“Wish You Were Here” opens with a riff that sounds as though it’s from an old recording, crackling out of a weathered car radio. Then the cleaner tones of an acoustic guitar emerge on the track, playing along with that A.M. sound. The interplay between the two conjures the image of a man listening to those sounds from long ago and trying to complement them in the present day. From the very beginning of the track, before a single lyric is uttered, “Wish You Were Here” evokes a sense of reflection, of lingering on something lost that the musician’s trying to recreate, recall, and summon once more back into the here and now.
That is the crux of Pink Floyd’s arguably most famous song — the combination of what was and what is and the contemplation of where you are in relation to where you used to be. The title track off the band’s seminal 1975 release, “Wish You Were Here” is rooted in a specific event and specific figure in the group’s past, one who seems to symbolize the turning point from when the band was young and hungry to when its members became part of the rock and roll machine, wondering how they had arrived at that point and how much it had changed them.
