Watch Roger Waters Perform Plush, Orchestral ‘Deja Vu’ on ‘Colbert’
Roger Waters played an orchestral, folk-rock version of “Deja Vu” on The Late Show. The song is slated to appear in June on Is This the Life We Really Want?, Waters’ first new album since 1992’s Amused to Death.
The Pink Floyd co-founder took the stage with support from a large string section, which brought drama to the track. Waters began singing over a placid strum, but by the end of the first verse, violins and cellos piled into the arrangement. The strings buttressed Waters’ vocals, adding gravity to the low end and tension during the second verse.
Waters sang casually, but his observations were cutting. “If I had been God, I would’ve rearranged the veins in the face to make them more resistant to alcohol and less prone to aging,” he sang. Later, he moved into politics: “The bankers get fat, the buffalos gone/ The mountaintop’s flat, the trout in the streams are all hermaphrodite/ You lean to the left, but you vote to the right.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone in February, Waters said that politics play an important role in Is This the Life We Really Want? “I like to think that people would still like to live in a world where the bees might survive, where we might address the problems of climate change, [and] where we might understand that if we empathize with others, it makes us feel happier,” he said.
Waters embarks on a North American tour in support of his new LP in May.