work had in making it all possible.
Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell once got close when discussing his love for the band’s artistry and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, when he told Louder that they create “an environment” that’s impossible to describe, and how the debut highlighted the importance of “music’s strange juxtaposition”, offering sounds that were “sometimes whimsical and pastoral, but simultaneously desperate and sad.”
In Waters’ world, all of this feels overwhelming and complicated because it often is, because the mind is a convoluted place, and the music sought to replicate that as authentically as possible while feeling abstract at the same time. As he once explained: “I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of senseless death and destruction and pain and poverty and things that are actually avoidable.”
In their world, the guitar was central to this appeal, carrying the emotional core of their stories with visceral poignancy, like the immediate sentimentality of ‘Wish You Were Here’ or the commanding energy throughout ‘Learning To Fly’. Seminal influences often shape musicians, which is also why the song that first got Waters into guitar also makes a lot of sense: when he fell in love with Ray Charles’ ‘I Believe to My Soul’.
Anyone familiar with the song will know just how much heart needs to go into replicating its guitar work, which is also likely why it made Waters click with the guitar for the first time, at least, in a way that truly meant something, and that went on to shape how he viewed the instrument’s role in the broader emotionality of a song. “When I was 14, I had an aunt who gave me a guitar, and it was an acoustic, steel-strung guitar, and I tried to learn, but it hurt my fingers too much, so I gave up,” Waters once said.
Continuing: “Then in college I bought a classical guitar and it had better strings and I began to play then. I was studying Architecture and I used Letraset letters to write on my guitar ‘I Believe to my Soul’ because I loved that song by Ray Charles.”
At the same time, this also makes complete sense because it shows how, from those early moments, and through feeling his way through the viscera of musical worlds, Waters grew familiar with how pacing and space can be the difference between something that connects and something that doesn’t. ‘I Believe to my Soul’ was all about taking its time, slugging you along with deep passion. The same could be said about much of Pink Floyd’s discography, at least when it comes to dumping you into deep waters and drowning you in a hazy mix of euphoria and dystopia.
