3 Pink Floyd Songs That Sound Like Descending Into Madness (In a Really Poetic Way)

Pink Floyd has a way of catching their listeners off guard while also looking deeply into their souls at the same time. Here are three of the wackiest songs from the group. Surprisingly, they’ve got some lyrical content even Shakespeare could be jealous of.

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“One Of My Turns”

At the beginning of “One Of My Turns”, a song off 1979’s The Wall, the listener gets a play-by-play of the made-up character Pink inviting a rock groupie into his home. Once you get to the singing portion of the song, though, it becomes more than just a creepy track with an organ underneath it.

“Day after day, love turns grey / Like the skin of a dying man / And night after night, we pretend it’s all right /, But I have grown older and / You have grown colder and / Nothing is very much fun anymore / And I can feel one of my turns coming on.”

In a sudden turn of events, Roger Waters’ voice reveals that “One Of My Turns” is about so much more. It’s about the mundanity of everyday life and the harsh realities we face as we run out of time. In addition to his own madness, of course.

“A New Machine, Pt. 1”

“A New Machine, Pt. 1” appears on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, along with “A New Machine, Pt. 2”, of course. If you listen to the lyrics, which are spaced out between synth sounds, it feels like the “machine” is talking to you.

I have always been here
I have always looked out from behind these eyes
It feels like more than a lifetime
Feels like more than a lifetime
Sometimes I get tired of the waiting
Sometimes I get tired of being in here
Is this the way it has always been?
Could it ever have been different?

In combination with the track’s unique production, this set of lyrics feels like a metaphor for something more. We might be talking about machines, but it feels like a glimpse into the darker parts of the human experience.

“Echoes”

Yeah, this one is pretty insane. Not only is “Echoes” by Pink Floyd a whopping 23 minutes long, but it starts with a weird, high-pitched piano sound that feels a little like mind torture. As Waters said in an interview, this song was supposed to be about “The potential that human beings have for recognizing each other’s humanity and responding to it, with empathy rather than antipathy.”

You can totally see that in the lyrics, which reference “strangers passing in the street” who “by chance, two separate glances meet.”

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