Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd

One of the side-effects of the digital revolution in music for me has been the rediscovery and reevaluation of music that I have known for years but put aside for some reason. In the 1980s I was a big fan of Pink Floyd, having graduated to them from Genesis and Rush. For all of these bands I would slowly obtain their entire catalogs (mainly by copying LPs from friends and public libraries to cassette). I listened to these cassettes for years, buying LPs, then the CDs, for many of those albums that I really enjoyed. But the accumulation of years, and albums, meant that, by 2002, I rarely, if ever, listened to Pink Floyd. Oh, there was of course the occasional hit on the radio when flipping around the dial, but I never pulled out those old cassettes or CDs.

Then came along MP3s and a new job with short cubicle walls and a real need to wear headphones so that I didn't get distracted by loud co-workers. I slowly began ripping some of my favorites, then, because I'm nothing if not methodical, I worked my way through my entire collection of 600 CDs. Along the way, I would listen to each individual song and, if I was paying half-attention (easier done when editing web pages then when creating them from scratch), I would give them a rating (I told you I was methodical--others have called it obsessive). A year-and-a-half later, and my whole collection had been rated.

Along the way I rediscovered some of those albums that hadn't been listened to in years, not to mention noticing some of the gaps in my collection, created by multiple moves and the idea that I needed to simplify my life (600 CDs take up more room than you would expect, as do LPs and cassettes). One of those rediscoveries was Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, which rose to the top of my list. If you had asked me before this exercise which Floyd album was my favorite, I probably would have picked The Final Cut or maybe The Wall, but I've (re)listened to all of these and it is Wish You Were Here that affects me the most.

The album, a paeon to departed and somewhat mentally unstable former bandleader Syd Barrett, has a bit of a split personality. The three songs in the middle comprise two radio-friendly complaints about the music biz and the title song, as generic a song of missing someone even though it was about Barrett. On either side of these is the longest song Floyd ever wrote, the many-parted (albeit fairly difficult to distinguish when one part ends and the next begins) "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." It is this song that really loads on the Barrett references, there for the longtime fans to nod at (like the reference to "you poet, you piper" among many others).

But it's not the lyrics that appeal to me here (I like the bitter Waters of The Final Cut for that), but the dynamic music, and I use that term in its musical sense, i.e, I like this music for its range and variance between soft and loud. "Shine On" is one of those few rock songs that really understands the role of the rest note, not to mention stringing together a bunch of whole notes. So many rock musicians think that it's how fast you can play (also known as the Van Halen syndrome), but music isn't about speed, it's about sound, and "Shine On" further clarified what had been experimental on Dark Side of the Moon and Animals into one of the few extended length rock songs that seem as powerful today as when they were recorded.