MUMBAI: George Roger Waters is an English singer, songwriter, bassist, and composer. In 1965, he co-founded the progressive rock band ‘Pink Floyd’ with drummer Nick Mason, keyboardist Rick Wright, and guitarist, singer, and songwriter Syd Barrett. Waters initially served as the group's bassist, but following the departure of Barrett in 1968, he also became their lyricist, co-lead vocalist, and conceptual leader.

Pink Floyd is very well known for some their hit songs like ‘Astronomy Domine’, ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘The Happiest Days of Our Lives’.

Roger Waters upcoming album after 25 years ‘Is This The Life We Really Want’ is a very socially conceptualized. It is scheduled to be released on 2 June 2017 by Columbia Records.

Waters shares his thoughts on his upcoming album and the inspiration behind ‘Is This The Life We Really Want’.

Tell us about your first new studio album in 25 years called, ‘Is This The Life We Really Want’?

It was the genesis of the whole thing. When I was on the road doing ‘The Wall’ I always had a guitar in the hotel room and this is a song that I wrote at some point when we were on the road, with then taking it and teaching it to the rest of the band, and saying, “Hey. What do you think of this?”

How was it working with producer Nigel Godrich, who famously has worked with ‘Radiohead’ in the past?

I very rarely relinquish the reins of power in these situations, but Nigel has very strong opinions about the way he wants to make records, and he’s good at making records. And it became very clear when we started recording the first couple of little bits of music one of which was the song ‘Déjà vu,’ and the other first thing we did was ‘Broken Bones’ that I could either stick my oar in every two minutes or work on a completely new discipline for me, which is keeping my mouth shut and waiting to see what happened, you know. And I did that a lot, but it was good because I think he's made a very good record and obviously I didn't keep my mouth entirely shut and contributed as much as I could whenever I could.

‘Picture That’ from the album is such a driving song. Your thoughts?

Yeah. Well, I'm just quoting directly from the nincompoop president. That's what he says. He believes that. That is one of his truths. He believes that greed is a good thing. He is Gordon Gecko, which is why it's so interesting that he has been elected to the highest office in the land. Maybe we will understand it eventually and maybe it would behoove us to understand how that happened. It’s an attachment to the idea of celebrity. Do you know, somebody quoted, a bookie’s price for who might be elected president.  Kim Kardashian's 500 to 1. Now that tells you something. I mean, seriously. Even that somebody would quote a price like saying that, but it's not as out of order as we thought because if somebody had offered you 500 to 1 on Donald Trump being president 10 years ago, for now, you would have said that's not nearly long enough odds. Or you wouldn't have taken it. You'd have wanted 10,000 to 1 because you would never believe it possible.

Why the title, ‘Is This The Life We Really Want’?

When I'd written a poem in 2008 called ‘Is This The Life We Really Want?’ which was just before the first Obama presidential election. And so we were coming off five years after the invasion of Iraq, and so we’re just at the end of Bush II and of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Karl Rove and all those other a**h***s. And so there was a great feeling of maybe…maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe. And it was me asking the question, Is this the life we really want? Do we really want to live in perpetual war?  Which we were looking at and which we still are. So it's still a relevant question. Now, eight years later, we discovered that we had high hopes for Barack, but it didn’t prevent us from apparently being willing participants in this thing.

Tell us about the song ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.’ There is such tenderness in this song.       

You wait until you see a picture of her. Cause she's real.  She's actually in a documentary movie called ‘Dirty Wars’ that a guy called Jeremy Scott, an American filmmaker made, and it's a story about J-Sock, but it's this one bit of it there is about a missile, a cruise missile attack on the Yemen made by Americans. Some American sailor went and this is a girl who’s killed by a cruise missile, but we have film of this particular child who, when I saw this kid – I just went, “Ooooh.” (in pain)  So that's kind of what that song is about.          

Let’s talk about the deep and sobering song ‘Smell The Roses,’ a song that also includes the same girl.

It was the last piece of the jigsaw. That was another piece that we put together just playing. It's another thing I’m playing bass on, so it's us playing and then there was a bit of editing by Nigel and then suddenly there's this thing that could be a song. Except it isn't. And so I had to go and sit and kind of scratch my head and listen to it. I wrote tons and tons of stuff and eventually, it became that. How I got you know into the idea of a sort of writing something that was a munitions factory and about torturing people or about there and how it kind of all got mingled up with her because she's in it. She's in the end of it. ‘Just a line in the captain's log/just a whine from a rescue dog another kid didn't make the grade/come on honey it's a fair trade/money honey yeah, so I don’t know’. It is what it is. Yes, it is! It’s an outpouring of grief, but also it’s angry. It is a bit angry about that.

Is it about how love conquers all in the end?

Yes, it’s exactly about that. I couldn’t have put that better. The lyric in it is,  ‘when I met you, part of me died’ and then I try to describe all negative aspects that I could imagine, not just about me but about anybody. The part that is deviousness, mischievous, global, colonial and blah-blah-blah.  And so it's about falling in love and the transcendental nature of love, and how it can affect your whole life and the whole way that you approach everything. But it's also about falling in love with liberty. So, at the end of the list of everything negative all I could think of was, ‘bring me a bowl to bathe her feet in. Bring me my final cigarette. It would be better by far to die in her arms than to lingering a lifetime of regret.’ And it would. If you cannot fall in love with liberty, then you've missed a crucial calling and when I say liberty, I mean liberty for all, Not liberty for Americans or for the Chinese. I mean liberty for everybody under a generally accepted rule of law that represents our attachment to ethical behavior and to generosity. The generosity that is inherent in the human spirit.

Please tell us about your ‘Us And Them’ tour

25 per cent of it will be the new album which comes out just before the tour starts. And the rest of it will be stuff from my Pink Floyd years or after, but it’s all around the general theme that there really is no “us” or “them.” There’s only us. My very strong feeling that we need to transcend our sometimes natural headlong rush to nationalism and exceptionalism and understand that we’re all human beings and that we have a duty to one another to cooperate and if possible even continue the possibility of life on this small weak fragile planet for a few more generations.