On Dark Side of the Moon, therapy, and power of music.
I had a pretty incredible day today. I decided to put on
The Dark Side of the Moon, an album I haven’t played in years. It’s come back into my consciousness thanks to TikTok, actually, getting served quite a bit of Pink Floyd content which is awesome. Had a long drive home from a great weekend away camping up on the Murray, and decided to put it on. I’ve said in the past that it is my favourite album of all-time, but it’s been years since I’ve listened to it.
I started to get a little emotional during "Breathe". "On the Run" is fantastic, it still sounds really fresh even 50 years on, it’s so well-produced, the claustrophobia is palpable. The electronics and synths are exceptional, and stand up to a lot of electronic work before or since. My favourite thing about it is how it really seems to create the soundtrack of a doomed plane ride, with those shuddering synths that sweep across the L-R channels, then the madcap laughter and the sudden crash. It’s so rarely spoken about, this song, because the album also contains Breathe, Time, Great Gig in the Sky, Money, Us and Them, Brain Damage and Eclipse (not to mention Any Colour You Like, a phenomenal song I’m just leaving out because it’s lesser known), but it should be spoken about more.
It’s been a long, long time since I’ve played or heard "Time" in full. (I found out through TikTok that the
tick-tock that runs throughout the early part of the song is completely analogue (is that the right word?) or organic, it’s Waters knocking his bass guitar). Eventually Gilmour’s first verse starts up and emotion starts to flood in… so many times I listened to this song as a late teenage/early 20s kid. But as good as Gilmour’s verses are, it’s Rick Wright that drives the nail into my heart, alongside the drums and the choir and minimal instrumentation. The solo and instrumental break is, obviously, incredible. It’s interesting, I think, on paper you could potentially argue that the lyrics to this song are a little too obvious… there’s very little left to the imagination, but they are just SO on-point about the anxieties of life and the passage the time and death, they’re so universal, sung so powerfully (particularly by Wright) and surrounded by a phenomenal song. They’re particularly resonant for me at the moment, I’m a bit over four months single for the first time in seven years after ending a relationship I thought for a long time was going the distance, and I’m nearly 33, and sometimes I feel as though my life is over, or that I’ve wasted parts of my life, and I’m deeply fearful and death and encroaching time. The choir’s ohhhhs behind the “or half a page of scribbled lines” never fails to send shivers through my body.
I love the madcap adlibs through the record, perhaps at their best on "The Great Gig in the Sky", which is such an affecting song. The slow first minute with the piano and slide guitar is so gorgeous and sets such a powerful platform for Clare Torry’s otherworldly take on death. I’ve not heard a song like it before or since. How amazing is that?
"Money", in many ways, has always been my least favourite song on the album, for a few reasons. Firstly, I hate coins lol and so a lot of the sound effects trigger me. Secondly, it’s
so Waters, which, despite my protestations in the Pink Floyd thread, does put me off a little (strangely, the fact that he sings both Brain Damage and Eclipse has never even put a dint in my love for those songs). Thirdly, it veers dangerously close to cock rock (though nowhere near as offensively as the awful Young Lust) and fourthly, for me, stylistically, it has always seemed a little like a sore thumb amidst an album full of perfect fingers. All these points made, it still slaps because the music just absolutely slays. And the coda that leads into the impeccable, heart-wrenching, deeply moving and beautiful "Us and Them"…
Man. I had forgotten how good this song is and how much I utterly adore it. The synths that open it, the slow guitar and drums, giving way to the piano and Dick Parry’s ethereal saxophone, just when you think the first verse is gonna start. Again, like in Time, the Gilmour-Wright interplay is majestic. It’s Wright’s verses, and the thunderous music that surrounds them, that make the song, but the slow build of Gilmour’s verses make the payoff all the sweeter. I actually wasn’t prepared for the visceral emotion that began to pound through my body listening to these verses again. The guitar that signals their arrival, Wright’s vocal is so impassioned, the choir is incredible, Parry’s sax is monstrous, and I have always found the war-based lyrics in Wright’s verses to be really poignant. The piano and adlib run of the Gilmour verses is gorgeous - if you give him a quick short, sharp shock - and then you have a majestic run of the Wright verses with Parry’s sax taking on the lead role (anyone who knows me knows that I’ve always had a love affair with the sax in songs). And then, as if we haven’t been rewarded enough already, we get yet another set of verses, and then the most exquisite segue into Any Colour You Like.
