12 Pink Floyd songs that capture the band perfectly

“Echoes” from Meddle (1971)

Floyd’s fourth album, Ummagumma, has its fans. It began to carve a more distinct path in the aftermath of Barrett’s departure that would come to fruition some years later. But Ummagumma is also something of an “everything including the kitchen sink” collection of musical impulses.

Two albums later, on Meddle, the band was presenting a clearer picture of where it was going. The massive, improvisational epic “Echoes” was a clarion call. It runs the entire second side of the album, way past the 20-minute mark. And it shows off everyone and everything the band was at the time.

Like several of the other tracks on Meddle, the songwriting was credited to all four members of the band. Gilmour and Wright take turns as the dominant musical voice, while Waters and Mason provide the sturdy floor they dance above. Waters wrote lyrics which drop in and out in the same way the various instruments do.

After about eleven minutes of hard-driving psychedelic rock, the mood shifts into a much more atmospheric phase, with Mason wrenching sounds from his keys that could serve as the soundtrack to a sci-fi horror film. A few minutes later, we move into yet another stage, with Waters’ bass ushering in a jazzier excursion which will return us to the lyrics of the song, in a verse that foreshadows the groundbreaking songs that would show up within the next few years.

“Wot’s … Uh the Deal?” from Obscured by Clouds (1972)

After the epic scope of “Echoes,” “Wot’s… Uh the Deal?” is positively tame, and to some fans, a bit pedestrian. But it showed that Floyd was entirely capable of creating softer, more sentimental songs without losing their special trippy sheen.

Obscured by Clouds was the second of two soundtrack albums the band created for Barbet Schroeder films, and neither album is all that close to their more coherent works that were conceived of as albums and not as soundtracks. But Obscured…and More (an earlier soundtrack album) have their moments.

“Wot’s...Uh the Deal?” features Gilmour singing and playing acoustic guitar while Wright plays a rather traditional piano part. Waters wrote the lyrics, and in many ways, this foreshadows the great acoustic numbers that would be sprinkled into the next run of alums. Though not as sophisticated as they had been, or would become, this is as sweet as Pink Floyd would ever get.