Behind the Meaning of “Time” by Pink Floyd

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day / Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way / Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown / Waiting for someone or something to show you the way, Pink Floyd laments over lost time in their 1973 track, “Time.”

That theme is established from the first few seconds of the song with the sound of a ringing clock. It’s impossible to ignore this song when it comes on – which no doubt enthuses songwriter Roger Waters. The vocalist taps into a sense of existentialism in the lyrics.

“I wrote that when I was 29 years old,” Roger Waters once told Rolling Stone. “The bits in the song where it goes, No one told you when to run/You missed the starting gun, it’s about my experience of being 29 years old and certainly going, ‘Fuck me. It’s the middle of life. I’ve been told that I was preparing for something.’

“The reason it’s a good song is because it describes the predicament of anybody who, growing up — if we’re grown up at all — suddenly realizes that time is going really, really fast,” Waters continued. “It makes you start to philosophize about life and what is important and how to derive joy from that.”

In the first verse, David Gilmour sings about the seemingly never-ending free time we have as children. You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today, he sings. In the next breath, he flashes forward to adulthood, when stretching time becomes a harder task and there never seems to be enough hours in the day.

One day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

The song becomes increasingly bleak as it goes on. Throughout the verses, the narrator grows older and older, feeling the pressures of time running out. Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time, the lyrics read.

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A sense of anxiety creeps in while listening to “Time.” You can almost see feel the minutes ticking by as this sprawling song crawls on. “Time” shows off one of the band’s greatest strengths: being able to relay a theme in both the lyrics and the musicality.

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

As the nearly seven-minute song comes to a close, the band reprises “Breathe (In The Air),” which appears earlier in the track list on The Dark Side of the Moon. Many fans have come to think of the interpolation as the moment the narrator passes onto the other side. The transition from “Time” to “The Great Gig in the Sky” helps to drive that idea home.

The band manages to tell the story of life, from childhood to death, in just a few minutes. Pink Floyd has never shied away from a weighty concept, which is part of what made them such a singular voice in rock from the early days of their career.

Far away, across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell

(Photo by Doug McKenzie/Getty Images)