Art, Poetry and Soaring Guitar

Rediscovering Pink Floyd 5 decades hence

 

Music Lovers will relate to this...

 You are stuck in a traffic jam or on a long boring drive and trying to tune into a channel that is actually playing music and not ads and suddenly you hear an amazing piece of music. You latch onto the station, hoping against hope that the radio host has not yet announced the details of the song and the station is not going to play more ads. Until a few years ago you couldn’t do much about this, you either got lucky or that piece of music was lost to you until you heard it again and caught the host while he was announcing the artist and the band. 

Smartphones and apps have finally brought us relief from these frustrations. On one such long road journey on the roads of Colorado, during the summer of 2015, I found myself in such a situation. I tuned into a radio station playing an amazing guitar solo. I scrambled to find the ‘sound hound’ app on my phone as I was driving and barely managed identify the song before it ended. The piece of music I heard was the long guitar solo towards the end of “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd.  After the song ended, I simply had to stop at the nearest coffee shop and download the song. That was my first Pink Floyd experience and I have been hooked ever since.

 I hadn’t grown up listening to Pink Floyd and during 20 years of listening to music I hadn’t even heard a single song from PF. The only faint memory I have of Pink Floyd is seeing some interesting cover art on a couple of albums in a CD store way back when CD’s first arrived on the scene. I now know these albums to be ‘The Division Bell’ and the ‘Delicate sound of Thunder’.  Listening to Pink Floyd’s 70’s and 80’s albums I can now see why their music was called ‘Art Rock’. Art rock (as Wikipedia describes), is inspired from a variety of musical styles like classical, folk and jazz and has theatrical nature to its performances and appealed to "artistically inclined" younger adults, especially due to its "virtuosity" and musical "complexity".

 The appeal of Pink Floyd starts with Art on the covers (see the enigmatic Easter Island- like heads on the cover of the album “Division Bell”), you hear the poetry in the lyrics, and then you hear David Gilmour’s guitar screaming, soaring and creating soundscapes that transport you to another place. Just like a photographer needs to develop an eye for the composition, a listener needs to persist, and has to develop the ear to truly understand the multi-layered music.  

 Even though the Die-hard PF fans will tell us that we need to listen to albums in entirety as the songs only make sense as part of the whole album, I am still going to list some amazing tracks to start off a novice to Pink Floyd – ‘Comfortably numb’, ‘Time’, ‘Money’, ‘Hey You’, ‘Another Brick in the wall part 2’ , ‘Learning to Fly’  and ‘Wearing the Inside Out’ will hook you, and then you can move onto some amazing deep cuts, like ‘Echoes’ and ‘Shine on you crazy diamond’ before taking it all in. Be sure to check out the album “Dark Side of the Moon” in its entirety. Dark Side is called one of the greatest albums of all time by well known Rock and Roll magazines. 

 This whole episode makes me wonder how much more sublime and yet undiscovered music (or art, or books, or…) is out there in the world? 

The minimalist design of the Dark Side of the Moon Vinyl cover has become one of the most recognizable representations of Pink Floyd. Artwork is supposedly a homage to the sound and light displays the accompanied the live shows of Pink Floyd

2023 Update: Its the 50 year since the release of Dark side of the moon and with more than 50 million copies sold, Pink Floyd continue to resonate with listeners worldwide