In 1973, Pink Floyd released one of the most iconic albums ever made: “The Dark Side of the Moon”. The album is the best-selling concept album of all time, with over 45 million copies sold worldwide. In this article, we will dive into the concept behind “The Dark Side of the Moon”, as well as the meaning behind every song on the album.
The Concept of The Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon was originally conceived as an album about the pressures of life – particularly that of a musician. But as the concept of the album developed, it broadened out to be about the human experience in general. The Dark Side of the Moon has an underlying theme of insanity and madness – caused by the pressures of life (time, greed, conflict, money, death) – and the album’s title can be seen as a metaphor for those underlying themes.
The idea behind the album came from Pink Floyd’s main conceptualist and lyricist Roger Waters (all the lyrics on the album were written by Waters). He proposed the concept during a meeting at drummer Nick Mason’s house. Mason, together with the other band members David Gilmour and Richard Wright, approved the idea. It was also Waters’ idea to connect the songs to make The Dark Side of the Moon a cohesive musical unit.
Let’s go over each track and explore their meaning and connection to the concept of the album.
Speak To Me
The Dark Side of the Moon opens with “Speak To Me”. The track is essentially a sound collage of elements heard later on the album. “Speak To Me” starts with a heartbeat (which can also be heard in the album’s final track “Eclipse”). In the album’s concept of being about the human experience, the heartbeat – and track – represents birth.
After the heartbeat, you hear ticking clocks (from “Time”), Cash registers (from “Money”), manic laughter (from “Brain Damage”), a helicopter (from “On the Run”), and a scream by Clare Torry (from “The Great Gig in the Sky”). They offer a snippet of what’s to come; album-wise and concept-wise.
“Speak To Me” also features two spoken phrases. Spoken phrases are heard throughout the entire album and were an idea from Roger Waters. “He wanted to use things in the songs to get responses from people,” Gilmour said in an interview. “We wrote a series of questions on cards and put them on a music stand, one question on each card, and got people into the studio and told them to read the first question and answer it.”
“Then they could remove that card and see the next question and answer that, but they couldn’t look through the cards so they didn’t really know what the thread of the questions was going to be until they got into it.”
Among the interviewees were Abbey Road staff members, roadies, and musicians. Paul and Linda McCartney were also interviewed, but their answers weren’t used.
Breathe
“Speak To Me” seamlessly transitions into The Dark Side of the Moon’s second track “Breathe” (sometimes titled “Breathe (In the Air)”). The track is the first proper song on the album and can be seen as a thematical continuation of “Speak To Me”: Birth.
The rest of “Breathe” can be interpreted as a piece of advice from a parent to a child to live life according to one’s own terms. “The lyrics are an exhortation directed mainly at myself, but also at anybody else who cares to listen. It’s about trying to be true to one’s path,” Roger Waters commented about the song.
On the Run
The Dark Side of The Moon’s third track “On the Run” was initially titled “The Travel Sequence”. The song thematically adheres to the original concept of the album: the pressures of life – particularly that of a musician. “On the Run” was inspired by the pressure of traveling, which especially impacted Pink Floyd’s keyboardist Richard Wright.
“For me, one of the pressures of being in the band was this constant fear of dying because of all the traveling we were doing in planes and on the motorways in America and in Europe,” Wright said in a 1998 interview with Mojo Magazine.
The anxiety-inducing sound of the song was recorded with a Synthi AKS synthesizer. “Everything you hear on that track, apart from the sound effects, was done live,” Engineer Alan Parsons commented. “It was all coming out of the Synthi A. Even the hi-hat over the top of it was done on that synth.”
Time
After “On the Run” comes one of The Dark Side of the Moon’s – and Pink Floyd’s – most celebrated tracks: “Time”. From its clock intro by Alan Parsons to the rototom drum solo by Nick Mason, from Gilmour and Wright’s shared lead vocals to Gilmour’s iconic guitar solo, “Time” is arguably the perfect Pink Floyd track.
But possibly the most outstanding feature of “Time” are Roger Waters’ lyrics. They express the inevitable pressure of time caused by our mortality, which most people neglect for most of their lives. In a documentary about the album, Roger Waters shared the inspiration behind the song. “I was 29 years old before I suddenly realized that this was life and it was happening and it was not a preparation for something. This was life happening now and one should grasp the nettle.”
At the end of the song, “Time” moves into a reprise of “Breathe” (the album’s second track). Roger Waters stated the verse, titled “Home Again”, was the third verse of “Breathe”, but was separated for structural reasons. Given the fact that the album’s third track “On the Run” is about the pressure of travel, it feels logical that the mellow “Home Again” verse of “Breathe” appears after “On the Run” instead of before.
Read more: The 10 Best Pink Floyd Songs of All Time
The Great Gig In the Sky
“The Great Gig In the Sky” closes side one of The Dark Side of the Moon. The song features lyricless vocals from guest vocalist Clare Torry, who improvised her iconic vocals over the track.
