Architect of The Wall, concept-album enthusiast, keeper of the Fender P Bass — Roger Waters has left an indelible stamp on rock ‘n’ roll history by crafting enthralling albums marked by technical and conceptual innovation. For many, his songs light our hearts with hope, provide us with comfort in shared experience, and give us courage to tear down our own metaphorical walls. Over the years, Waters has drawn both brutal criticism and soaring praise from listeners and cultural commentators. So, what makes his songwriting so enduringly powerful and worthy of such passionate discussion? What elements continue to captivate lifelong listeners and to attract new generations of music lovers? While it’s not possible to cover the vast ocean of Waters’s songwriting in one article, we’ll hit the main bases. Join us as we examine the bricks, blood, and tears that combine to build Roger Waters’s compositional world. Lights! Roll the sound effects!
Engineering the Concept
From the exploration of unsettling topics to the tangible renderings of his characters, Waters compels listeners to peer into the microscope and to unflinchingly observe the apprehension and confusion inherent to modern life. The prickly concepts Waters presents on his albums, both with the Floyd and without, ride on waves of evocative music to open a dialogue with his listeners. It’s as if he’s offering a hand and saying, “I feel the same; now, let’s do something about it.”
Thematically, Waters covers a lot of ground: a midlife crisis presented as a midmorning dream in The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking; critiques of contemporary society through the eyes of a channel-surfing monkey in Amused to Death; madness examined in The Dark Side of the Moon. In this way, we engage in a shared experience with Waters and learn about ourselves through his lens. These concepts dig deep into our psyches and tickle the nerves that keep us up at night.
A look back at the Pink Floyd catalog reveals early incarnations of the concepts and themes that stuck with Waters throughout his songwriting career — war, personal relationships, modern life, and politics, to name a few. Take a listen to 1968’s “Corporal Clegg” for an introduction to the fledgling songwriter who would go on to write The Wall, the poignant postwar album that helped many come to terms, or at least stand eye to eye, with the world forever altered by the destruction of WWII. Waters has been consistently and staunchly critical of war, in part due to the personal trauma of his father’s death in Anzio, Italy, during WWII. The Final Cut, Amused to Death, and Is This the Life We Really Want? provide continuing examples of Waters’s sometimes elegantly melancholic, sometimes scathingly explosive voice on the topic.
Pink Floyd’s first concept album and the first album to feature lyrics written entirely by Waters, The Dark Side of the Moon, examines the microcosm of the postwar bourgeoisie alongside macro concepts like madness, time, and mortality. Also, “Us and Them” proffers another example of Waters examining the topic of war and voicing his thoughts on the absurdity and misfortune of it. The album slowly peels back the layers of life in 1973, revealing universal themes that reverberate with listeners today. DSOTM continues to grip audiences because Waters’s lyrics, floating on the musical wings of Wright, Gilmour, and Mason, provide a space where we can share in the madness of being alive — the madness of time, money, death, religion, and more.
To this day, Waters continues to focus the microscope on the world in which we live. His most recent studio album, 2017’s Is This the Life We Really Want?, showcases incisive lyrics reminiscent of 1977’s Animals. Waters comes at his subjects with honesty and a critical eye, making them approachable through his conversational yet poignant wordplay. Check out “Déjà Vu” for some classic Waters lyrical goodness. Though always engrossed in affairs of the time, Waters also makes sure to touch on the intimately personal. Like The Wall, Animals, Pros and Cons, and Dark Side, the lofty concepts in ITTLWRW? are lyrically drawn back to earth, which allows listeners a way in and a chance to interact with the album.
“All those political questions can always be reduced to some kind of microcosm. It’s all very well to be involved in grand political thoughts or acts, but it all comes back to one’s own life and how you lead it and how you treat people on a personal level.”
Roger Waters, Uncut magazine
There’s no doubt, you can’t have a Roger Waters album without a deep sense of mankind’s dark side. Yet, Waters persistently suffuses his songs with an appreciation for life’s beauty, presenting a message of hope through human relationships and empathy. In Animals‘ “Pigs on the Wing (Part Two),” there’s love and communication. In Pros and Cons‘ “5:11AM (The Moment of Clarity),” there’s human connection. In “Amused to Death,” there’s resolution and remembrance. And, of course, when the wall collapses at the end of The Wall, there’s hope. Waters starts his concepts by reaching his hands into the pool of human muck and sorting out the stones and sunken bricks to explore the suffering of our human condition while looking for the pathways to positive change. This honest look at darkness combined with unflinching optimism draws audiences far and wide to the grip of Waters’s songwriting.
