Hi everyone, co-host Luke here with something of a Michael and Us first. This will be a solo episode

conceived and presented by me, dedicated not to a film or otherwise visual object but instead to

music, and in fact, motivated by a specific piece of music, that being a roughly 24-minute

composition called Adam Hart Mother, originally recorded in 1970,

and occupying the whole of Side A on the Pink Floyd album of the same name.

So what gives? Why dedicate a whole episode to one track featured on a Pink Floyd album more than 50 years ago?

As with some of what we do on this podcast, there is admittedly something

of a personal component here. I've loved the piece and the album on which it appears since I first

discovered them as a teenager. It's a half LPs worth of what you might crudely call symphonic rock

that is incredibly beautiful and compelling, and in many ways I think defies generic categorization.

Again and again, I've found myself coming back to this strange, wonderful, and idiosyncratic composition.

And if it weren't an implicit breach of the morbid etiquette expected on such occasions,

it's one among only a handful of pieces to which I could honestly assign the old

cliche, I'd want that played at my funeral. Or, if you're a British listener, this one would

probably be one I'd include on my Desert Island discs. So we'll dive in shortly, but before

we do that, I'd like to get just a few production notes out of the way.

This episode is obviously going to be a little different than some of our usual ones.

I'm going to begin by talking about the origins, history, and prehistory of Adam Hartmother

and situated a bit for you within the wider corpus of Pink Floyd.

Then you're going to hear a conversation between myself and the

artist, musician, poet, and composer Ron Geeson. Throughout the whole of this episode, the

conversation with my guest included, you're going to hear various songs and pieces of music

...