Today on my drive to/from work, I listened to Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd’s 1975 album). I hadn’t listened to it in quite a while. It’s still pretty good. However, this listen-through, I noticed two things.

First, production quality has drastically increased since 1975. There’s multiple times that I felt sonic opportunities were missed, simply because the technology wasn’t there to produce them. The synth solos during Welcome to the Machine felt texturally lacking, and of course the sound effects were throughout. There were a few other moments where I thought that if given today’s editing tools, the sound would be completely different.

How much of music from the past and the present is just the artist settling for what they have? You may have heard people discuss how Beethoven would totally be into metal were he alive today. Would metal groups hear music 200 years from now and see it as better than theirs?

Second, Wish You Were Here (the song) is even better than I thought it was!