Roger Waters has unveiled The Lockdown Sessions, a six-song collection mostly recorded at home during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Stream it below with Apple Music and Spotify.
The Lockdown Sessions tracks were culled from Waters’ solo career and time in Pink Floyd: “Mother” and “Vera” originally appeared on The Wall; “Two Suns in the Sunset” and “The Gunner’s Dream” come from Waters’ final Pink Floyd record, The Final Cut; “The Bravery of Being out of Range” was a standout from his solo album, Amused to Death; and The Lockdown Sessions closes with “Comfortably Numb 2022,” which he recorded during the “This Is Not a Drill” North American tour.
“Our ‘Us and Them Tour’ lasted three years,” Waters wrote in a statement. “At every gig we did an encore after the main show 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!’ 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… Schlummmm! For me it was Friday March 13th 2020. Lockdown! So much for the Encores project. Unless…”
He added, “We’ve tacked ‘C. Numb’ on the end of the collection, as an appropriate exclamation point in closing this circle of love.”
Next year, Waters will bring his “This Is Not a Drill Tour” to Europe, and tickets are available here. Reportedly, Pink Floyd are attempting to sell their catalog but prospective buyers are wary of Waters political activism, which in the past year has included encouraging Ukraine to surrender, defending Russia and China, and calling US President Biden a “war criminal.”
