Wish You Were Here

“You don't consciously decide that the important people in your life will always be there. You just live as though they will.”

I don't think I realised what I was making until it was almost finished.

At first I thought I was just building another session. I had this loose idea of taking pieces of Pink Floyd and letting them exist somewhere closer to the music I naturally disappear into now. Less a remix, more a conversation between two worlds that probably aren't as different as they first appear.

That seemed like enough of an explanation at the time.

Then somewhere along the way I noticed I wasn't really listening to Pink Floyd anymore.

I was listening to my childhood.

Not the big memories. Those are surprisingly unreliable. It's the ordinary ones that seem to stay.

Music drifting in from another room while I was doing something completely unrelated. Albums playing in the car that I was far too young to understand. Songs becoming familiar long before I knew what they were called or what they were trying to say.

They were just always there.

I think that's one of the strange things about being a child. You don't really know what is going to matter later. Things just happen around you and you absorb them without thinking about it.

Then years pass and something comes back; a few notes, a particular sound. And suddenly you aren't remembering an event, you're remembering what it felt like to be that version of yourself.

I found myself watching “The Wall” the original film again while this session was taking shape. As a kid it mostly confused me. It felt unsettling in a way I couldn't explain, like I'd walked into a conversation I wasn't old enough to understand. Watching it now was different. I didn't suddenly understand everything. I just recognised things in it that I couldn't have recognised when I was younger. Or maybe they were always there, maybe I just hadn't lived enough yet?

I've been thinking about time differently recently. Not in an anxious way. Just enough to notice it.

When you're younger, you don't really think about people leaving. You don't consciously decide that the important people in your life will always be there. You just live as though they will.

You build your world around that assumption.

Then one day you're standing next to your dad at another concert and you have this strange thought that there won't be an infinite number of these.

I don't remember exactly when I first had it. I just remember it being there. Then the music starts, everyones in the moment. People are talking and cheering. Nothing is wrong exactly, but you notice the moment differently.

Not because anything has happened, because it hasnt. But because one day it will.

I think that is what this session became.

Not grief. Not really nostalgia either. Something closer to wanting to hold onto a moment while I'm still inside it.

I've realised that music has always been how I remember parts of my life. I struggle to remember dates, birthdays, or even things that were said 2 minutes ago (my wife can attest to that). Places blur together. Whole years seem to disappear into one another.

But I can hear a piece of music and suddenly know where I was, or who I was, or who I was with. Sometimes I don't even remember the actual event. I remember the music that was there and how it made me feel in that moment.

It's strange how songs seem to keep versions of us alive that we thought had disappeared.

Maybe that's part of why I started making these chapters.

Maybe I've been building an archive without really knowing I was doing it.

I don't actually listen to Pink Floyd very often. Not because I don't love the music. Maybe because I do. I will drift in to it from time to time, I can’t even predict when that will be or even why maybe.

Every time I come back to those records they seem to carry more than the songs themselves. Long drives. Evenings at home. Music playing somewhere in the background. Versions of my dad that existed at certain points in his life. Versions of me that don't exist anymore, at least not literally.

It's amazing how much a piece of music can carry without saying anything about it.

There was a point while I was recording this where I stopped worrying about whether I was making the session clever. I'd been thinking about transitions and arrangements and whether the references were too obvious or not obvious enough.

Eventually I stopped caring.

This wasn't really about making Pink Floyd work inside a different kind of music.

It was about recognising where some of the music I love came from. Somewhere along the way, the things my dad listened to became part of me.

The music I listen to now has traces of those things in it whether I intended that or not.

I don't think I can separate them anymore.

And maybe I don't want to.

This session sits somewhere in that space.

Between what I was given and what I've become. Between the music I grew up with and the music I found for myself. Between then and now.

I don't know how many more concerts my dad and I will go to together. Hopefully more than I'm imagining. Hopefully enough that when I read this again, I'll wonder why I was worrying about it.

I'd be very happy to be wrong.

But I don't think I can un-know it now.

The ordinary moments don't last forever. That's probably why they matter. This session is one of those moments. I don't know whether I'll remember the exact evening this was recorded years from now.

I probably won't. But I know I'll remember the music.

And if I hear it again when I'm older, maybe I'll remember this version of me standing beside my dad, listening to music we somehow both ended up carrying.

I think that's what I wanted to keep.

Not the past.

Just this moment, now. Before it becomes the past.