Time

The song begins with the famous explosion of ticking clocks and ringing alarms, one of the most surprising openings in rock history. Before a single line is sung, Pink Floyd forces the listener to confront the song’s central theme: the relentless and inevitable passage of time. The sounds of the clocks were edited together by Pink Floyd’s sound engineer, Alan Parsons. Each clock was recorded separately in an antique shop, and then all the tracks were combined into one.

“Time” fascinates and captivates because it captures something deeply universal—the quiet realization that life flows faster than we expect. Roger Waters came up with this idea when he realized he was no longer preparing for anything in life, but was right in the middle of it. He had just turned 28 at the time.

The album “The Dark Side of the Moon” has sold approximately 40 million copies and holds the undisputed record for the most weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart, with 989. The album entered the chart in March 1973 upon its release, dropped off in 1974, but then returned from time to time, including for 11 consecutive years from 1977 to 1988, when it remained on the chart without ever leaving. Various reissues and promotional campaigns periodically bring it back onto the chart. For example, in 2014, the Google Play store sold the entire album for 99 cents, which propelled it to No. 13.