Recently, I had Pink Floyd on the brain and I got to thinking about the evolution of the band’s sound. 

From their psychedelic beginnings with the brilliant and tortured Syd Barrett at the helm, to the war and death-influenced heyday of ‘The Wall’ with Roger Waters setting the controls, the pre-eminent theme with Floyd’s tuneage has always been ‘mood’. 

I find that the album that often gets lost in the mix is 1971’s ‘Meddle’. Now there’s no shortage of Floyd classics from the ‘Dark Side/Wish/Wall’ juggernaut. But ‘Meddle’ is rarely mentioned in the same breath as those seminal albums. 

Part of the reason why, at least in my opinion, is that ‘Meddle’ is four filler tunes sandwiched between two terrific ones. Upon listening it more closely, however, ‘Meddle’ is the disc that perfectly segues from their former LSD-fueled freak-out incarnation into mainstream rock immortality. And no song better exemplifies that transition better than the 24-minute opus, ‘Echoes’. I don’t throw the adjective ‘epic’ around very often, but this song most definitely qualifies. 

This was always my favorite version of ‘Echoes’, from ‘Live at Pompeii’. Enjoy!