So, You Thought You Might Like to Go to the Show
Subsequently, these conceptualizations find life through the theatrical conceits intrinsically linked to Waters’s songwriting. From The Wall and The Final Cut to Radio K.A.O.S. and Ça Ira, his songwriting hitches themes to physically visualized images and characters — crafting a form of songwriting meant to be seen as well as heard. The characters Waters creates to illustrate his concepts lend themselves to film and theatrical performance — puppets from The Wall and Algie, the inflatable pig from Animals that sailed over Battersea Power Station, are a few examples that are now iconic in their own right. The early days of writing film soundtracks with Pink Floyd and Waters’s involvement in Roy Battersby’s 1970 documentary, The Body, are some of the experiences that opened his musical mindset to high-concept themes and visual ideas. These elements bring audiences as close to the story as possible, engaging them in albums that transcend their musical boundaries and lodge their messages in our heads like engrossing novels.
To begin, 1979’s The Wall provides the best example of the link between theatrics and musical composition. When first conceiving The Wall after 1977’s In the Flesh Tour, Waters envisioned a 40-foot-tall wall constructed onstage to accompany his opera-like cast of characters. Then, enlisting the help of artist Gerald Scarfe, Waters found himself in the company of his own creations given corporeal form. Performances of The Wall, from the original tour in 1980 to the Berlin show in 1990 and its resurgence in 2013, featured Scarfe’s animation as well as massive puppets that appeared during the show. The mother, the wife, and the schoolmaster walked beside the wall, looming larger than life at up to 30 feet tall. Fittingly, with the help of composer Julien Bilodeau, The Wall eventually became a bona fide opera. This enduring piece of British rock history exemplifies how Waters’s songwriting endears audiences to it through its use of conceptual visuals as much as through its touching music. The music, the visuals, and the story all captivate us time and time again. Watch the Roger Waters: The Wall film to see The Wall‘s theatrical visuals at their most advanced and awe-inspiring.
Waters’s last album with Pink Floyd, The Final Cut, was also turned into a short film directed by British photographer Willie Christie to provide visualization for Waters’s story. The album, full of spare bricks originally intended as a soundtrack to The Wall film, features songwriting enmeshed with visual storytelling that makes the meaning accessible to audiences. Questioning current events and discussing the tragedies of war, Waters makes these heavy topics approachable by pulling them into the lived experiences of his characters. Through this, he offers a place where people can come to “speak out loud about your doubts and fears,” as written in in “The Gunner’s Dream.” The film brings this closer to home with palpable imagery of the characters’ plights, offering audiences a deeper connection to the message.
“I’ve only ever written about one thing in my life, which is the fact that we as human beings have a responsibility to one another, and that it’s important that we empathize with others, that we organize society so that we all become happier and we all get the life we really want.”
Roger Waters, Rolling Stone
Continuing in this vein, Waters’s post-Floyd albums linked imagery to his songwriting, as well. For example, Radio K.A.O.S. featured an elaborate tour that brought his concept to life. Jim Ladd performed as the DJ character, and the stage design benefited from the hand of architect Mark Fisher, who had previously worked with the Floyd. Seeing this tour on the road meant falling into the story and letting the music and theatrics transport you into Waters’s universe. The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking tour also displayed backdrop projection directed by Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth) to enrich the story. More recently, Ça Ira, anopera composed by Waters for the libretto written by Étienne and Nadine Roda-Gil, lit up the stage on its opening night with thrilling performances that brought life to its concept. As listeners weave their way through Waters’s career, they’re guided by musical compositions and theatrical elements working in tandem to elevate the themes with concrete incarnations, thus mooring them in our consciousness.
That Was Pretty Avant-garde, Wasn’t It?
Waters’s albums sparkle with groundbreaking technical experimentation that started in the early days with Pink Floyd and snowballed into his current work. The long, onstage psychedelic jams with the Floyd opened a world of untapped sonic possibilities that tested the limits of traditional composition. Learning from this, Waters has kept his mind open, constantly flirting with avant-garde techniques and engagingly novel approaches. From his tape loop on “Money” to the QSound mixing on Amused to Death and Ummagumma‘s mic-tapping opus, listeners have cued into these musique-concrètehallmarks with voracity.
An interesting example lies at the depths of the Pink Floyd iceberg: Household Objects, an almost-Floyd album pioneered by the mind of Waters after the success of Dark Side. The idea was to use common objects like rubber bands, wine glasses, and brooms to craft songs from hands-on sonic experimentation. Though the would-be album was eventually shelved and looked at by the Floyd members somewhat unfavorably, it gave birth to the ethereal atmosphere heard in “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” — let’s have a toast to those wine glasses!
Another early gem from the Waters songwriting ocean surfaces in Ummagumma. “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict” flaunts some of Waters’s early experimentation at its best. With mic tapping and tape effects, including half-time speed manipulations, this song evidences Waters’s burgeoning sound-design chops.
