Mother Goodbye Blue Sky Pink Floyd

Mother
Goodbye Blue Sky Album: The Wall (1979)
by Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd's album The Wall is mainly the creation of founding member Roger Waters. It's a semi-autobiographical story about a young boy who loses his father in the war and is raised by his overly protective mother, who is the focus of this song. The child grows up alone as an outsider that absolutely does not fit in. He feels trapped by his overly protective environment while being shunned by the men around him.

Waters told Mojo that the mother portrayed in the song has some similarities to his own mum. He said: "My mother was suffocating in her own way. She always had to be right about everything. I'm not blaming her. That's who she was. I grew up with a single parent who could never hear anything I said, because nothing I said could possibly be as important as what she believed. My mother was, to some extent, a wall herself that I was banging my head against. She lived her life in the service of others. She was a school teacher. But it wasn't until I was 45, 50 years old that I realised how impossible it was for her to listen to me."

When Mojo asked Waters if his mother saw herself in the song, he replied: "She's not that recognizable. The song is more general, the idea that we can be controlled by our parents' views on things like sex. The single mother of boys, particularly, can make sex harder than it needs to be."

The main character in the song and throughout The Wall is named Pink. In this song, he's portrayed by Roger Waters, who asks his mother a series of questions:

Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb?
Mother, do you think they'll like this song?

Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour is the voice of the mother telling him the world is terrifying, but she'll protect him:

Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you
Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing

Unlike many of the songs on The Wall, "Mother" works well when extracted as an individual song, making it suitable for airplay. The songs on the album all flow together, so most don't have clear starting and stopping points, but "Mother" follows "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)," which ends with the sound of a phone ringing. There's then a brief silence before we hear Roger Waters take a deep breath and sing the first line of "Mother." The song is the last track on Side 1 of the double album, so it has a clear ending on the line, "Mother, did it need to be so high?"

Radio stations took advantage and gave the song lots of airplay, playing it right off the album because it wasn't released as a single. It endured for many years on classic rock radio.

The Wall was made into a 1982 movie starring Bob Geldof as Pink. There are animated sequences throughout the film created by Gerald Scarfe, who visualized the mother as a huge monstrous woman with a brick-wall bosom. Roger Waters told Mojo magazine December 2009: "The song has some connection with my mother, for sure, though the mother that Gerald Scarfe visualises in his drawings couldn't be further from mine. She's nothing like that."

Pink Floyd's drummer Nick Mason didn't play on this track. According to Roger Waters, this was because Mason had trouble with the 5/4 time signatures and other changes, as "his brain doesn't work that way." Jeff Porcaro, who was a session drummer and also a member of the band Toto, took his place. Mason was also replaced on drums (this time by Andy Newmark) on the track "Two Suns in the Sunset" from the album The Final Cut.

Roger Waters came up with the idea for The Wall after Pink Floyd's 1977 tour. Over the next year, he developed the idea, and when the band reconvened, he had a 90-minute demo with just his voice and guitar to lay out his vision. With help from producer Bob Ezrin, Waters and the band expanded the songs and tied them all together with sound effects and musical transitions. Many of the songs changed drastically from Waters' demo, but "Mother" hewed close to the original. Other songs that remained pretty much intact include "Is There Anybody Out There?" and "Don't Leave Me Now."

Roger Waters took over most of the songwriting in Pink Floyd starting with their 1975 album Wish You Were Here. By the time they recorded The Wall, there was a great deal of tension in the band. They pulled off one more album (The Final Cut in 1983) before Waters left, which he assumed would be the end of the group. He was wrong. Gilmour and company carried on without him as Pink Floyd, releasing their first Waters-less album, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, in 1987.

Waters wasn't done performing The Wall though. In 1990 he staged an ambitious concert in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, enlisting famous singers to help out. On "Mother," he was joined by Sinéad O'Connor and three members of The Band: Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Levon Helm.

Pearl Jam performed "Mother" on September 30, 2011 as part of a week-long Pink Floyd tribute on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. The Shins, Foo Fighters, MGMT, and Dierks Bentley all played Pink Floyd songs on the show that week.

Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines recorded a cover version in 2013 which was the title track to her first solo album. She decided to cover the song after hearing Roger Waters perform it on his The Wall Live tour, which ran 2010-2013. Waters loved her rendition, telling Rolling Stone, "I get goosebumps just talking about it."

"Goodbye Blue Sky" is part of Pink Floyd's seminal album The Wall, the creation of founding member Roger Waters. It's a concept album centered on the character Pink, who is in many ways an outcrop of Waters' psyche. The song finds Pink in early adolescence, already beset by fear in the aftermath of World War II in England ("Did you hear the falling bombs?"). He's getting ready to set out on his own, leaving behind any childhood innocence - the "blue sky."

On the vinyl version of the album, "Goodbye Blue Sky" is the first track on Side 2 (The Wall was a double album). In an interview around the album's release, Roger Waters described the song as being a recap of the first side of album one, summing up Pink's life to that point. As Waters says, in it's most simplistic form "it's remembering one's childhood and then getting ready to set off into the rest of one's life."

The child who says the line, "Look mummy, there's an airplane up in the sky" is Roger's son Harry, who was only two years old at the time. Harry, like his father, also became a musician.

The lead vocal on this one is by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, who in various spots on the album shows up as the voice of someone addressing Pink. For instance, he's the voice of Pink's mum in "Mother."

The Wall was adapted into an movie in 1982 starring Bob Geldof as Pink. "Goodbye Blue Sky" plays in one of the many sequences animated by Gerald Scarfe. The sequence starts with a dove transforming into a vulture and ends with a cross dripping blood - scary stuff!

Roger Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985 but that didn't stop him from performing The Wall in Berlin in 1990 after the Berlin Wall fell. He used guest vocalists to fill David Gilmour's parts. For "Goodbye Blue Sky" he got a good one: Joni Mitchell.

Waters did an entire tour for the album that ran from 2010 to 2013.