Today I’m listening to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (the album and the song) and I’m remembering the first time I really listened to it. I took the train from Seattle to Los Angeles and I had the cassette so I listened to it on my walkman. I listened to it over and over, hearing nuances I’d missed so many times before and that’s when I fell in love with Pink Floyd and most notably with Roger Waters’ brain and talent.

The album is not a casual listen, it’s one of those things I put on when I want to listen to music, not just have it in the background but as I have the LP and the cassette which long died, I bought it recently from iTunes and it came up and I stopped to just *listen* which doesn’t happen often in my life.

The first time my husband told me he loved me was on a Saturday night, we’d been to Mexico that same night in our friend’s car that threatened to blow up the whole ride up and back, LOL. Anyway, we were in his room, drinking coronas and this record was on. The song Wish You Were Here came on and we were alone for a few moments (imagine a house full of 18 year old boys, not much alone time) and he told me he loved me.

We traveled to Eastern Europe in college and a busker played this on a castle rampart in Budapest. We danced to it, in the middle of the day, under the vivid blue sky.

To this day I won’t exchange my heroes for ghosts.

It’s a cynical album. Here they’ve reached the heights they aspired to the whole of their lives and the negatives had set in. Infighting, jealousy, the band was falling apart and yet, I think this record is amazing, far more so than anything they created without Waters later on and frankly, even though I love Roger Waters, better than anything he’s created solo. The creative process fascinates me, the sorts of dynamics that drive people to make art together and how outside stresses can bleed in and yet make the product amazing.

Anyway, it’s just a gem of a piece and something I’d forgotten the intensity of and here it is playing as I write my futuristic.