The track was initially titled “The Mortality Sequence” and is about death, which Clare Torry had to convey lyriclessly. The track’s title was eventually changed to “The Great Gig In the Sky”, which is a reference to heaven.
“The Great Gig In the Sky” is the end of side one of The Dark Side of the Moon. You could argue that side one is about birth and death, and that side two – which we will dive into next – discusses the pressures in between.
Money
Side two of The Dark Side of the Moon opens with “Money”. Despite its odd 7/4 time signature (used for most of the song), “Money” is probably the most accessible track on the album. The song was released as the album’s lead single and reached number 13 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
“Money” famously starts with a loop of money-associated sound effects. The sequence was created by Roger Waters and Nick Mason after Waters felt the album needed a track about “Money” – which is of course a major pressure in life.
“Roger and I constructed the tape loop for ‘Money’ in our home studios and then took it into Abbey Road,” Nick Mason wrote in his biography Inside Out. “I had drilled holes in old pennies and then threaded them onto strings; they gave one sound on the loop of seven. Roger had recorded coins swirling around in the mixing bowl Judy [his then-wife] used for her pottery, the tearing paper effect was created very simply in front of a microphone and the faithful sound library supplied the cash registers.”
“Money” criticized the evil nature of money, which ironically enough, would make the band members millions of dollars.
Us and Them
The seventh track on The Dark Side of the Moon is “Us and Them”. The song, composed by Richard Wright, was initially written for the movie Zabriskie Point. But director Michelangelo Antonioni rejected the track, which led Pink Floyd to use the song on The Dark Side of the Moon.
In an interview with Louder Sound, Roger Waters shared the meaning behind the poignant track. “The first verse is about going to war, how on the front line we don’t get much chance to communicate with one another, because someone else has decided that we shouldn’t. The second verse is about civil liberties, racism, and colour prejudice. The last verse is about passing a tramp in the street and not helping.”
Any Colour You Like
The eighth track on the album is the instrumental “Any Colour You Like”. According to Waters, he heard the phrase being used by porcelain sellers in Cambridge, where Waters lived. As part of their sales pitch, they’d say: “Any colour you like, they’re all blue.”
“So, metaphorically, ‘Any Colour You Like’ is interesting, in that sense, because it denotes offering a choice where there is none,” Roger Waters said in an interview with Phil Rose. “And it’s also interesting that in the phrase, ‘Any colour you like, they’re all blue,’ I don’t know why, but in my mind, it’s always ‘they’re all blue’, which, if you think about it, relates very much to the light and dark, sun and moon, good and evil. You make your choice but it’s always blue.”
Brian Damage
“Brain Damage/Eclipse” is the grand finale of The Dark Side of The Moon. Roger Waters stated that “Brian Damage” was inspired by former band member Syd Barrett, who left the band in 1968 due to his deteriorated mental health.
“When you see that happening to someone you’ve been very close friends with, and known more or less your whole life, it really concentrates the mind on how ephemeral one’s sensibilities and mental capacities can be,” Roger Waters told Rolling Stone. “That was certainly expressed in “Brain Damage.”
In the context of the album, you could argue the song conveys that the pressures discussed in the earlier songs have finally driven the narrator to ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ (insanity/madness).
Eclipse
“Brain Damage” seamlessly transitions into The Dark Side of the Moon’s final track: “Eclipse”. Pink Floyd even shortly considered naming the album “Eclipse”, after the band Medicine Head released an album titled Dark Side of the Moon in 1972. But the album failed commercially, which led Pink Floyd back to The Dark Side of the Moon.
“The album uses the sun and the moon as symbols; the light and the dark; the good and the bad; the life force as opposed to the death force,” Roger Waters stated. “I think it’s [Eclipse] a very simple statement saying that all the good things life can offer are there for us to grasp, but that the influence of some dark force in our natures prevents us from seizing them.”
The song famously ends with the statement: “There is no dark side in the moon really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.” The words were spoken by Abbey Road’s doorman Gerry O’Driscoll, who was part of the interviews performed by the band. O’Driscoll answered the phrase to the question “What is ‘the dark side of the moon’?”
The album ends like it starts; with a heartbeat. It represents the full circle of life.
Legacy
“The Dark Side of the Moon” became an immediate success upon its release. In the US, the album topped the album chart and reached gold certification within mere months. Over the years, “The Dark Side of the Moon” sold over 45 million copies worldwide and spent an astonishing 988 weeks on the US album chart, which is a record.
When asked about the success of the album in an interview with Chris Salewicz, Roger Waters replied: “It’s very well-balanced and well-constructed, dynamically and musically, and I think the humanity of its approach is appealing. It’s satisfying. I think also that it was the first album of that kind. I think it was probably the first completely cohesive album that was made. A concept album, mate! I always thought it would be hugely successful.”
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