The ambient textures and film-style sound foley featured on early Pink Floyd songs reached heightened levels of sophistication in later albums. As previously mentioned, The Dark Side of the Moon features Waters’s well-known tape loop comprised of cash registers, tearing receipts, and jingling change on “Money.” Years later, The Wall harnessed explosions, the sounds of crashing planes, chirping birds, and voices of his characters — Waters even goes so far as to add a hidden backward message in “Empty Spaces.” In a similar way, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, written during the same period as The Wall, utilizes character voices, a match striking, truck exhaust, and a child’s voice. Amused to Death implements dogs barking; television channels switching; ape chatter; and, most touchingly, Alfred Razzell’s recounting of his experience with Bill Hubbard. Most recently, Is This the Life We Really Want? incorporates found sounds into Nigel Godrich’s (Radiohead, Beck) stunning arrangements. These sonic details act as threads that sew the central themes of the album together, effectively pushing the concept to the forefront and pulling the listener into the message. Having years to mature his incorporation of musique concrète, Waters’s production-heavy songwriting approach continues to enchant his audience.
Drop the needle on any Waters record and keep your ears peeled. You’ll be treated to a holistic listening experience that dovetails from album to album. When Pink Floyd composed songs like “Atom Heart Mother” and “Echoes,” they laid a thematic groundwork that would endlessly evolve. Onward into his solo career, Waters continued to forge albums where songs bleed into one another and create a cohesive whole sewn together by conceptual threads. As the moments from Dark Side tick away, as The Wall builds to its conclusion, as the narrator in Pros and Cons drives to waking, the lyrical and thematic elements link and pull the audience closer to the story. The wraparound connecting the ending of The Wall to its beginning — where Waters speaks, “Isn’t this where we came in?” — spurs greater potential for interpretation by its listeners and evokes the timelessness of the album’s musings on the human experience. For this reason, The Wall has continued to resonate with audiences since its release — every listen brings about a new outlook. This continuity in Waters’s songwriting, also apparent on Radio K.A.O.S., Amused to Death, and Is This the Life We Really Want?, carries Waters’s primary theme of the importance of empathy to the forefront while encouraging active listening on the part of his audience.
Evident through his later career, Waters gained from the musical experimentation with his bandmates during the formative Pink Floyd years. One self-proclaimed madcap with a sparkle in his eyes particularly made a mark. Working with Syd Barrett, Waters came to realize that expressing emotions in their truest form while attaching lyrics to rhythm in interesting ways creates the foundation for a poignant and touching song. Barrett’s early Floyd composition “Bike” uses lyrics that dance around the end of a rhythmic line until his thought is completed. One of Waters’s first songs written for Pink Floyd, 1967’s “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk,” carries this technique forward. This approach to writing keeps the heart at the forefront and instigates dynamic lyrics that skip beyond the rhythm of the song. This continuing method appears in “Mother” from The Wall and in “What God Wants, Part I” from Amused to Death, to provide a few examples. And Waters never lost sight of Barrett’s influence on the band — 1975’s Wish You Were Here paid poetic tribute to Barrett with lyrics striking in their heartfelt honesty and lifted by music crafted by Gilmour, Wright, and Mason.
“Maybe I learned from Syd that it’s really important that you don’t throw that stuff in the bin, that you keep it. That that almost childish expression of feeling is the important bit and all the embellishment that goes on around it is, you know, secondary to that. This is how I feel; however laughable it may seem.”
Roger Waters, The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story
Along with his use of ambient noises and musique concrète, Roger Waters approached his voice in a unique way — that’s right, we’re talking about the scream! Back in 1967, when Pink Floyd would perform songs like “Pow R. Toc H.,” Waters experimented with his vocals and explored the ways the voice could add to a song in divergent ways. In 1968, “Careful with That Axe, Eugene” was born, and Waters’s primordial scream fluidly graced the crescendo. Fast-forward to The Wall, and his inhale scream had gained full steam. The keening howl stitching “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” to “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” functions both percussively and conceptually by adding to the sense of fear and terror discussed in the lyrics. It also connects the album further to the visual components like Gerald Scarfe’s watercolor painting of the screaming man — often the first image associated with The Wall.
Later, Waters’s scream enlivens The Final Cut‘s “Two Suns in the Sunset,” adding emphasis to the song’s lyrics about the terror of nuclear war portrayed in terms of its human cost. Quintessentially Roger Waters, this scream echoes the fear, frustration, and confusion of existence. During his solo career, he kept the scream in his back pocket, unveiling it at the start of The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, as an empathic curtain draw to kick off the album. He uses this iconic vocal punctuation again on “Radio Waves,” the opening track of Radio K.A.O.S. Across his work, Waters has used his voice as a tool. Whether it functions as a percussive instrument or as a thematic exclamation mark, his innovative inhale scream is as central to his artistic identity as are his energetic bass playing and heartfelt songwriting.
Throughout his decades-long career, Roger Waters has touched the hearts of listeners and has inspired countless musicians to experiment with conceptual and technical ideas that challenge the status quo. If Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon lit the musical fire in you or if Is This the Life We Really Want? struck a nerve, then you’ll agree there’s a vast wealth of insight, both philosophical and artistic, in the music of Roger Waters.
“In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There’s nothing else as important at all.”
Roger Waters, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii
For a direct glimpse into the songwriting mind of Roger Waters, check out Sweetwater’s official “The Roger Waters Essentials” Spotify playlist!
