The question of “What’s your favorite album?” is a very difficult one to answer; particularly in the iTunes era, when the concept of an album (no pun intended) is dying. It’s a very subjective one. Ask 300 people that question and you’ll likely get 300 different answers. It’s personal, ingrained in our memories. For me, the answer to that question has always been automatic. I don’t think I’ve ever fully understood why an album that debuted 10 years before I was born was so great, besides the stock answer of “it’s really, really good.” But now, as I hone in on age thirty, I think I have full understanding of why Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is my favorite album of all time.
Technically speaking, the album is phenomenal. Remember, this album was recorded in 1973, decades before digital remastering, before the age where producers could hit a little button and fix a missed-time snare hit or alter a sharp vocal note. This album flows like a single piece of music, expertly arranged, perfectly played. Nobody will ever (legitimately) claim Gilmour, Mason, Waters, or Wright to be the greatest at their instrument, but as a unit there may be no one better. This album is the perfect balance of music and lyric, of major and minor…of yin and yang. Overlaying are the ground-breaking electronic, sound, and tape effects that aren’t gimmicks and don’t distract, but enhance.
Most people won’t doubt its technical proficiency, though. It’s been nearly 40 years, and no album that sells a minimum of 5,000 copies every week is gimmicky or subpar. This is about why, to me, it is my favorite album.
To me, it strikes a personal chord. It has been an institution in my life. I remember hearing “Any Colour You Like” on my brother’s hi-fi while playing The Goonies on my Commodore 64. I remember the first time I ever took the record out of its sleeve, and that distinctive vinyl smell.
But it goes deeper than that. Dark Side of the Moon is about life: everyday, mundane, chaotic, bordering on madness. It has a universal appeal that may explain why it has been so successful. And to me, specifically, I see my life. It’s something that I don’t think I connected to when I was 16, or even 25. But as I approach thirty, all I hear is it screaming in my ear. It may help to know that Roger Waters was my age when he wrote it.
I am feeling today what Waters felt. I feel the anger and sorrow of needless conflict. I feel the overbearing pressure of being constantly on the run in modern life in pursuit of the root of all evil today – money. I am aware, and for lack of a better term, mortified of my imminent mortality. I wish I could grasp the very realistic and courageous philosophical view that “there’s no reason for [being afraid of dying]. We all got to go sometime.” And now more than ever, I experience the madness that our world forces us into.
“[When] you are young, life is long, and there is time to kill today,” Waters writes about life in your early twenties. “But 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 its sinking, and 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.” He writes from his life experience, realizing upon approaching thirty that he wasn’t in a dress rehearsal, that he was in the show, and that we had wasted all of that time waiting for his life to begin, when in reality, it was nearly already half over. Certainly, maybe everyone could, but I identify with that. For much of the last decade, I have sat around and waited for something to change. “I’ll go back to school,” I’d say. “I don’t need to write tonight; I’ll play Xbox instead,” I’d say. Well, its ten years later, and I haven’t done those things. I feel like I’ve missed the starting gun.
It’s truly a profound album. And because its themes are so universal, it would be hard not to find yourself in it. It only took me twenty years, a few hundred listens, and buying it no less than five times to discover, but better late then never. Now if I could only apply that philosophy to the rest of my life.