10 Best Hard Rock Songs Over 10 Minutes Long
9. Pink Floyd - Echoes - 23:31
No stranger to experimentation or songs on the long-side, a list of classic ten minute tracks would be remiss without the titans that are Pink Floyd. And, whilst they provide so many potential choices, it’s the importance of Echoes that makes it shine just that little bit extra.
Perfectly titled for its origin, Pink Floyd’s Echoes started life as a series of unfinished material and ideas. The band can be celebrated for a great many things, but one that gets overlooked is their willingness to try absolutely anything in pursuit of serving a song. Floyd had up to two dozen tapes from previous sessions that were considered for this new track. As such, over the course of the song we shift through several psychedelic soundscapes with a persistent melancholic yearning for connection that would continue into their later work. The fifteen minute instrumental section in the middle of Echoes swells in ways that the band had not accomplished before - sounding both ethereal and yet very human.
Echoes clocks in at 23:31 and takes up the entire second side of 1971’s Meddle LP and, to many, represents an important part of the Pink Floyd catalogue as the band began to find a new identity; shedding their skin from the “Syd Barret Style Era” and embracing Roger Waters as the lynchpin of the group. Meddle may not be their most recognised work but Echoes would have a profound effect on the band’s future and thus the future for progressive music.