Vulture Ranking (out of 165 songs): 1
UCR Ranking (out of 167 songs): 3
Louder Ranking (out of 50 songs): 3
WMGK Ranking (out of 40 songs): 1
Ranker Ranking (out of 132 songs): 6
Billboard Ranking (out of 50 songs): 1
Vulture Ranking (1 out of 165 songs): Again, you see a good but troubled band put aside the fights, collaborate on a good song, and then record it in a way that makes the sound of it still timeless, more than 40 years on. WYWH is a funerary for Barrett, again, but it’s also a love song, and it’s also a meditation on life and ambition and a quest, and also finally about what we don’t know, which is everything. RW had moved on from the ridiculous lyrics of PF’s earlier work, and passed even the plain speak of DSOTM; on WYWH, he finally achieves something like good rock poetry — which is to say, words that make it clear what they mean, even if that meaning isn’t there on the page — and here manages to deliver them that way, too. WYWH was sturdy enough, and magnanimous enough, to serve the band one final time, in the group’s one reunion appearance together, at the Live 8 concert, where it was clearly about them as well. RW, older and wiser, clearly regretted the dissolution, and felt it was a time to hug and make up; but it was also clear that DG was having none of it. After The Final Cut, RW pressed on with a series of cranky, crackpot rock operas. (Radio K.A.O.S. is about a kid named Billy, who is “almost a vegetable,” but who has some sort of telekinetic powers, or something. It’s all a little unclear, but apparently the kid, a friendly radio DJ, and a mad scientist who gets turned around by Live Aid join together to … avert a nuclear holocaust. Whew!) RW then bore the humiliation of taking the accompanying dog-and-pony show around to smallish venues the same summer his former band mates played stadiums. The years have mellowed RW somewhat; he is older and even handsomer now. He remains highly politically principled and, now, since he actually gives interviews, you can hear how smart he actually is. And yet, he can probably still walk down most streets in the world and not be recognized. He actually seems happy now. We should have his problems.
UCR Ranking (3 out of 167 songs): This is PF at their most vulnerable. It’s practically a country tune, neither overwritten nor overextended nor over-performed. Its importance in their catalog isn’t down to sound or size or scope. It’s because of the song’s beating heart: an open, honest yearning. Whether it refers to Syd (as DG believes) or is self-directed (as RW recalls) doesn’t really matter. It’s a request for deliverance from the ugly things in life, a prayer that the subject can tell life’s pleasures from pain, a hope that he or she doesn’t get duped by false friends. It’s a wish for closeness and clarity and peace. It’s a wish worth making.
Louder Ranking (3 out of 50 songs): Rewind to January 1975, and Abbey Road hummed with bad vibes as PF embarked on sessions for their ninth album. With DG admitting that 1973’s DSOTM had left them “creatively trapped”, RWs explaining the WYWH concept as working “with people whom you know aren’t there anymore”, and
NM quipping on Capital Radio that “I really did wish that I wasn’t there”, this latest album was the signpost to the great PF fallout.
And yet, even on a record that DG remembers “started quite painfully”, the title track brought a moment of easy serendipity and happy synergy between the members. “I had bought a 12-string guitar,” DG recalled. “I was strumming it in the control room of Studio Three at Abbey Road, and that opening riff just started coming out. Roger’s ears pricked up and he said, ‘What’s that?’ I had a terrible habit of playing bits of songs by other people that were good. And I think Roger was a bit nervous asking, in case it came from something else, by someone else.”
While DG became “mildly obsessed” as he developed the guitar part, the band’s brainwave was to open WYWH with the effect of a listener cycling through radio stations, alighting on Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, before finally settling on a distant-sounding 12-string riff, which is shortly joined by a warmer acoustic passage.
“The idea,” explained Gilmour, “was that it was like a guitar playing on the radio and someone in their room at home, in their bedroom or something, listening to it and joining in. So the other guitar was supposed to be a kid at home joining in with the guitar he’s listening to on the radio. “And therefore,” he added, “it wasn’t supposed to be too slick – and it wasn’t. Every time I listen to the actual original recording, I think, ‘God, I should have really done that a little bit better.’”
While a cameo by the French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli was largely edited out (some claim it’s just audible at the end), more significant was RW’s wistful lyric, with a standout couplet that could be read as a nod to the bassist’s unraveling marriage, but was principally a salute to the fallen Syd Barrett. “Although SOYCD is specifically about Syd, and WYWH has a broader remit,” noted DG, “I can’t sing it without thinking about Syd.”
Indeed, when the classic Pink Floyd line-up reunited in London at Live 8 in 2005, RW and DG made sure that the Hyde Park audience were in no doubt of WYWH’s subject matter as they performed the song on acoustic guitars. “We’re doing this for everyone who’s not here,” announced the bassist, pointedly. “And particularly, of course, for Syd.”
WMGK Ranking (1 out of 40 songs): RW has said that the song isn’t specifically about Syd Barrett. DG says he can’t sing the song without singing about Barrett. But whatever the song means to them, what matters is what it means to you. It’s probably PF’s most relatable song: no matter who you are, there’s always someone that you miss. Even if most of the lyrics are just impressionistic and may not have any deep meaning to you, the line “How I wish, wish you were here” resonates with nearly everyone.
Billboard Ranking (1 out of 50 songs): Feels kinda wrong, doesn’t it? To have a relatively straightforward ballad as the crowning achievement of one of history’s greatest progressive rock bands — it’s sorta like putting Patience at the top of a GNR list, no? Fair, but you have to consider that being PF means even an accessible lighter-waver like WYWH has untold layers of subtle production and structural depth to it. Consider the radio crackle the opening riff emerges from — a thematic holdover from the preceding Have A Cigar outro — and the way the song’s acoustic solo lands on top of it with such comparative clarity, with every finger-on-strings slip audible, that it’s heart-piercing from the first note. Or how the bleating synths come in to fortify the melodic refrain in between the first verse and chorus. Or how despite being among the most legendary sing-alongs in rock history — epochal enough that even a mook like Fred Durst knows all the words — the song’s chorus only appears once in the entire song.
WYWH lands like no other song in the band’s catalog, because it does all these clever, unobtrusively inventive things, but the song’s core remains as emotive and relatable as a Lynyrd Skynyrd classic. It’s about Syd Barrett, of course — though he probably would’ve hated the lack of bongos or feedback freakouts — but it doesn’t have to be, not by a long shot. And even with a chorus so sky-scraping, you don’t need to deploy it more than once when you’re falling back to a riff that anyone who’s ever learned the acoustic has attempted to master within the first month. WYWH packs the obligatory anti-authoritarian messaging into its verse, but its ultimate feeling is one of human connection, of needing friends and family and loved ones to give you a reason to keep fighting in the first place. It’s as beautiful a composition and production as the ’70s produced, and it should live on well after the last DSOTM poster is torn down from a college undergrad dorm room.