Roger Waters made headlines recently when he shared he re-recorded Pink Floyd’s iconic 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. In a new social media post, he explains why he decided to do so.
Waters explains the idea to re-record the album came when he was recording Lockdown Sessions, an album of reworked songs from his time with Pink Floyd and as a solo artist. Among the songs re-recorded is the classic Floyd track “Comfortably Numb” from The Wall.
“It occurred to me that ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ could well be a suitable candidate for a similar re-working, partly as a tribute to the original work, but also to re-address the political and emotional message of the whole album,” writes Waters. “I discussed it with [producer] Gus [Seyffert] and [filmmaker] Sean [Evans], and when we’d stopped giggling and shouting ‘You must be f—ing mad’ at one another we decided to take it on.”
Waters is in the process of wrapping up mixing the re-recorded album. He does note about the project, “It’s not a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable. But it is a way for the seventy-nine-year-old man to look back across the intervening fifty years into the eyes of the twenty-nine-year-old and say, to quote a poem of mine about my Father, ‘We did our best, we kept his trust, our Dad would have been proud of us.’”
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He concluded, “And also, it is a way for me to honor a recording that Nick [Mason] and Rick [Wright] and Dave [Gilmour] and I have every right to be very proud of. Happy 50th to ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’”
The tone of Waters’ explanation seems very different compared to when he first talked about re-recording The Dark Side of the Moon. Last month, he said in an interview with The Telegraph, “I wrote ‘The Dark Side of the Moon.’ Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap! Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it. (It should be noted that in the album’s credits, Waters is credited for writing all the lyrics. Gilmour, Mason and Wright have various music credits on the album, along with Waters.) Waters then added of his former bandmates, “Well, Nick never pretended. But Gilmour and Rick? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say. They are not artists!”
