David Gilmour understood early on in Pink Floyd the importance of collaboration. He was never comfortable being a songwriter first, and his best moments came when he sang Roger Waters’s brilliant lyrics. But he had a few reservations when some of his lines didn’t roll off the tongue nicely.
For all of the great Floyd tunes he had a hand in, though, Gilmour doesn’t get nearly the amount of credit he deserves as a vocalist. It’s easy to forget about his vocals when he does a lot of speaking with his guitar, but compared to the strange cadence that Waters always had during his prime, hearing Gilmour’s gentle voice on ‘Comfortably Numb’ is one of the best moments on The Wall, and with all due respect to Waters, there was no way he could have sang ‘Money’ like Gilmour did.
There was always bound to come a time when they would reach an impasse, though. The Final Cut was already a contentious album to make, but as early as Dark Side of the Moon, Waters could feel that the magic that all four of them had together had started to slip away when Wish You Were Here officially began. Still, it helped that Waters had grand visions for where to take some of their albums.
Despite The Final Cut being a bit of a mess, it’s still a concise statement from Waters most of the time, and as much as the band had tension in the studio making Wish You Were Here, it’s hard to imagine anyone having a problem with any piece of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ when those four magical guitar notes creep into the mix. If that magic worked, though, Animals was a much different beast.
The makings of songs like ‘Dogs’ had already existed during the Wish You Were Here sessions before being nixed by Waters, but even when the next album started, Gilmour had a problem getting all of the words right to the original version ‘You Gotta Be Crazy’, saying, “The first lot Roger wrote for ‘Dogs’, were just too many words to sing. But most of the ideas were ideas I felt good about, and encapsulated a lot of the thinking that I had as well. I often wished I had been able to express them as well as he did.”
In fact, there are a few bootleg recordings when the band are woodshedding the material where Gilmour sounds unsure of himself. The whole thing is admittedly a little bit faster than the one that ended up on the album, and since it’s in E minor instead of D minor, you can tell that Gilmour is straining a little bit when he isn’t already out of breath racing to the following line of lyrics.
But by paring things down, the simplicity of each line can sink in a little more. Since Waters was telling the story of corporate entities that try their best to exploit those at the bottom, hearing lines about the modern version of dogs wearing a certain look in their eye and an easy smile before going after their prey is a far more intimidating lyric.
Even if the rest of the band are playing a bit sparsely compared to their earlier work, it ends up working pretty well in this instance. Pink Floyd had always been about creating a mood with their music ever since the Syd Barrett days, and while the album isn’t home to the kind of mind-bending guitar solos everyone fawns over, it does the exact job Waters wanted it to do. Animals might not get the same kind of accolades as Dark Side of the Moon, but songs like this deserve to be celebrated as much as their epic classics.
