Every minute of every day your life is passing you by. All our lives are passing us by and there’s not a thing we can do about it. Minute by minute, second by second, we are all racing towards our own inevitable mortality. It’s a scary thought and one that we often go great lengths to avoid confronting. But on the fourth track of The Dark Side Of The Moon, Pink Floyd look this thought dead in the eye.
«Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day»
Of all the struggles that Pink Floyd talked about throughout The Dark Side Of The Moon, time is the most universal. No matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter how rich or how poor you are: you’ll always have to face time, and try as we may, none of us will ever truly be able to preserve the beautiful moment in time. No matter what we do, the seconds will keep on ticking. What we can do is try to make the best of what we’re given, try to cherish those beautiful moments before they’re washed away like so many grains of sand. And that’s the message that Pink Floyd sing on Time. Before we get into that message though, we open with the most jarring moment on all of The Dark Side Of The Moon: this cacophony of clocks pulls you out of the dazed panic of On The Run and into clear awareness while also laying out the main theme of the song. Like most of the sound collages on The Dark Side Of The Moon, this assortment of clocks was assembled by Alan Parsons. He didn’t originally put them together for The Dark Side Of The Moon, but rather for another release he had planned to show off what the new technologies of quadrophonic sound could do. But then he heard Pink Floyd working on Time and he thought the sound clause would fit perfectly with the song, so he dug up his recordings and offer them to the band and they did work perfectly waking you from the implied death at the end of On The Run. Once the bells die out, we find ourselves in a spacy intro propelled by a Nick Mason roto Tom solo. Thanks to that solo, Mason garden writing credit on the song, making it the only song on all of The Dark Side Of The Moon that features all four members as songwriters. At Mason solo’s the rest of the band lays down imposing atmosphere. Then we break into the first verse:
«Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown / waiting for someone or something to show you the way»
Here we’re met with an all-too-familiar scene for many of us: aboard youth wasting time. When you’re young, time seems to be the last concern in the world. You’ve got so much time that you’re trying to find ways to waste it, you drive around with your bodies making mischief, you lay around in the Sun, you fill your days with nothingness as you wait for real life to be.
«Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain / and you are young and life is long and there is time to kill today»
But all that changes and the changes come at you fast. Roger Waters talked about this experience in an interview with Mojo: “I have the strangest feeling growing up -and I know a lot of people share this- that childhood and adolescence and one’s early adult life are preparing for something that’s going to happen later. 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”. At the end of the first verse Richard Wright sings that feeling in one of the most heartbreakingly human and real moments of the entire album:
«And then one day you find ten years have got behind you / no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun»
From there we jump into a passionate guitar solo by David Gilmour. This isn’t the typical song structure for rock. Usually solos formed the bridge of a song, pushing the momentum towards a finale, but here Gilmour’s passion cuts right through the center of the song. Playing with structure like this, Pink Floyd’s music amplifies the anxiety of the lyrics. The solo comes at you fast, sooner than expected, just as life does. The solo itself is remarkable. We can really look at it in two sections. The first is a desperate section that runs about a minute. In this first part Gilmour captures the pained anxiety of watching your life passed before your eyes. Then a warm chorus of backup singers flood your ear. Musically it’s the same as Richard Wright’s vocal passages in the song: it’s a melancholic acceptance of the inevitability of time. This melancholy is only a brief break though, as we launch back into desperation in the second verse.
«And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking»
This verse is one of many parallels that reveal themselves throughout The Dark Side Of The Moon: Gilmour singing here echoes the end of the first verse, which was sung by Wright.
Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun,
but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way,
but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Both feature images of sunshine and the metaphor of life as running of race. Here though, the race has started and you already find yourself desperately running to catch up, desperately running to find your life. It’s the same sunshine that you laid in when you were younger, but its meaning is different. Each time the Sun sinks behind the horizon it marks another day passing, it marks your life taking away. Wright half of the second verse is the opposite of Gilmour section. In the first verse where Gilmour sings about wasting time, Wright sings about not being able to find time. He sings of the national spirit of England, how it feels as though everyone is in the same boat, trying desperately to get a grasp of their own life trying to catch up to time.
«Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way»
The verse ends with the break of the fourth wall. Wright announces that the song is over, but there’s no real resolution, no chorus, no final solo: it just ends. Once again the music is reflecting the anxieties present in the lyrics. We don’t get any answers to the questions asked, we don’t get a catharsis and so it is when you reach the end of your life: you thought you would have more to say, more to do. We all want to be a part of something big or profound, but in the end we spend so much of our lives wasting time or chasing time. While the song Time ends on this thought, the recording itself has another piece of music stapled to the end: a reprise of Breathe. Time back to the birth we saw two tracks ago, this verse of Breathe talks of ageing and returning home to a place of comfort.
«Home, home again»
It’s a rest after the tension and stress that have dominated the last two songs, but it’s not all comforting. The song brings in another image: the tolling of a bell far away.
«The tolling of the iron bell calls the faithful to their knees to hear the softly spoken magic spells»
That bell is an announcement that we’re gonna keep following the rabbit hole down, deeper into the core if humanity. The tolling bell calls back to the ringing locks at the beginning, but it also suggests a funeral. It’s the shadow of mortality that hangs over all of The Dark Side Of The Moon and death comes hand-in-hand with a new discussion: spirituality, religion and the afterlife. All of these topics will be explored in the next song, as we push towards the end of side A.
Fonte: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9FfcrOKcjQ&list=PLrCONIX0kFzjpsPE74uVYxHYmDMky25xl&index=3
Martina Leonardi
IV E scientifico
