[3:20 a.m.] : [2019-10-03]
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I keep thinking that I need to sleep. I only got 3 hours of sleep last night (this morning, or I guess rather yesterday morning now) and it's after 3 A.M. and I'm so fucking tired, and my body aches, and I keep thinking that I need to sleep. And yet I've spent the last hour listening to Roger Waters. Like any young teenage boy, the first time I heard Pink Floyd changed my entire life. Laying on the carpet of a friends' bedroom floor staring up at plastic glow in the dark stars stuck to the ceiling as for the very first time I heard "Hey You" ... there was no way anything would ever be the same again. Between the two I've always preferred Water's led Floyd. Don't get me wrong, The Division Bell is a gorgeous album but Gilmore has never been able to match the pure raw depth of emotion that Roger Waters delivers in his words. If you scroll through my previous posts, somewhere is the stacks, you'll find an entry devoted entirely to my finally giving The Final Cut a listed. That post is full of revelation and regret at making that discovery but not doing it sooner. You'd think I would have learned a lesson from it, but apparently I never learn. Yesterday for the first time I finally had the thought that I should spend some quality time with Roger Water's solo works. Listening to The Pros & Cons of Hitch Hiking has been like finally listening to The Final Cut for the first time, it's like finding a whole new Floyd album plucked right from when I love them most. I have no real excuse for why I waited until now and I kind of hate my self for it. Maybe that's why I can't turn it off and go to be even though I'm so damn tired. Maybe I'm just shit at taking care of myself. Or maybe there's just an over powering beauty in the lyrics, and the emotion of Roger Waters voice, and the way every Clapton guitar solo is perfectly strong and lonely and amazing and I know I'll never be able to do anything that well. I know I should be thinking that I need to sleep and I know it's now almost 4 A.M. and I'm so damn tired but I keep thinking how ridiculous it is that people argue if The Beatles or The Stones are the greatest band of all time. Say what you want about being first to do something like rock-n-roll and the influence they've had on other bands, yet neither band musically achieved anything as haunting, beautiful, and still full of solid rock much less with the consistency that Roger Waters has with and without Pink Floyd. Case and point: I just listened to The Final Cut's title track three or four times in a row before moving on to Water's most recent album and while it is very much in his voice that he is no longer anything other than an old man I've hit a wall with the track "The Last Refugee" and the lines in it, "Show me the shy, slow smile you keep hidden by warm brown eyes. Catch the sweet hover of lips just barely apart, and wonder at loves sweet ache, and the wild beat of my heart. Oh, rhapsody tearing me apart." John Lennon never wrote anything that compares, fight me. Leonard Cohen is the only one I can think of who could maybe pen a better verse but he certainly never would have been able to make it work with honest emotion while accompanied by back up soul singers and Eric Clapton blues guitar solos and an saxophone that comes and goes but always sits perfectly in the mix. It's 4:15 A.M. and I only got three hours of sleep going into yesterday and I am so damn tired and I know I need to sleep, but it's very possible instead I'll just sit here until the sun comes up listening to a debut solo album released in 1984 over and over and over again. Despite how incredibly tired I am this just feels like it matters more somehow. |
