“He just said no”: the Pink Floyd song Roger Waters refused to write lyrics for
Every member usually has their role to play in every band. Beyond playing what they come up with on their instrument, it’s important for everyone to hold up equal weight so that every song sounds the best it can whenever it comes time to record, whether that’s singing, playing the right guitar solo, or knowing when to lay back. While Roger Waters was known as the grand wordsmith behind all of Pink Floyd’s greatest songs, he outright refused to go near the lyric sheet when making this deep cut.
Granted, it’s hard to blame Waters for not wanting to write more than he needed to in the late 1960s. Syd Barrett was starting to spiral out of control, and since he was the main songwriter, it was up to Waters to take the reins and make the right call for what songs would be on the record, where he could steer the band next, and somehow find a way to hold onto his own sanity in the process.
When David Gilmour joined in Barrett’s place, though, there should have been nothing they needed to worry about anymore. Gilmour was every bit the guitar hero that he would become even at that stage, but that didn’t always lend itself well to being a brilliant songwriter whenever the time called for it.
So, while many of Gilmour’s first turns behind the microphone are miles better than what Waters sounded like, it’s clear that he was singing his bandmate’s words half the time. Waters was the one capable of setting up a scene in the listener’s mind, but Gilmour knew that he would left to his own devices when putting together material for Ummagumma.
Even though the album itself is one of the weaker entries in Floyd’s catalogue, it still had a decent idea behind it. Throughout the studio disc, the band wanted to try their hand at making their own songs for one individual side of the record, but while ‘The Narrow Way’ is a good showcase for what Gilmour can do on guitar, he admitted that Waters left him hanging trying to find the right lyric.
Since Waters was already concerned with making the kind of musique concrete pieces that make people dumbfounded, Gilmour remembered getting massive pushback when asking him to help him with the tune, saying, “I’d never written anything before. I just went into the studio and started waffling about, tacking bits and pieces together. I rang up Roger at one point to ask him to write me some lyrics. He just said, No.”
The song is much worse for it, but it does give people an opportunity to see what Gilmour could do on his own. In fact, knowing now what would happen to Floyd in the future, this might have been the 1970s equivalent of what Gilmour would do once Waters left before the recording of A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Still, ‘The Narrow Way’ is yet another example of Floyd’s ambitions getting a little too high for their performance ability. They would strike a better balance once they landed on Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon, but for now, it was all about figuring things out and wondering who they would sound like in the future.
