The 1960 song Roger Waters spent his life trying to match: “Could move anyone like this”
It took a long time for Roger Waters to truly master the art of a great song.
It’s one thing to make the kind of nice singalong tunes that capture the moment, but the ones that are going to last a lifetime are normally the tunes that have a lot more on their mind other than the typical love song schlock that you’ve heard a million times. Waters certainly knew better than to make those kinds of tunes, but he knew the right heartfelt message could go a long way for people that had no idea who he even was.
But when looking at what he was doing with Pink Floyd, it’s not like he started off as one of the greatest wordsmiths of all time. Syd Barrett was already standing out as a rock and roll eccentric, but once he lost his way to drugs, Waters was practically left to steer a ship that had lost its main power supply. There was no way that he was going to make the same strange tunes that Barrett did, but when ‘Echoes’ came out, it truly felt like he had hit a major turning point in his songwriting.
Pink Floyd had been one thing before they made that song, but when Waters learned about putting empathy into his tunes, he realised the titans existed in every single genre. Bob Dylan was obviously going to be a big frontrunner for what he was aiming for whenever he made his rambling songs in his solo career, but if you wanted to hear someone’s take on life, you weren’t going to find much better than soul music.
The biggest names in the genre were the ones that wore their heart on their sleeve every single time they sang, and even if they didn’t write their tunes, they embodied them. There isn’t a soul on this Earth that didn’t believe that Aretha Franklin wanted respect from her man when she came home or that Otis Redding was sitting wasting time on that lonely pier, but Ray Charles should be commended for helping invent that kind of genre.
Charles was the kind of musician that no one could truly define back in the day, and while he was busy inventing R&B at the time, the fact that he could make dramatic pivots into country music on Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music is still unprecedented. He was already known for playing the greatest standards and blues songs, but when ‘Georgia On My Mind’ came on, Waters knew that he was dealing with someone that could embody their repertoire perfectly.
Waters could try his hand at writing the best tunes he could, but any time he made a new masterpiece, he always needed to measure it against Charles, saying, “When I first heard Ray Charles singing ‘Georgia On My Mind’, I remember thinking: ‘If I could ever write a song that could move anyone like this song moves me, that would be it – I’d be happy. Although I’m not comparing myself to Hoagy Carmichael [who wrote the song], I sense that at some point along the way I’ve provided that moment for somebody else.”
Then again, even Carmichael wouldn’t have been able to do what Charles did on that song. He was practically a sonic actor for those few minutes singing about the wonders of the Georgia countryside, and while Waters could try to get the same emotion out of his own tunes, there’s a good reason why he ended up using other voices both in and out of Pink Floyd to make his point on some of his classics.
It was fun to try and think outside the box some of the time, but sometimes being the greatest songwriter you can be is giving your song off to someone else to work out. It’s one thing to make the best music that you think you can, but the sign of growth is knowing where to find the best singer to help do your song justice to turn it from a decent tune into a masterpiece.
