Richard Wright and "Us and Them"

I tend to find myself coming back to vulnerability as a topic. Great art either makes you feel vulnerable or is vulnerable itself, which allows you to connect to it. This is especially true of great music.

There was a clip of Wright playing a demo of the piano part from "Us and Them" with some commentary and it damn near made me cry.

"I love that chord, I don't know why. But it wouldn't work if it had gone up to an A. But that what music's all about..."

After hearing it stripped down and bare, "Us and Them" has taken on a totally new form for me, and consequently so has Dark Side of the Moon. I personally put DSOTM in contention with the "greatest", (Kind of Blue, Sgt. Pepper, Electric Ladyland) because it makes me feel so vulnerable. I've never been grasp the album, it's always been the other way around. The raw emotion would grab me and wrap me up to a point where I feel very small. Like an astronaut floating out in space. But hearing a track from the album sound so naked I found an edge to grasp. Now for the first time I can listen to the album and slide inbetween despair and triumph, wrestling with it track by track.

And now I wait for the sun to set so I can walk through the city at night and listen to the words of Roger Water's for what must be the thousandth time.