After teasing it in a recent interview, Roger Waters has now released The Lockdown Sessions.
Waters recorded the five songs on the project — a digital-only release — at home during the COVID-19 lockdown between 2020 and 2021. One song postdates those tracks, though: a new version of “Comfortably Numb” that was recorded during Waters’ 2022 This Is Not a Drill North American tour.
The songs include material from both Waters’ solo career and Pink Floyd: “Mother” and “Vera” from Pink Floyd’s The Wall; “Two Suns In the Sunset” and “The Gunner’s Dream” from Waters’ final album with Floyd, The Final Cut; and “The Bravery of Being Out of Range” from his 1992 album, Amused to Death.
Explaining why he chose to record these particular songs, he writes, “Our Us and Them Tour lasted three years … At every gig we did an encore after the main show…[we] closed with ‘Comfortably Numb’… the encore was always ‘Mother’ … I can’t remember why I decided to start doing other songs? Anyway, at some point after the end of the tour … I started thinking, ‘It could make an interesting album, all those encores … The Encores — yeah, has a nice ring to it!'”
He continues, “Then … I’m in England doing the Ginger Baker tribute gig one Tuesday night at the Hammersmith Odeon with Eric Clapton and … the following Saturday marching from The Australian Embassy to Parliament Square to make a speech in support of Julian Assange, when, bugger me, Covid! For me it was Friday March 13, 2020. Lockdown! So much for the Encores project.”
Waters adds, “We’ve tacked C. Numb on the end of the collection, as an appropriate exclamation point in closing this circle of love.”
The European run of This Is Not A Drill will kick off March 17 in Lisbon, Portugal.
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