Roger Waters – “Déjà Vu”

Amy Harris/Invision/AP

Roger Waters – “Déjà Vu”

Amy Harris/Invision/AP

Next month, the former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters will release Is This The Life We Really Want?, his first solo album in a quarter-century. Waters has spoken about how the album is a meditation on the way in which we live now, and first single “Smell The Roses” gave some sense of that. But we can really hear the full reach of Waters’ ambition in “Déjà Vu,” the new song that he shared this morning.

It’s a grand, gentle power ballad, full of strings and strummy acoustic guitars. And on the song, Waters starts out by imagining himself doing a better job than God if he had somehow been the supreme being: “If I had been God, I would have rearranged the veins in the face to make them more resistant to alcohol and less resistant to aging.” He also sings about imagining himself a drone, being afraid to murder innocent people, and about observing the insanity of human life on this planet in 2017. It’s a grand, moving song, and you can hear it below.

Is This The Life We Really Want? is out 6/2 on Columbia.

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