Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Syd Barrett founded Pink Floyd. He wrote their early hits, named the band, defined their original psychedelic sound. Then his mind broke—acid, schizophrenia, some combination nobody could untangle—and by 1968 he was gone. The band kept going. They became one of the biggest rock acts in the world. And in 1975, they finally wrote him a letter.

“Shine On You Crazy Diamond” stretches across both sides of Wish You Were Here, twenty-six minutes of elegy bookending an album about absence. The first four notes spell out Syd’s name in the key of B-A-D-D. Nobody told the band this. They discovered it later. Some things write themselves.

Gilmour’s guitar enters slowly, bending notes like questions that don’t have answers. For several minutes, there’s no urgency—just space, just grief spreading out to fill whatever room you’re in. When Waters finally sings, his voice is quiet. “Remember when you were young? You shone like the sun.” Past tense. Already gone.

The strangest part of the story: while they were recording this album, a fat, bald man wandered into the studio. Nobody recognized him at first. It was Syd. He’d shaved his eyebrows. He’d gained so much weight he looked like a different person. He sat and watched them record a song about losing him, and they couldn’t tell if he understood.

Nobody knows for sure. He left and never came back. Died in 2006, having spent thirty years alone in his mother’s house, painting paintings nobody saw. The crazy diamond had stopped shining decades before.

Some goodbyes take a long time to say. This one takes twenty-six minutes, and it still doesn’t feel like enough.