It is half past midnight. I have my headphones on, and I am listening to something I have not heard in what feels like ages.

Pink Floyd.

And I’m not listening to any Floyd song. I am listening to the epic Coming Back To Life.

I first heard this song back in 1999, five years after it was originally released in 1995. A friend of mine had introduced me to Pink Floyd via the classic Another Brick In The World Part 2. We were in our early teens back then, and for kids growing up in Pakistan, the only access to foreign music was via music taped on audio cassettes and sold in audio stores. If this was the west, the shop owners would be locked away for life, but thankfully for us, no one gave a hoot about intellectual property in Pakistan. I didn’t understand too much of Pink Floyd back then. To me it was just a cool band that had a great guitar player. Nor did I know that the band was not exactly ‘new’ and the fact that it has been around for ages.

There is something about this song that captures you in the most incredible of manners. It might be David Gilmour’s soothing voice. It might his brilliant guitar solo. It might be the way the song picks up. It might the insanely captivating lyrics. Every passing second of the song elevates you into outer space, leaving the world far and wide behind. It is a mixture of joy, despair, happiness and anxiety rolled into 6 odd minutes of unadulterated brilliance. The emotions the song conjures are existential, yet hypothetical. It feels like the kind of song they would play in outer space, where you kick back on a Beer that doesn’t follow the law of gravity. The song is epic on levels one can’t even comprehend. It transcends time, soulfully breaking every barrier of artistic limits man has ever known. Words alone cannot do it justice. Commentary alone cannot celebrate how divine it is.

Time will not pause. Nor will the unfathomable brilliance of this song.

I give you, Coming Back To Life .