Take It Back

The conventional wisdom says Pink Floyd died when Roger Waters walked out the door. That everything after was Gilmour and a bunch of session guys playing dress-up in a stadium. The conventional wisdom is wrong.

The Division Bell came out in 1994, seventeen years after Animals, a lifetime after the band you remember. And “Take It Back” sounds nothing like “Comfortably Numb” or “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” It sounds like a pop song. A really good pop song. And that drove people crazy.

Here’s what Gilmour understood that the purists didn’t: accessibility isn’t compromise. You can write something with hooks and melodies, something that works on the radio between Soundgarden and Counting Crows, and still mean every note of it. The atmospheric Floyd textures are still there—they’re just in service of a song, not an hour-long journey into madness.

The environmental message could have been heavy-handed. It’s 1994, everyone’s worried about the ozone layer, bands are putting Save The Rainforest stickers on their guitars. But Gilmour keeps it personal. The “take it back” isn’t a lecture. It’s a plea. A wish that things could be undone.

His guitar solo is short. Fans complained. They wanted the five-minute odyssey, the weeping Stratocaster building to catharsis. What they got was concentrated essence—everything he wanted to say, distilled into thirty seconds. Not a word wasted.

Some bands know when to stop talking.