Hey You

"Hey You" is a power ballad by English rock band Pink Floyd, released on their 1979 double album The Wall. The song, along with "The Show Must Go On", was edited out of the film for fear on the part of the filmmakers that the film was running too long; however, a rough version is available as an extra on the 25th Anniversary Edition DVD. Composition The song starts off with an acoustic guitar, restrung in a fashion similar to Nashville tuning, but with the low E string replaced by a high E tuned two full octaves higher than normal. It plays arpeggios over E and D minor added ninth chords. The alternate stringing allows for adjacent pitches (such as the E, F♯, and G of the Em9 chord) to ring out separately on separate strings throughout the arpeggio. A fretless bass enters, also played by guitarist David Gilmour rather than usual bassist Roger Waters. Next to join in is the Fender Rhodes electric piano by Richard Wright, Gilmour's vocals, singing in the first person, as the character "Pink" ("Can you feel me?"), and overdubbed acoustic guitar and drums at the start of the second verse. In the middle is a guitar solo underscored by an overdriven Hammond Organ which is played over the album's leitmotif of the melody to "Another Brick in the Wall" (in E minor and A minor, rather than D minor). After the solo, Roger Waters sings the lead vocal for the rest of the song, in a narrative role, referring to "Pink" in the third person ("No matter how he tried") and then as Pink ("don't tell me there's no hope at all"). The bridge is a chord sequence later heard on the album as "Bring the Boys Back Home", ending on an E minor chord, leading to a reprise of the instrumental introduction, augmented by prominent ARP Quadra riffs. At this point, there is a piece of indecipherable whispering from the left channel. Drums and vocals then join in. At about 3:23 into the song, a sonar-like sound, similar to the ping in "Echoes", is heard. After the lyrics, "And the worms ate into his brain", the album's chief sound engineer, James Guthrie created the worm-eating sound effect by using the faintly audible sound of a hand-held power drill boring into an undefined material. When Waters sings the final verse, he does so one octave higher than Gilmour, with the highest note being the first C above middle C. Plot The Wall tells the story of Pink, an alienated young rock star who is retreating from society and isolating himself.