"Any Colour You Like", I’ve said many times, is an absolute masterpiece, and it’s this 11 minutes that long ago cemented Rick Wright as my favourite member of Pink Floyd. The man is a fucking genius. The instrumentation on this song is unreal. It’s literal funk music at one point. And it just flows so unbelievably well out of Us and Them. It’s fun and sick as hell and such a bitching complement to the emotion of Us and Them. It and "A New Career in a New Town" are the two best instrumental tracks ever made.
Ah, "Brain Damage". At this point, I’m so heavily invested in the music on my long drive home, and my face so wet with tears, and my muscles strained from screaming Wright’s verses in Us and Them, that the first minute is a welcome respite. Roger’s verse makes me smile and the guitar is great. But it’s a brief respite, because the chorus is yet another moment of utter fucking glory and joy and melancholy on this beautiful motherfucking album. Maybe I’m in too deep with this song that this is an over-the-top statement, but I do really feel the insanity vibes they were going for in this song. I really felt it after leaning so heavily into the emotion over the preceding seven tracks. I’m so into the song and the album that I do feel like I’ve gone a little insane, I’m so deep into it.
The defining thing that makes
The Dark Side of the Moon the GOAT record, and so unbelievably powerful and resonant and fresh after 50 fucking years, is the narrative. And I don’t really mean the somewhat vague concept behind the album, I mean the musical and storytelling narrative that is created through the sequencing and transitions, in between some of the best songs ever committed to tape. The second chorus of Brain Damage reaches its conclusion and then the song actually feels like it gets a bit silly. A bit drunk. There’s a new synth line over the top of the guitar, the madcap is back, and then, just when you think this I’ve-run-out-of-superlatives record couldn’t get any better, Nick Mason pounds the drums four times, Gilmour plays a tiny little chiming guitar part and your soul leaves your body as "Eclipse" begins.
It’s less than two minutes, and yet it’s the greatest song ever written. To this day, after 15+ years of listening to the song, I am still utterly gobsmacked that such a phenomenal song exists. I was in my car, driving on a barren highway, tears streaming down my face at this point, literally fucking screaming the lyrics at the top of my lungs. The moment the song starts, the drums, the synths, my soul just leaves my body and floats to a higher plane. Waters’ lyrics and vocals are utterly perfect, the choir is unreal. It is a fucking stunning coda that somehow seems to contain within it all of the emotion and power of the entire album and then take it into overdrive. And then the heartbeat, and the madcap’s final words. So yeah, after all this time,
The Dark Side of the Moon is still my favourite album of all time.
What made this listen in particular so special was what was happening for me emotionally as all this was happening. I’ve struggled mightily at times over the past two years, questioning who I am and which path I should take. I’ve been doing some pretty deep therapy, schema therapy and internal family systems. A few weeks ago, when I saw Bon Iver, for the first time, I felt a strong and powerful version of myself come through the centre of my body, with a message That I Am Okay And That Everything Is Going To Be All Right. I wept multiple times, because it was so powerful, comforting and healing. In that moment, and during that concert, it felt like I could truly trust myself for the first time in a very, very long time, because I was being held and supported by myself. Like I was my own best friend, the person or the thing I’ve been searching for. My therapist says it is Healthy Daniel. He’s always been here, but hasn’t had many opportunities in my life to live from the front.
As the back end of DSOTM played out, that version of myself stepped through again. l. And it was accompanied by a vision, or a feeling. Of Healthy Daniel as the conductor, or musical director, of a huge 10+ people band, comprised of all the different parts of myself: the anxiety, the critic, the detached protectors, the joy, the sadness, the anger, the fear and a cast of supporting players. We were all on stage, losing our shit as we performed
The Dark Side of the Moon. Healthy Daniel didn’t seem to be playing an instrument, but he was centre stage, empowering everyone, welcoming everyone, guiding the performance, accentuating different players playing different roles at different times. He was smiling and loving it as much as everyone. He was equal with all on stage.
