The Pink Floyd album that Roger Waters is still moved by: “I feel quite emotional now”
No good art is made without putting some heart into it. As much as some professional songwriters see themselves as musical machines spitting out whatever kind of tune they think the charts will like, there’s a lot more staying power that comes with someone leaving their soul in the groove of a song than hearing a track that sounds put together by a committee. While Pink Floyd never claimed to go along with the program, Roger Waters felt that Dark Side of the Moon was one of the most emotional experiences that he ever had revisiting one of his albums.
Then again, it’s understandable why the post-Syd-Barrett era had a bit of a lull in terms of raw emotion. It’s hard to move on from losing both a frontman and a friend, and looking back on projects like A Saucerful of Secrets and Ummagumma, it seemed like the group were still trying to push forward but was still in shock from watching Barrett slowly lose his mind.
Even though Atom Heart Mother started inching them closer to their signature sound, ‘Echoes’ off of Meddle was the moment they actually found their classic chops. Suddenly, Waters was unafraid to talk about his empathetic side and how he could relate to his fellow man, so just imagine what an album would sound like if he was able to drag out that theme for an entire record.
Although Dark Side of the Moon isn’t the most soul-lashing record ever conceived, it does make everyone think about the bravery that comes with moving through life. Whether it’s fighting off the desire to go insane or realising that there’s only so much time left on this Earth, each track explores a different facet of everyday life that will make people want to laugh, cry, or make something worthwhile of themselves.
And it’s not like Waters would take that kind of empathy for granted, either. Despite his insistence on making a revamped version of the album and tainting a bit of its reputation, that doesn’t take away from the central themes from holding up, like the sense of the “other” on ‘Us and Them’ and the uneasiness at having to wake up every morning on ‘Breathe’.
While it’s probably difficult for anyone to revisit their old material, Waters remembered being incredibly moved hearing Dark Side of the Moon after it was finished, saying, “I played it to Judy, my first wife. When it finished, I turned to her and said, ‘What do you think?’, and she was crying. I feel quite emotional now. We achieved something with that record. We could have easily said, ‘We’re done’, but we were too frightened to do that. And I’m glad we struggled on because we did some great work after that.”
Despite Waters’s attempts at getting even more emotional and theatrical on The Wall, there is nothing that could compare to Dark Side of the Moon, if only for its power to move people. It’s one thing to be able to tell the story in the same way a playwright might, but by keeping things fairly ordinary, Pink Floyd went from having abstract musical tone paintings to creating the most universal music ever made.
