A Year of Music

Just to give you an idea of what it’s like to work at Rhapsody, there was a time last year where a bunch of us were hanging out in the kitchen: a mustachioed QA contractor whose tastes seemed to have frozen sometime around 1977, one of the senior editors, and a couple of engineers (including me). I think it was probably the tail-end of a company meeting. Anyway, we were talking about psychedelic music, and – as it does – the conversation turned to Pink Floyd, and Dark Side of the Moon. Some of us got to wondering who did the ridiculously overblown female backing vocals, and not one or two but three of the people in the conversation were able to name both Clare Torry and Lesley Duncan without looking anything up (unlike me just now). I have a lot of random trivia crammed in my head, but I can’t get at it like that; it’s all connected sideways, and I have to get at it indirectly. Also, I just like listening to Dark Side of the Moon, and feel mild twinges of jealousy that my dad got to see it performed live.

Stuck in my head this morning: “Matilda Mother” by The Pink Floyd. The way the song begins, with a gentle organ fade-in and a slow build into song-ness, is a lot like the process of waking up. Of course, the song is also full of half-submerged mommy issues, so take from that what you will.

Speaking of The Pink Floyd and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the remastered 40th anniversary re-release of that album has been out for a while, in a couple of different editions. There’s a 2-CD version with both the stereo and mono mixes of the album, and a 3-CD deluxe hyper über version that appends a disc of semi-rarities, as well as a bulky clothbound book-like package that contains excerpts from one of Syd Barrett’s notebooks. The logic of all this is suspect; there have got to be far more people interested in unreleased material from Barrett-era Floyd than there are audio geeks who want to compare the two mixdowns, and the rarities themselves could stand to be more rare. If you’re inclined to pick one or the other up, get the three-disc version; the packaging is fairly gratuitous, but you also get “Arnold Layne” and the original, much weirder version of “Matilda Mother”, which had to be withdrawn because it *cough* stole its lyrics from a children’s poem by Hilaire Belloc.