Echoes

Pink Floyd is probably the biggest victim of my early teenage music exploration. To clarify, when I first started getting into music, almost everything I listened to was from the radio. Led Zeppelin was, and still is, my favorite, and Pink Floyd was a close, well, not second (Soundgarden...), but probably third. I listened to their mid-70s albums over and over... and over. And unlike Zeppelin, for a while I became pretty burnt out on some of their stuff from Dark Side of the Moon through the Wall (well, minus Animals). I still love the songs I always loved, which is most of them, but the ones I don't like (Welcome to the Machine, most of the second half of the Wall) can really get on my nerves after a while.

HOWEVVEEERRRRRRRR, I still like the other eras of the band as much as I always did, maybe more, now that I've dug a lot deeper since I was 15 or so. I'm still not too familiar with the post-Wall stuff. I didn't like the Final Cut, and while I like the radio songs from the time after Roger Waters left (On the Turning Away, Learning to Fly, etc) I've never listened to the albums. The Syd Barrett stuff is great too, of course, but lately I've really been getting into the early 70s stuff, the somewhat more obscure releases post-Syd and pre-Dark Side.

As you probably figured out, this post is about Echoes, which is most likely my favorite Pink Floyd song. Maybe. If not it's up there. It's a long one, too, over 23 minutes. I decided to see if it was their longest song, but according to Wikipedia, Atom Heart Mother (which is several not-so-connected songs and some avant-garde stuff) is 24 minutes and the combined tracks of Shine on You Crazy Diamond is 26 minutes long. But I guess that doesn't really matter, I was just checking for my own good. The point is, it's a lengthy number, yet it rarely bores me.

Meddle is kind of a weird album. The first three songs are good, and pretty normal for a Pink Floyd album, what with the usual soft trippiness and whatnot. The next two songs are not quite as serious, which is kind of unexpected. Then this comes on as the last song which makes the album even more bizarre, but ends it on a great note.



I'm very glad I found this video, which not only is the full version of the song in one video, but synced with the final scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it was supposed to be in the film, but by then they began to refuse allowing their music to be used in movies due to previous failed efforts. However, they apparently regretted not letting the song be used after watching the movie, and I can see why. This video is pretty much insane.

I could pretty much just listen to that first note forever. I don't know why it's so perfect but it is. I always like listening to how their songs slowly build up, including this one. The first high note over and over, into the seagull guitars in the background and the high note turning into melodies (apparently it's a keyboard recorded through a Leslie speaker, giving it the weird swirly sound), then it begins. This band was so great at ambient music. The verses are kind of a precursor to later songs like Breathe, and as usual, David Gilmour's vocals sound great, and Rick Wright's too!

One of my favorite parts is THE RIFF, the one that serves as the part where a chorus would be. The part that was ripped off for Phantom of the Opera, but was done much better in this song.

Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine.

And no-one called us to the land
And no-one knows the wheres or whys
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can

And no-one calls us to move on
And no-one forces down our eyes
And no-one speaks and no-one tries
And no-one flies around the sun

Cloudless everyday you fall upon my waking eyes
inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no-one sings me lullabies
And no-one makes me close my eyes
And so I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky

I have no clue what it means but I love it. The oceanic sound of the first verse, the "airy" sound of the last one, and the fact that the music has a sound somewhere between the ocean and in the sky. I have my stupid theories as to what it could be about, but it's probably way off. It fits perfectly with the music so that's great enough for me.

So after the first two verses it goes into one of Mr. Gilmour's great guitar solos that sounds something like a mix of a pterodactyl, space, and a dentist drill. The solo builds and builds until 7 minutes in, when it goes into my other favorite part, the funky section, which is something else they did very well. The guitar solo comes back in with his usual reverby spaciness. By the 11th minute the funk descends into the creepy ambient seagull section, which may be the only song in that style of music that you should ever listen to because it does it perfectly. It sets a perfect frightening lost at sea atmosphere. Or something. lolz

Around 15 and a half minutes it goes back to the intro section, with an extra chord hanging throughout. Slowly everything builds back up, sounding sort of like One of These Days, the first song on Meddle. Eventually (around 18 minutes) the great echoed (HAHAHAHA) guitar melody comes in, yet another favorite moment, and then into the last verse, RIFF, and then the outro with the keyboard and guitar trading lines, then the weird rising whooshing sound fading into the end.

I have a weird memory attached to this song. I used to go to school at College of the Ozarks in the first few months of 2008 and worked at the restaurant at the Keeter Center. I hated working there so much. The specifics of the job itself won't be discussed here, but one day I was really having a terrible time and felt like I was worth of nothing. I couldn't do anything right and my bosses liked to point it out, and I really needed to calm down. So I went outside to my car (which was a BIG NO NO) and listened to all of Echoes to be calmed down (I was in a pretty big Pink Floyd phase at the time). My stress pretty much disappeared while the song was playing. I decided not to go back in and just waited for my next class. And that's my not so exciting story.

Sorry to go on about this one for so long, but it's really a masterpiece. Not that the other songs I wrote about weren't, but this one is much longer, harhar.

Since I'm so predictable, here is a live version, the only one I recall ever hearing, and maybe the only one anyone ever needs to hear, the Live at Pompeii version.





By the way, that echoey guitar part about 3 minutes in on the second video of the live take sounds like something from an old Sonic game. It's cool... ANYWAY...

I could go on some more, but I think I have long enough. I'll let the song speak for itself from here.