The one album Roger Waters says he is ‘hugely proud’ to have been a part of

An album which bassist and Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters remains “hugely proud” of may surprise listeners.

It’s not The Wall or The Dark Side of the Moon which Waters is deeply thankful to have been a part of. Not even Amused to Death, which he said is an album he wanted to be remembered by. One of his most recent releases and perhaps an overlooked one at that saw Waters tackle Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. In a trailer for the album release, the Wish You Were Here hitmaker shared why the project meant a lot to him. The veteran musician has written some of the all-time greats but albums like Ça Ira and The Soldier’s Tale are spoken of highly by Waters in recent interviews.

While the former Pink Floyd frontman may not play songs from either of these albums in his live shows, it seems he remains very proud of the work he put into the opera piece and book adaptation.

Waters said: “I’m hugely proud of it [the album] and feel hugely honoured to have been given the opportunity to be even part of the production of what I consider to be not just a great piece of work from Stravinsky – and whoever wrote the original text as well. It’s based on a Russian folk tale.”

The bassist would then share details of his roles on the production, with Waters voicing the characters heard on the album. He said: “So I am the narrator, but I’m also the soldier, the princess, the Devil, the bloke in the pub, and the king.”

Waters would add it’s a “stunning recording” backed by a group of musicians who made the album “amazing” to listen to. It’s not the first time Waters has offered listeners a different experience to his Pink Floyd days either, with the veteran performer also working on the French opera, Ça Ira.

The project was “liberating” to write according to Waters, who says the project was a “liberating” experience. He said: “It is [liberating]! But I wrote all the music – well, eighty per cent of it – to the French version of the libretto. 

“It was Sony who pushed me to write an English version, but in parts the literal translation, shorn of Etienne’s jeu de mots and idiomatic and literary allusions, didn’t make much sense. I had to rewrite the English to fit the metre of the French text. 

“In fact, I invented some bits of history to advance the narrative. For instance, the scene in the garden in Vienna in 1765 involving the young Marie Antoinette and the boy who grows up to become the revolutionary priest, where he tries to warn her that there’s trouble at mill.”

Though the project would be a personally satisfying one for Waters, he did later discuss the diffiuclty in effecting an emotional response from the audience. He shared: “Basically I feel that music’s job is to generate an emotional reaction. And if it does that, then it’s succeeded. Beethoven transcends time and is still moving people. 

“That is the qualitative view of success. As regards the quantitative view, is it the more people you get to the better? Maybe. It’s always a very slippery slope on the other side of the numbers hill, a very complex area, it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to manufacture a popular product rather than just doing the work.”