(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 2 December 2025 17:10, UK
Not everyone is looking at how they are going to be remembered whenever they sit down to write a song. It’s always been about capturing how someone is feeling in the moment, and if it happens to resonate with millions of people, then that is just an extra bonus. Now with a treasure trove of classics in the rearview, though, Roger Waters thinks that Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, and his solo album Amused to Death are among the finest pieces that he has ever released.
Then again, Waters fell into being the main songwriter of Pink Floyd almost by accident. Someone had to step up the minute Syd Barrett started losing his mind, and while Waters was the one to reluctantly fill in, his grand concepts helped give the group a vision for where they wanted to take their music throughout the 1970s.
It was a hot mess looking through their first post-Barrett songs, but ‘Echoes’ was the real start of something new, and that would be even further explored on Dark Side of the Moon. While the concept of life is a lot more by-the-numbers compared to his other records, Waters hit upon something anyone breathing can relate to, talking about the dangers of not letting life pass you by if that’s what everyone was feeling, though, what was really going on in Waters’ mind.
The album isn’t only a conceptual masterpiece but also sees the band provide some of their best singular songs too. As well as ‘Money’, ‘Time’ and ‘Breathe’, the album holds perhaps one of their most beloved tracks of all time in ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. They are individually brilliant, but when the songs are sewn together, the tapestry created is that of legend.
The answer was The Wall, which is among the heaviest set of lyrics he had ever penned. Written around a stand-in for both him and Barrett, the story of a rockstar locked inside their own mind is probably a lot more autobiographical than even Waters probably realised, complete with the power dynamic that comes with being a rockstar and whether or not he can still relate to people when on that pedestal.
Roger Waters playing the guitar. (Credits: Far Out / digboston)
Rightly described as a ‘rock opera’, Waters and the rest of the band were once again carving out their own path as they moved away from the psychedelia which had set them up as a huge act and were now more pointed toward success on a commercial level. With the help of Waters’ lyrical narration, the story of Pink has become one of the most widely loved rock stories of all time and rightly deserves its kudos.
And while Amused to Death took years to create, the result is one of the most musically satisfying of Waters’s solo years. While a lot of people question whether that has to do with the fact that Jeff Beck is on the record, it still holds together as one of the finest looks at the modern age, including stirring images of kids wanting to watch footage of war on TV.
Animals and Wish You Were Here are still fine pieces of Floyd’s catalogue, but Waters still thought that those three albums were the gold standard for what he strived to do, saying, “I’d like to be remembered for Dark Side, The Wall, Amused to Death, you know the songs. I’d like to be remembered for having a vision of arena rock as theatre, for developing the marriage between visual elements and the music to make the rock and roll experience more visceral.”
But looking back on each of the concepts, they all seem to tell the story of Waters a little bit more. The Wall is by far the closest to Waters’s vision of himself, but seeing him go from trying to relate to everyone on Dark Side to closing himself off and then critiquing those stuck in a rut of mainstream culture is like him trying to throw his own philosophy back at his audience.
For him, it was never about creating a hit song that made people want to turn up the radio. Waters wanted to make music that stirred people up, and that meant testing them whenever they picked up one of his records.
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