Music of the Day, 18 May 2024

a small regret you won't forget

Last night, I lived a meme. Looking forward to a good night’s sleep after a stressful week, I was in bed before 9:30. But as soon as I switched the light off, my mind switched on and went into full perseveration mode. A panoply of minor incidents and major regrets paraded through my mind until I got up around midnight to take an antihistamine/sleep aid. While I did get to sleep shortly after that, the perseveration seems to have persisted in dreams… and an insistent, half-recognized drum melody punctuated them.

Waking this morning at my usual time,¹ work delayed me from browsing my Pink Floyd collection to identify the song. Reading the album title—which is drawn from today’s MotD—was all it took to fall down the hole.

“One Slip” was the fourth US single² from Pink Floyd’s 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason, its first without songwriter-bassist Roger Waters. I remember thinking at the time that the album was something of a return to Pink Floyd’s early, more atmospheric sound, with an unmistakable ‘80s feel too. I was quite familiar with the song by the time it was released as a single, as I’d been given the disc just after it came out and had listened to it often. My brother and I also saw Pink Floyd in concert on this tour, at a show that for me was memorable more for the negatives surrounding it than the excellent music.

If you’re a regular reader, you know this refrain: headphones or earbuds are a must to catch all its nuances, especially in the slow-building intro of “One Slip.” The heavily syncopated percussion melody (by Nick Mason and Jim Keitner) during the intro is what my mind was imperfectly playing as I slept. I recall always liking the music better than the lyrics; it’s complex and luscious. The lyrics, while not directly relevant to specific events in my life, hit too close for comfort in other ways: ruminating on decision points; and wondering how one seemingly inconsequential decision or encounter might have changed the course of my life. No wonder “One Slip” came to mind last night.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason has unfortunately been linked to one of the worst periods in my life so far: my mother’s diagnosis of brain cancer a month prior to the album’s release; my race to complete at least my master’s degree before she died;³ the immediate push to start preparing for my qualifying exams⁴ to become a doctoral candidate; an utter betrayal of my trust by a grad-school friend; and my mother’s impending death around the time of the concert.⁵ I can no longer listen to any of it without my sympathetic division going into overdrive. Listening to “One Slip” just three times while composing this piece has given me an attack of anxiety. I’m quite sad about that, because I would like to be able to enjoy the album again, but I’m unable to make myself do the work necessary to become desensitized.

Is anyone else like this? Do you have great music that you simply can’t listen to because of painful or other negative connections to it?

Fortunately, and thanks once again to

Ian Sharp

, I have an antidote to hand: after listening to “All Hail Skull” by sleepmakeswaves from this week’s edition of Gems, I found a playlist of the entire album and enjoyed it. I’ll be returning to it now and expect it to become a go-to soundtrack for when I’m working.

1. so I got even less sleep than usual. Brilliant.

2. third single in the UK; and it was originally the B-side to “Learning to Fly”

3. which I did accomplish, but not before the cancer ravaged her mind so much that we couldn’t tell if she understood anything we told her

4. by far the most difficult element of grad school

5. she died three weeks later