I played Eclipse over and over and over, crying and screaming. It’s very rare that these parts of me feel safe enough to come out, and Healthy Daniel made them feel safe enough to do so. There was still some self-consciousness, an over-controller who is looking around to make sure we’re not being too intense or extra, keeping us part of the tribe, but that’s okay too.
The concert ended, and we took a bow. The critic seemed to start throwing things from side of stage, and it was difficult not to succumb to him, but Healthy Daniel is just so powerful that it didn’t feel as though the moment was completely ruined or the detached protectors had to step in and shut everything down. He just smiled and calmly said, you’re welcome too, and hopefully one day you’ll feel comfortable and safe enough to join us on stage.
The concert now over, other songs began to pop in my head that I wanted to listen to. The first was The Load-Out / Stay, the nine-minute, two-song epic by Jackson Browne. I’ve adored "The Load-Out" for many years, hearing it played by my Dad, who has long owned
Running on Empty on vinyl, and hearing it on Gold 104 on the odd occasion. It is such a beautiful song. The piano is so beautifully melancholy and Browne’s vocals are just perfect. The song is an ode to Browne’s roadies, post-show pack-downs and the life of touring musicians, and the lyrics are specific to this narrative, but the song is so beautiful that it feels like so much more than that. It is masterful piece of songwriting, music craft and production, and then, after five-and-a-half minutes, it segues seamlessly into a cover of Maurice Williams’ doo-wop hit "Stay". It is, in fact, so seamless, that for most of my life I had no idea it was two separate songs. It has always held a little extra resonance in my life, too, as it was the favourite song of a close family friend Graham and his son Dion, who sadly passed away after an accident some years ago.
By this point, I was truly elevated, and when I hit that elevated state, I gravitate towards songs that capture that magic feeling. Enter "Memory of a Free Festival", a barely-known David Bowie folk deep cut that closed his 1969 self-titled second album (also known now as
Space Oddity, for the eponymous track that was released on this record). It has the classic roughshod vibes of pre-Glam Bowie, his vocals a little unpolished, the organ - the only instrumentation for the first third of the song - not-quite-expertly played, and features a warped "A Day in the Life" / "Revolution 9"-style bridge, but it then unfolds into a glorious refrain that takes up the rest of the track, with “The sun machine is coming down / and we’re gonna have a party” repeated over and over. Eventually Bowie steps back, swallowed up by a passionate choir of voices. Since I first heard this song, I have been in love with it, and I have always dreamed of playing this song at a festival, or other peak experience, singing the refrain with thousands of others. I cried again, imagining being the man on the hill who starts to dance, and is eventually joined by many others, and dreaming of such a moment.
Searching for Memory of a Free Festival, I saw 2011’s "Young, Wild & Free", by Wiz Khalifa, Snoop Dogg and Bruno Mars. So I played it. I loved this song man. The sweet piano and Bruno Mars’ gorgeous chorus capture such a lovely feeling. The refrain made me cry again, as I imagined Healthy Daniel letting the rest of my internal family know that it’s fine and good and wonderful to get drunk and/or high and have a good time. Healthy Daniel makes me feel safe, and happy, and content, like Everything Really Will Be Ok.
I took a voice note after about an hour-and-a-half of playing these songs, crying, weeping and sobbing, over this powerful experience, and how Healthy Daniel made these parts feel safe enough to come out.
Then I played "The Festival Song", an Aussie hip-hop song - I can genuinely count on one hand the amount of these songs I like - by Pez and 360 and Hailey Cramer. I’d wept my tears by now and was just smiling. This song is deeply nostalgic to me - it was released in 2008, and came out around the time that me and a whole bunch of friends attended a few of the now-defunct Pyramid Rock Festivals. The warm piano-led beat is lovely and Pez and 360, two rappers I have no interest in ever hearing ever again, manage to capture a moment in time in such perfect detail the song is almost like looking at photographs.
Happy, content and cried out for now, I return a missed call from Dad. He has some sad family news. Because Healthy Daniel is present, I feel I have space to talk to Dad about it in a way I might not have otherwise. I feel the feelings of it. Then I put on Triple M’s Sunday Rub, chuckle lightly at the c-grade banter and continue the drive into Melbourne. Life is life, and it’s better when Healthy Daniel is here.
