Mother - 2011 Remastered Version

Pink Floyd's album The Wall is mainly the creation of founding member Roger Waters. It's a semi-autobiographical story about a young boy who loses his father in the war and is raised by his overly protective mother, who is the focus of this song. The child grows up alone as an outsider that absolutely does not fit in. He feels trapped by his overly protective environment while being shunned by the men around him. Waters told Mojo that the mother portrayed in the song has some similarities to his own mum. He said: "My mother was suffocating in her own way. She always had to be right about everything. I'm not blaming her. That's who she was. I grew up with a single parent who could never hear anything I said, because nothing I said could possibly be as important as what she believed. My mother was, to some extent, a wall herself that I was banging my head against. She lived her life in the service of others. She was a school teacher. But it wasn't until I was 45, 50 years old that I realised how impossible it was for her to listen to me." When Mojo asked Waters if his mother saw herself in the song, he replied: "She's not that recognizable. The song is more general, the idea that we can be controlled by our parents' views on things like sex. The single mother of boys, particularly, can make sex harder than it needs to be."

The main character in the song and throughout The Wall is named Pink. In this song, he's portrayed by Roger Waters, who asks his mother a series of questions: Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb? Mother, do you think they'll like this song? Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour is the voice of the mother telling him the world is terrifying, but she'll protect him: Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing

Unlike many of the songs on The Wall, "Mother" works well when extracted as an individual song, making it suitable for airplay. The songs on the album all flow together, so most don't have clear starting and stopping points, but "Mother" follows "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)," which ends with the sound of a phone ringing. There's then a brief silence before we hear Roger Waters take a deep breath and sing the first line of "Mother." The song is the last track on Side 1 of the double album, so it has a clear ending on the line, "Mother, did it need to be so high?" Radio stations took advantage and gave the song lots of airplay, playing it right off the album because it wasn't released as a single. It endured for many years on classic rock radio.