The Anxiety That Inspired Roger Waters To Write “Time” by Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd’s classic “Time” opens with the sound of ticking clocks and clanging alarm bells. If it makes you feel anxious, that’s the point. It’s exactly how Roger Waters felt when he wrote the lyrics.

The track features guitarist David Gilmour and keyboardist Richard Wright on lead vocals. It appears on The Dark Side Of The Moon, a masterpiece defined by unease. This is Pink Floyd continuing further into its post-Syd Barrett chapter.

The Moments That Make Up a Dull Day

Waters, then only 29, was struck by the quick passage of time. Instead of spending his life making plans, he now found himself simply existing.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day,
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown,
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

As a young man, he had an entire life ahead of him. But he couldn’t help feeling like whatever future event he had planned for had already come and gone.

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain,
And you are young, and life is long, and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you,
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

Another Year Around the Sun

Earth keeps revolving, and the years pass like a persistent clock, pushing toward old age and, eventually, nudging us out of existence. We feel age; we fight against it, but we know it’s a lost cause. As Thom Yorke put it in “Fake Plastic Trees”: gravity always wins.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking,
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.

Instead of seeming like a burden, Waters writes about keeping despair to himself. But as years accumulate, we perceive years as accelerated time. Now, it takes up larger chunks of our existence as opposed to our younger years, when things felt as though they moved at a snail’s pace.

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time,
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines.
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say.

Photo by Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images