"Wish You Were Here" is the title track on Pink Floyd's 1975 album Wish You Were Here. David Gilmour and Roger Waters collaborated to write the music, and Gilmour sang the lead vocals on the track. In 2011, the song was ranked Number 324 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In the original album version, the song segues from "Have a Cigar" as if a radio had been turned away from one station, through several others (including a radio play and one playing the opening of the finale movement of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony), and finally to a new station where "Wish You Were Here" is beginning.
Gilmour performed the famous introduction on a twelve-string guitar, processed to sound like it was playing through an AM radio, and then overdubbed a fuller-sounding acoustic guitar solo. This passage was mixed to sound as though a guitarist were listening to the radio and playing along on top of the progression. As the acoustic part becomes more complex, the 'radio broadcast' fades away and Gilmour's voice enters, while the rest of the band joins in. The intro riff is repeated several times before Gilmour plays further solos and a third verse follows, featuring an increasingly expressive vocal from Gilmour and audible backing vocals. At the end of the recorded song, the final solo crossfades with wind sound effects, and finally segues into the second section of the multi-part suite "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".
While it never achieved mainstream success in the United States, "Wish You Were Here" is one of those songs that isn't necessarily appreciated in the moment, but is only recognized as musical brilliance several decades after its initial release. The album Wish You Were Here, like the record that precedes it, is a concept album. Revolving around the central theme of absence, the lyrics throughout the album demonstrated the difference between the groups early years - when Pink Floyd was a band of brothers, making music for a small but devoted audience - and the present. The guys had become multi-millionaires in the was of The Dark Side of the Moon's success, but they'd also become cash cows for a corporate label, and the camaraderie that once existed between them had become strained.
Written essentially for Syd Barrett, former founder of Pink Floyd who was ousted from the band amid speculation of mental illness and his excessive use of psychedelic drugs. It has been famously mentioned that Pink Floyd's creativity levels had tanked following the massive success of Dark Side, and rightfully so. I mean, can anyone ever match the creativity of that album? Not even Pink Floyd could. If you think about it, "Wish You Were Here" could be both talking about the lost musician, and also the band itself as many people were left wondering where Pink Floyd went and that we all 'wished they were here'.
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