“Throw yourself under a train”: the most serious songwriter Roger Waters ever heard
Rock and roll is not meant to be the most lighthearted genre in the world. It may have started with music that people could play at sockhops across America and have a good time, but once the Vietnam War started raging on, musicians began to talk about the horror they were seeing around them and commenting on why people couldn’t manage to stop the carnage half a world away. While that ultimately opened doors for artists like Roger Waters, even he admitted that he was far from the most serious songwriter he knew.
Then again, anything that Waters would write would be a lot less lighthearted than what Syd Barrett was doing when they started. Compared to everyone else in the group, Barrett was far more interested in making fanciful tales that no one had heard of before, and looking back on all the other psychedelic records that were coming out around 1967, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is one of the most singular releases for how strange tunes like ‘Bike’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’ could get.
When Barrett started to lose his battle with his mental health, though, Waters’s songs saw him unpack a lot of his repressed feelings. There was the odd upbeat song with pitch black lyrics like ‘Free Four’, but once Waters found his calling writing about empathy, a lot of his writing was spent either unpacking the concept of the human condition or exploring the grief that he felt after losing Barrett on albums like Wish You Were Here.
But throughout most of his later career, Waters never turned a blind eye to the horrors that he saw around him. The Wall was his first bold exploration into the psyche of what it means to be a rock star, but elsewhere in his career, he had songs that explored the dangers of big business on Animals and would even explore the ever-growing reliance on television to get through the day on Amused to Death.
“If you get any more serious than *that*, you fucking throw yourself under a train.”
Roger Waters
Waters was already going down new avenues as a songwriter, but it wasn’t anything that John Lennon hadn’t done before. The Beatles were the perfect breeding ground for Lennon to start toying with what a song could sound like, but throughout his solo career, he was more than willing to stick his neck out for what he believed in, whether that was getting political on ‘Power to the People’ or saying that the Fab Four were over in the bluntest way possible on the album Plastic Ono Band.
He still had his soft side, but Waters felt that there was no way he could ever be as blunt as Lennon, saying, “The divisions that always existed between popular music and serious music are no longer there. You can’t get any more serious than Lennon at his most serious. If you get any more serious than *that*, you fucking throw yourself under a train.” But Lennon’s caustic numbers were only suggesting what people could do later.
Whereas many “serious” songwriters try to get their way into the conversation by singing about topics like death and destruction, Waters learned from Lennon that it can only be serious when you care about the people at the centre of it. Anyone can write a decent love song, but if they want their words to resonate when they deliver that final gut punch, they need to make sure that the audience knows the characters they’re talking about.
Waters could always find ways to paint with that broad brush whenever he came up with his grand concepts, but perhaps the serious songwriters like Lennon only get there because they’re singing about themselves. Anyone can find time to go the way of Dylan and make different stories, but the last thing that Lennon wanted to do was deceive his audience by becoming a fiction writer.
