#04 - Time from The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)
Appeared On: 29 ballots (out of 33 . . . 87.9%)
Total Points: 558 points (out of 825 possible points . . . 67.6%)
Top Rankers: @Ghost Rider Friend of 
@PIK95 @BassNBrew @zamboni @Dan Lambskin @Desert_Power @Ghoti 
Highest Rankings: 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5
Initial Acoustic Demo, 
Early Mix, 
In Concert Video, 
Early Live Version, 
Brighton - 1972, 
New York - 1973, 
London- 1974, 
Los Angeles - 1975, 
DSOT, 
Pulse, 
Gdansk, 
Pompeii
Live Performances: PF: 147, 
DG's PF 133, 
RW: 388, 
DG: 83
Covers: Killers, 
Shadow Gallery, 
Pangaea, 
Dream Theater, 
Billy Sherwood, 
Godsmack, 
Weezer, 
Gov't Mule, 
Kelsey Wood, 
Dr. Cryptic
The last remaining track from DSOTM. Initially called Time Song, it is the only song on the album on which all 4 members receive a writing credit (the last time that happened). DG lost a bet with manager Steve O'Rourke, after wagering the album wouldn't even crack the U.S. Top 10. The song describes the phenomenon in which time seems to pass more quickly as one ages, often leading to despair in old age over missed opportunities of the past. 
RW said the lyrics came from a eureka moment he experienced approaching age 30. He had spent his adolescence and young adulthood waiting for life to begin, only to discover that he was already living it. "I spent an awful lot of my life — until I was about 28 — waiting for my life to start. I though that at some point I would turn from a chrysalis into a butterfly, that my real life would begin. So if I had that bit of my life to live again, I would rather live the years between 18 and 28 knowing that that was it, that nothing was suddenly going to happen — that it was happening all the time."
"Time passes, and you are what you are, you do what you do. I suddenly thought at 29, ‘Hang on, it’s happening’, It has been right from the beginning, and there isn't suddenly a line when the training stops and life starts. … To be here now, this is it. Make the most of it. Maybe we all suffer from the feeling of lost opportunities, or you could have done better, or done more. Maybe it’s comforting to hear that feeling expressed in a piece of work that’s been as successful as this one. People often think, ‘If only … I could write the hit song, or have the success, everything would be okay.’ It’s very nice, but it doesn’t solve any of the problems you might feel about yourself.”
The long introductory passage of clocks chiming and alarms ringing were recorded as a quadraphonic test by Alan Parsons. The sound effects were not recorded for the album. "That was my idea to bring in these recordings of antique clocks, all recorded one at a time, on a portable tape machine, and then we transferred them all onto a multi-track tape, made them all tick and chime in sync," Parsons said. "PF liked that."
DG: "Parsons had just recently gone out with a whole set of equipment and had recorded all these clocks in a clock shop. And we were doing the son
, and he said "Listen, I just did all these things, I did all these clocks," and so we wheeled out his tape and listened to it and said "Great! Stick it on!" And that was his idea."
Everything about Time was big: its cacophony of clocks, its sonic range from hushed tick-tocking to full-throated rock exuberance, its notions about the hourglass of life, its seven-minute length. It also might be DSOTM's hardest-rocking moment with bass digging deep into the song’s funky gait and DG burning through everything with his blazing arrow of a guitar solo coated in space echo. DG: “Some punch, some rock guitar. Once you’ve had that guitar up so loud on the stage, where you can lean back and volume will stop you from falling backward, that’s a hard drug to kick.”
Vulture Ranking (out of 165 songs): 36
UCR Ranking (out of 167 songs): 2
Louder Ranking (out of 50 songs): 5
WMGK Ranking (out of 40 songs): 5
Ranker Ranking (out of 132 songs): 8
Billboard Ranking (out of 50 songs): 9
Vulture Ranking (36 out of 165 songs): It’s a rough call, but this is probably the worst actual song on DSOTM. (No need to post the rest.)
UCR Ranking (2 out of 167 songs): Nick brought the anticipation. Roger brought the wisdom. David brought the passion. Rick brought the soul. Here they are, folks, the members of PF, each getting their turn in the spotlight (and a writing credit) by working collaboratively. It wasn't always so balanced, but when everything under PF was in tune, the music was a richer experience. Not only does Time rock, it thrills, provokes, fascinates and draws your attention to the intricacies of the recording: Mason’s teasing rototoms and Wright’s punctuations of electric piano, DG’s tsunami of a guitar solo and RW’s self-critical profundity. The reprise of Breathe is the perfect sigh of a closer.
Louder Ranking (5 out of 50 songs): The effects that adorn Time are a prime example of how Pink Floyd’s working methods in the studio could transform a song. Without them 
Time might have been an Obscured By Clouds outtake. The ticking clocks that gradually grow in intensity before breaking out in a cacophony of alarms is just the beginning. How fortuitous that engineer 
Alan Parsons – en route to his own Project from an apprenticeship working with The Beatles – should have been dispatched a month earlier to make a series of field recordings for a sound effects album EMI was planning. And that deep sonorous guitar note that follows – how long did it take before DG and the band were satisfied that they had exactly the right sound? How deep? How sonorous? And then the tom toms that bring a syncopated edge to the rhythm; that’s not Mason flailing away on his drum kit. He’d found a set of rototoms – metal framed drums with no shell that are tuned by rotation – lying around the studio. All this happens before a word has been sung.
WMGK Ranking (5 out of 40 songs): It’s the last time the group co-wrote a PF song. Waters and Wright split the lead vocals, the last time Wright would sing lead for 20 years. The song is haunted by the passage of time and the idea that you’re not accomplishing enough. At a certain age the lyrics are scarier than anything you’ll hear in a punk or metal song.
Billboard Ranking (9 out of 50 songs): The cruelest trick that PF ever played on their stoner fans, setting the alarm clock to end all alarm clocks to go off right when DSOTM seems to be settling into its early mellow. Blame engineer Alan Parsons and his quadraphonic sound tests for that one, but credit the band to living up to so dramatic an intro with one of their best lyrics — about RW’s sudden quarter-life crisis — a trademark wailing DG solo, and the band’s first on-record reprise, of album opener Breathe, cleverly following the Time closing sentiment.