“Us and Them”: How Roger Waters’ War Grief and Richard Wright’s Jazz Chords Became the Heart of Dark Side

The line “And in the end, they’ll take our dreams” didn’t come from nowhere. Roger Waters’ father, Eric Fletcher Waters, was killed in World War II when Roger was only five months old — a death that haunted every anti-war lyric he wrote. That specific phrase, with its quiet resignation, is widely read as a direct reference to the loss of a father’s future and the dreams he never got to live. Waters has never denied it, though he tends to let the music speak for itself.

The chord structure was all Richard Wright. He brought in a sequence rooted in jazz — Dm7 to Cmaj7, then Bbmaj7, Am7, G — that moves in a descending pattern. Wright said he wrote it as a quiet, unresolved progression that “felt like walking through rain.” Waters then layered his lyrics over the changes, matching the mood of each chord: the tension of Dm7 for “Us and them,” the softer fall into Bbmaj7 for “And after all we’re only ordinary men.” The two men rarely wrote together again, but here their instincts locked — Wright’s harmonic melancholy, Waters’ biographical ache — and created the album’s most emotionally complex track.