In their way, the guys in Pink Floyd did a great job making their personal problems into everybody's problems. My favourite Floyd album is Dark Side of the Moon, because the observations and sorrows of that album feel truly universal... getting older, wasting your life in the pursuit of money and peace of mind, and losing it all. As they progressed, they turned a bit inward, mining their own situation more and more, particularly in the case of Roger Waters' songwriting.
"Wish You Were Here" is one of those great, haunting delicate ballads. It has a dusty, sorrowful guitar picked expertly by David Gilmore, and all the background instruments swell just perfectly to underscore Waters' oblique, well-done, simple-yet-effective lyrics. It sounds like the ultimate lovelorn, break-up, "I need you more now than ever, but we can't be together" type song, particularly at its climactic "Two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl" line.
It's not that. It's very specifically about Syd Barret, the founding leader of Pink Floyd, who vacated the band after one album and a handful of singles due to drug use and psychological... disintegration. Whether Waters was nostalgic, or whether he felt Barrett's presence was a stabilizing one that was long missing and ultimately reflected in the band's turmoil... I'm not sure. But he's definitely singing about Syd.
Things got even more specific, more autobiographical, and yet more obscure, on The Wall, which tells a story of rock star alienation. Now, I've listened to a lot of music about rock star alienation, and even though I am not a rock star and find it somewhat silly to whine about having achieved great success in your chosen field, I often find it makes for some of the best music. No, no kidding. Hey, Greek tragedies were always about nobility, played for the commoners, and they managed to get the point across. In general, I think, the problem of being disappointed by your greatest desire is easy enough to relate to.
I think the distance between the rock star lifestyle and the average listener's helps this. Everything about the rock life seems exaggerated and impossible, including its grief. They got where they did, after all, by taking the feelings, all the little ones we deal with daily, and stretching them out to 3-minute moments, twelve to an album. So by necessity, it must be bigger, or feel bigger. In The Wall, "disliking your audience" is equally tragic to losing your father in the war (all in all, they're both "just bricks in the wall.")
"Comfortably Numb" captures this ambivalence, lyrically and sonically. It's mellow yet tense (the brooding bass, the breathing guitar.) Waters voices the Doctor administering the shot that will allow fictional rock star Pink to complete the show, David Gilmour plays Pink as zoned out and losing connection with reality (...Syd?) Again there is beautiful poetry in the lyrics, particularly Gilmour's parts. The money, however, is in the guitar solos, which manage to reach both a warm beauty that only music can reach, and a cold detachment as signified in the lyrics. The great thing about a song's execution like this is that it forms a bridge between what the song is literally about in its lyrics and context, and what it stirs up in the listener. The song really does a great job not just being about, but living out, that ambivalent, two-sided rock star fever dream.
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