Fifty years ago, Pink Floyd released their landmark album, “Wish You Were Here,” and the band recently reissued it in a deluxe package with remastered tracks, unreleased demos, and live performances. The archival material puts listeners into the magic of the time as we hear the beginnings of what would become generation-defining songs.
Now, the band has expanded its presentation of the music with a brand new music video for the title track, “Wish You Were Here.”
Justin Daashuur Hopkins, who has also created videos for artists like Coldplay and Rita Ora, directed the official video. It opens on quickly spliced clips of the moon, an egg and sperm, and then an eyeball with flames shooting out. This could be an allusion to the band’s rebirth with the album: they wrote it after three years of touring the hugely successful “Dark Side of the Moon.”
As the intro’s radio sounds are dialed into the actual song, the video transitions into vintage Pink Floyd clips and animation of a man tumbling through space.
The vision of a man lost in the clouds is another representation of the song’s meaning.
Bassist, vocalist, and songwriter Roger Waters describes the entire album as being about “absence and to some extent, the loss of [former vocalist] Syd Barrett, who had succumbed to mental illness.”
“Wish You Were Here” began with David Gilmour‘s iconic guitar riff, which he plays on a twelve-string. It’s built on a melody crafted from the G pentatonic scale: G, A, B, D, and E. The notes fall perfectly under your fingers on the guitar in the G chord shape, and they also give you space to play chords around them.
The opening riff alternates between E minor and G major – the relative major and minor chords in the key of G. Moving between “happy” and “sad” sounds sets up a sort of melancholy that immediately caught Waters’ attention.
In an interview with John Edginton, Gilmour explained that he was strumming on the piece in the control room of Studio Three in Abbey Road Studios, where the band was writing and recording the album.
“Roger immediately said, ‘What’s that?'” He said. “Then we had to immediately get on with it and work it up and write the rest of the music.” He added that the riff is similar to many other riffs, but that it has some sort of magic.
“The ones that do have that magic, it’s obvious to people around. Even just that piece of music has an emotional pull to it. That’s what we’re struggling to find all the time.”
Waters told AXS TV that he wrote the song very quickly after that. “It was one of those happy times when stream of consciousness works and words come out that have meter and meaning and are musical and fit a melody. I don’t try to investigate them too much. It would be like investigating a butterfly – you’d end up with dust and a few broken bits.”
We, however, can investigate the music. Get the guitar tab for “Wish You Were Here” and create your own magic:
