Can someone explain the meaning of the lyrics to "Comfortably Numb?"

[Floogeldy]

Live 8 led me to rediscover this song. I wore out my copy of The Wall when it first came out. My interest is renewed and I've been playing it every day. What a fantastic song!

My thoughts are that the lyrics include a musician who gets an injection of something to help him perform, coupled with his random thoughts in a following dream state, reflecting some detachment or loss of extreme emotions.

But I could be totally wrong.

What do you think?

B-)

[Kikosexy2]

1. You're right...

on the money! Drugs and rock'n roll.

'

[Catch22Dem]

2. I always thought they were about Syd Barrett

By the way, I read somewhere that PF music was selling like hot cakes all week. :D Rock on!!!

[freeplessinseattle]

4. and they're donating all the profits! I looove PF!! n/t

[justinsb]

3. You've pretty much got it

detachment or being 'numb' as al alternative to feeling anything.

[BeyondGeography]

5. Numb to a fallen world

Numb to the mind-numbing nature of it all. If the lyrics aren't enough, there's more pain in that guitar solo than any one human being should be able to produce.

One of the best R&R songs ever, IMHO.

[Dudley_DUright]

6. I don't know what the lyrics mean

but have have been working on David Gilmore's solo on that tune for months. Every time I try to play it, my hands feel like two balloons. ;-)

[tridim]

15. Which one?

There are really two solos. A happy one and an evil one. I like the evil (second) solo the best, but the opening to the first one is just amazing.

[Dudley_DUright]

23. Both

Due to inspiration from this thread, I just had a go at them again and got as close as I ever had to getting them right. I mostly play blues solos, so a key of B major solo is not easy for me. I agree that the beginning of the first solo is the most dramatic part, followed by the high part in the second solo (which runs right up to the top note (D) on my stratocaster).

[tridim]

24. Hehe.. I'm doing the same thing

I have to learn them now. :) I'm not really a good lead guitar player (I mostly play rhythm), and I'm much more comfortable with scales on the mandolin and violin, but I'll still try.

[Dudley_DUright]

25. I have a mandolin that I play once in awhile

which would help me if I ever take up the fiddle (*sigh* someday). I also have a banjo that I try to play once and awhile, but I am mostly an electric blues lead player.

[tridim]

33. I quit fiddle lessons at 16, but still know enough to be dangerous

I can play the Orange Blossom Special, complete with pseudo train whistle sounds. :) I was *this close* to selling my fiddle back then to buy a synthesizer, I'm so glad I didn't.

It was a bonus to eventually figure out that the mando is just a fiddle with a fret board. I picked it up really fast after learning how to pick on both the up and down stroke.

[Dudley_DUright]

34. I am hoping the transition will be easy the other way also

However, I have tried bowing a violin before (I teach a course on the science of music), and I am not very good at it. I mostly get screeches out of the strings.

[dbonds]

26. On these solo's remember that the vibrato is from the bar.

I used to try to do it with my left hand, but you have to be incredibly fast, accurate, and strong to keep that up.

[Dudley_DUright]

27. Thanks

I was doing it all with the left hand too.

[tridim]

32. Good to know.. I don't have a whammy bar on my Martin

Oh well. Bending strings is more fun anyway. :)

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

7. Might be a nit-pick

but I think 'comfortably numb' is on the Dark Side of the Moon lp?
In any case, I thought it was about escaping the dull, dreary, terrible, inhumane way of life so many of us live, either all the time, or on occasion......

Edit- My bad---thinking of Us and Them on Dark Side.....

[Dudley_DUright]

11. Nope

Definitely from "The Wall"

http://www.pinkfloydonline.com/discography/thewall.html

[tridim]

8. When I was a child, I had a fever.

My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I've got that feeling once again.
I can't explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.

I have become comfortably numb.

...

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying.

...

When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look, but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child has grown, the dream is gone.

I have become comfortably numb.

Lots of people take drugs to feel like they felt as a child. That's what the song is about. Not many songs about drugs give me chills however. It's special.

[Dudley_DUright]

14. Interesting quote from David Gilmore

David Gilmour: "I still think some of the music is incredibly naff, but The Wall is conceptually brilliant. At the time I thought it was
Roger listing all the things that can turn a person into an isolated
human being. I came to see it as as one of the luckiest people in the
world issuing a catalogue of abuse and bile against people who'd never
done anything to him. Roger was taking more and more of the credits. In
the songbook for this album against Comfortably Numb it says Music
by Gilmour and Waters. It shouldn't. He did the lyrics. I did the
music. I kept finding hundreds of little things like that. Shouldn't
bitch, but one does feel unjustly done."

more...

http://www.pinkfloydonline.com/discography/thewall.html

[sundog]

9. heroin

that's what i thought... but it could be taken on other levels for anyone who has shut down part of their soul

[jobycom]

10. I think it has more to do with the Wall he has built

around his emotions. Because of his life, he's gotten used to numbing his emotions, so that he doesn't experience pain. The downside is he doesn't experience positive emotions, or form attachmentst to loved ones. When his wife cheats, he feels nothing, but she cheats because he felt nothing in the first place. He's numbed himself so he can remain comfortable, never feeling the pain, never feeling the pleasure.

"Is there anybody in there" is asking if he's even alive, if there's anyone even inside him anymore who can respond to anything.

Sure, drugs can bring this on, but he takes the drugs to create the numbness.

That's how I always took it.

[ET Awful]

16. Yup, the Wall (including Comfortably Numb) has little to do with drugs

but has everything to do with mental anguish and alienation.

Much of the feeling on that album is a musical document of a downard spiral into depression.

Much of the thought process came from a dislike of the fans who could care less about the band themselves but were there for the show and the spectacle.

In the context of the overall story of the album, at this point (my belief is that it is as a result of a mental breakdown of sorts), Pink has locked himself in his hotel room. The pinprick mentioned isn't heroin or any numbing narcotic, but is something that brings him far enough out of his mental state to be able to perform (where he still feels completely unlike himself, thus bringing about the "Pink isn't well, he stayed back at the hotel" heard later on the album in "In the Flesh").

[freeplessinseattle]

19. yes, that's how I see the pinprick. people who self-injure want

to both numb the pain, and feel something to feel alive, so choose controlled physical pain, which can give a person an interesting sense of calm and focus. plus endorphins are released with pain so there is a lift, a distraction from emotional pain, and a symbolical release and "cleansing", letting the numbness and the pain flow out with the blood.

[Inland]

12. Alienation.

I think the best Pink Floyd song, given the lyrics. Certainly the best on the album, which is spotty.

Its pretty clear the speaker is detached even without the drugs.

[nytemare]

13. Here is an interesting link.

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.lasso?id=1697

[dbonds]

17. I always saw it as the last stage of his personal wall being built.

The character Pink builds his wall through the whole albulm. He cracks at the end and is given some drug to keep him going. It seems thought that he doesn't survive the trip it sends him on, as the last refrain from the kids at the end of the albulm is 'Pink is Dead'. Although part of me would like to think he broke through the wall and the wall building Pink is dead.

[MN ChimpH8R]

20. Is Pink Dead

I don't think so. This album has always been close to my heart and I've thought about it a lot for the last 25 years.

One must consider the backstory of the album, which is young Pink becoming progressively more alienated from himself and other people despite becoming a huge star. At the point of CN, Pink is in a catatonic stupor. The Money Men cannot have Pink not going out there and making the $$$ for them, so they dope him up and send him out on stage. There, he flips out, turning into Nazi-Pink, works the crowd up into mob riot and eventually what he has become all crashes in on him. He tries himself in his own mind and is sentenced to the worst fate imaginable - he must tear down the wall he has built to protect himself from being hurt by the Outside World. Pink - the real Pink and not the self-built construct - is still alive. He has to put the pieces back together and come to terms with what his life has been.

w/o going into boring specifics, I had a very similar experience to the trial bit and the after effects last summer. Waters captures the internal horrors a little too well. I am still trying to pick up and reassemble the pieces.

edited for spelling

[dbonds]

22. That is what I also hoped the ending was.

But I have heard the interpretation that he didn't survive it. You sum up exactly what I had felt it should be. This also goes along with the movie of a baby left crying against all the pieces of the wall. The baby is the real Pink.

[jobycom]

40. Yes

The baby crying is Pink.

I remember watching the movie, and having hours of discussion over the exploding wall at the end, and trying to determine whether it meant death, insanity or rebirth. Notice that the wall explodes outward. Those who are chanting "tear down the wall" save him. It is a hopeful album.

Over twenty years later, we're still trying to work it out. Beats the Hell out of Rick Astley, dont it?

[the other one]

18. Don't be silly. Its just a good dance number.

[Debi]

21. I'm sorry, I've never seen The Wall sober

I thought it was a prerequisite to be drunk or stoned before they'd even let you in to the theater? Was I wrong?

[Pacifist Patriot]

29. That was my impression.

I'm not sure I've ever listened to the album sober.

[jobycom]

41. Apparently. I've neverbeen drunk or stoned, and they let me in.

I can't see why anyone would want to see it drunk or stoned. It's slow and depressing. Drunk, you'd get depressed, and stoned, you'd fall asleep.

Come to think of it, the movie did that to me sober at times, too, so I guess it doesn't matter how you see it. :-)

[Lannes]

28. The Wall was inspired in part by Syd Barrett's problems

like it was for "Wish you were here".There was a good article about him 15 years or so ago.Ill post it if I can find it.

[ismnotwasm]

30. For a long time I thought it was about heroin

(I always think songs like that are about heroin--personal flaw) But the words show a deeper meaning. There are many ways and reasons to check out emotionally.

[Lannes]

31. I couldnt find the article but here is a decent one about him

From The Observer

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,804928,00.html

an exerpt:

"You shone like the sun

Syd Barrett was the prodigiously talented founder of Pink Floyd, but after just two years at the centre of the 60s psychedelic scene, he suffered a massive breakdown and has lived as a recluse ever since. In this extract from his candid new book, Tim Willis tracks him down and pieces together the story of rock's lost icon "

[Floogeldy]

35. Muchas gracias, todas las personas!

B-)

[skygazer]

36. Comfortably Numb is NOT about drugs

In "The Wall", the character of Pink has built up a wall in his mind created of all the painful experiences in his life - the death of his father in the war, his over protective mother, his unhappy school years, his loveless marriage. The wall he's built protects him from the pain of life but at the same time isolates him from others. Eventually, he discovers he's trapped behind it.

Comfortably Numb is about being isolated, alone, on the edge of losing one's sanity. "There is no pain, you are receding..." describes what it feels like to be lost in your own mind, to be alone and mentally detached. The feeling he describes of when he was a child and had a fever - that described that horrible detached feeling well. That sense of observing the world rather than being a part of it.

The "pinprick" is a stimulant to help him get through the show but it's not drugs per se as in heroin or coke. He's drifted off to a place in his mind where he can imagine this whole trial scene. He's Comfortably Numb, unfeeling, detached and alone.

It's a sad song, and beautiful. Anyone who has ever suffered from crippling depression or other mental illness can tell you that it's EXACTLY what that feels like.

At the end, when he tears down the wall, Roger Waters wasn't even certain what that meant at the time. But to me, it's always meant that you can do that - tear down that wall you build inside and begin to live with the world instead of apart from it.

Roger Waters is God.

[Floogeldy]

37. Honestly . . .

. . . I'm not going to say that the song is about drugs, and only about drugs. But the references are too many for me personally to discount drugs completely as an element in the story, if only to pick Pink up and get him going again.

"Well I can ease your pain
Get you on your feet again . . .

Just a little pinprick.
There'll be no more aaaaaaaaah!
But you may feel a little sick.
Can you stand up?
I do believe it's working, good.
That'll keep you going through the show . . . ."






B-)

[skygazer]

38. Watch the movie

Puts it in perspective. :shrug:

[Floogeldy]

39. Okay

I will watch it.

B-)