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.”

Journal Entry: Wish You Were Here

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 things that probably aren't as far apart as they first seem.

That was about as far as I'd thought it through.

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

I was listening to my childhood.

Not even the big memories. Those are surprisingly unreliable. It's the ordinary stuff that seems to hang around.

Music coming from another room while I was doing something else. Albums playing in the car that I was probably too young to understand. Songs becoming familiar long before I knew what they were called or what they were about.

They were just there.

I think that's one of the strange things about being a kid. You don't have any idea what is going to matter later. You don't know which bits you're going to remember and which bits will just disappear. You're not really choosing anything. Things just happen around you and you absorb them.

Then years go by and something comes back.

A few notes or a sound and suddenly you're not remembering an event exactly, you're remembering what it felt like to be that version of yourself.

I ended up watching The Wall again while I was making this. I haven't seen it for years.

As a kid it mostly confused me. It was unsettling and I couldn't really explain why. It felt like I'd walked into a conversation I wasn't old enough to understand.

Watching it now was different.

I still don't think I understand all of it. I just recognised things in it that I couldn't have recognised when I was younger.

Or maybe they were always there and I just hadn't lived enough yet.

I've been thinking about time a bit differently recently too. Not in some big existential 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 are going to be there forever. 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 weird thought that there won't be an infinite number of these.

I don't remember exactly when I first had that thought. I just remember it being there. Then the music starts and everyone's in it. People talking, people cheering, whatever song is playing, and everything is completely normal.

But you notice the moment differently.

Nothing has happened. That's the strange bit. Nothing has happened at all.

You just suddenly know that one day there will be a last one and you won't know it is the last one when you're standing there. I don't really like thinking about that.

Hopefully there are loads more. Hopefully I'm worrying about something completely unnecessarily and years from now I'll read this and think I was being ridiculous. I'd be very happy to be wrong.

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

And I think that was somewhere in my head while I was making this. I've realised over the years that music is probably how I remember more of my life than anything else. I can't remember dates for shit. Birthdays, conversations, what I was supposed to be doing five minutes ago. My wife can attest to that.

Places blur together. Whole years seem to disappear into each other.

But I'll hear something and suddenly I know where I was. Or who I was with. Sometimes I don't even remember the actual thing that happened. I just remember the music that was there and how I felt when I heard it.

It's weird.

A song can somehow keep a version of you alive that doesn't really exist anymore.

That's probably part of why I've ended up making these chapters.

I think I've been building some sort of archive without really knowing I was doing it.

I don't listen to Pink Floyd all the time. I don't think I've ever been that person who has a Pink Floyd record on every week. But I love it, and every now and then I'll drift back into it.

I never really know why. And every time I do, the records seem to carry more than the music itself. Long drives. Evenings at home. My mum and my dad. Music playing somewhere in the background. Different versions of them at different points in their life. Different versions of me that don't exist anymore either.

It's amazing what gets attached to a song without you ever deciding to attach it.

There was a point while I was making this where I realised I was worrying too much about whether I was making it clever. Was the reference too obvious? Was the transition good enough? Was I actually doing anything interesting with the original music or was I just putting things together because I liked them?

And eventually I just thought, leave it, let it go...

I stopped worrying about it.

Because the more I worked on it, the more obvious it became that this wasn't really about making Pink Floyd work inside a different kind of music. It was about the fact that some of that music was already in me.

My mum & dad listened to it.

I grew up around it.

Then I went off and found all this other music for myself and somewhere along the way the two things just became mixed together.

I don't think I can separate them anymore.

And I'm not sure I'd want to.

I don't know how many more concerts my dad and I will go to together. Hopefully loads.

Hopefully when I read this again in ten or twenty years or so, if i’m lucky, I'll wonder why the hell I was thinking about it.

But I know I'll remember the music and the feelings and memories attached to it.

Maybe not the exact evening I made this. Probably not.

But if I hear it again years from now, I think I'll remember where my head was. I'll remember Pink Floyd. I'll remember my parents. And maybe that's all I was really doing without realising it.

Trying to keep hold of something while I was still actually living it.

Something to think about anyway.