10 Most Emotional Rock Albums Ever Made

Rock and roll can be a pretty nasty industry the more time you look at it. As much as the touring and recording might seem fun at the outset, seeing people get chewed up by the fame machine and spit back out is not really the most romantic job in the world. Now that Pink Floyd saw the real cost of iconic status on Dark Side of the Moon, they looked to their past to make sense of what they were dealing with.

Since most of the band weren't even on speaking terms at this point, you can feel the tension in the air on Wish You Were Here, especially when Roger Waters takes aim at the record industry directly on songs like Welcome to the Machine. Though Roger may have written the words to these songs, the most important Pink Floyd member here is Syd Barrett, who had to be ousted from the group when his mental state started to fracture under the pressure.

After Syd visited the sessions looking like a shell of himself, the band leaned into their grief a little bit further, with the suite Shine On You Crazy Diamond being an attempt to capture the entire experience that they had while Syd was in the band. Though there are a lot of emotions tied up in some of these songs, Floyd were still trying to push themselves, and were willing to put their hearts on the line to do it.