283. Song No. 4,281: “Have a Cigar,” Pink Floyd
Wish You Were Here, 1975

I’m honestly shocked it’s taken almost four years and more than 300 entries to finally arrive at my first Pink Floyd post, especially considering how much I have loved this band since the earliest days of figuring out my musical taste. I could claim so many of their albums as my favorites over the years: While I tend to flit among Meddle, Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Animals the most, Wish You Were Here was the first one I claimed as eminently special to me decades after its release and with the all-consuming energy of a teenage heart already getting familiar with the sense that time is just a long-con personal attack.

Loving this album all throughout the years I adopted my taste in music as a personality trait demanding constant cultivation means it is drenched in a lifetime of ambling through an exhaustive emotional spectrum. This album-art poster with the infinitely taped and retaped corners had a highly visible place of honor all over my childhood bedroom, moving across the planes of those four walls until, in an unintentional nod to a already-complex relationship with the person to whom I begrudgingly attribute my foundational fondness for classic rock, it started hiding a hole my now-estranged father punched into said bedroom’s door the first time Teenage Me had the audacity to stand up for myself. But it’s also the first album I played as my newly minted husband and I made the seven-hour drive to our honeymoon destination because a fondness for ’60s- and ’70s-era rock is one of the few overlaps in our listening habits, and it’s been a shared touchstone I’ve used as conversational ingress points throughout my nearly 20-year career filled with coworkers older than me. For someone who started life as a music lover by approaching “my” contemporary bands with a haughtily gatekeeping indie-snob possessiveness because no one else knew how to love my music the right way, the countless different ways I’ve found a shared affinity for Pink Floyd in the weirdest places certainly helped me understand that it’s actually a lot more fun to, instead, regard favorite bands as built-in common ground.

Wish You Were Here‘s titular track is obviously the shiniest diamond in this five-song/44-minute album that’s ruled mostly by an undeniable fondness for former frontman Syd Barrett as his mental health continued to decline, but also a distinctly defined distrust in a soulless machine treating music—and the people creating it—like monetized commodities; that dichotomy between the warmth with which the lyrics sing of Syd and a sneering awareness of what it means to make a living on your art is a unifying force tearing through this album, highlighting the good and the bad of making your talent your capital, recognizing the people who make the ride feel less like a transactional one, and balancing the humanity of creation with the greed of the corporation selling it. “Have a Cigar,” itself is a sparklingly cynical takedown of an industry ruled by insatiable fat cats, stands out for its world-class symbolism, spot-on recreation of professional cliches designed to lure enchanted young talent and flawlessly executed delivery of the woefully out-of-touch “By the way, which one’s Pink?” that is just cool and sleazily charming and has a killer sound meriting a tip of the hat to (Roy) Harper.