Fifty years ago, Pink Floyd released an album that felt like a sigh.

Wish You Were Here had no radio-friendly singles, no obvious hooks, and followed a monumental success (The Dark Side of the Moon) that sold more than 30 million copies.

And yet, it may be the band’s most emotionally resonant work—a mournful, ambient, oddly intimate meditation on absence, loss, and disillusionment.

You don’t sing along to Wish You Were Here. You absorb it.

The album opens with the ghostly hum of a synthesizer, like a transmission arriving from deep space. Then comes Shine On You Crazy Diamond—a nine-part suite split across the album’s start and finish, and a tribute to Syd Barrett, the band’s founding frontman who had been lost to mental illness and drug abuse.

The lyrics (“Now there’s a look in your eyes / Like black holes in the sky”) are devastating. And they’re delivered without sentimentality, just sorrow.

Roger Waters, who wrote much of the record, later called it “a requiem.” David Gilmour’s guitar playing—especially on “Shine On”—became its own language: yearning, lyrical, grieving. He didn’t so much solo as speak.

Between the bookends of Shine On are three tracks that bite deeper than their gentle tones suggest.

“Welcome to the Machine” is a snarling indictment of the music industry, delivered through synths that hiss and churn like a corporate combine. “Have a Cigar” lampoons record execs in their own voice, with Roy Harper singing the role of a clueless label rep who asks, “By the way, which one’s Pink?” It’s funny until you realize it’s almost verbatim from EMI boardrooms.

And then comes the title track.

“Wish You Were Here” is deceptively simple: just a 12-string acoustic guitar and Gilmour’s wounded vocals. But it cuts straight through—more elegy than song. Waters later said it wasn’t just for Syd. It was for anyone who’s ever been emotionally absent. And maybe for themselves.

The production was more organic than its predecessor. Gone were the heartbeats and clocks and tape loops of Dark Side. In their place: space. Air. The sense of a band playing together, not just producing a record, but trying to reach someone who wasn’t there anymore.

At the time, it was misunderstood. Rolling Stone gave it a lukewarm review in 1975. But decades later, Wish You Were Here has aged not just well—but hauntingly. It now feels like the record that understood what the band didn’t say aloud: fame had isolated them, grief had sobered them, and the machine had won something.

Still, Wish You Were Here remains, a half-century on, Pink Floyd’s most humane album. It doesn’t rage against the void. It speaks to it. It sends signals into the silence, hoping someone’s still listening.

Maybe that’s why it still plays like a message meant for us—wherever we are.

“I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.”

Mitch Hedberg died twenty years ago. That sentence reads wrong—like he just went out for a sandwich and forgot to come back.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, site of my transplant, Mitch wasn’t built for the job market. He wasn’t built for much of Earth, really. He had a surfer’s drawl, a curtain of hair like he was hiding from the 1990s, and a stage presence that suggested his mind was already halfway through the next dozen punchlines.

He looked at the world like it owed him laughter—small, weird laughter. And he paid it back in full.

“I bought a seven-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring.”

That wasn’t just a joke. It was syntax from another planet. Hedberg didn’t deliver jokes so much as he delivered angles—twists on the banal so sharp they drew blood.

He hated confrontation. Wore sunglasses on stage not for coolness, but camouflage. The spotlight didn’t energize him—it interrogated him.

“My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.”

He made absurdism feel like wisdom. There was no aggression in his act. No rage, no moral scoreboard. Just observational comedy from a man who saw the world through a cracked kaleidoscope and liked it better that way.

“I saw a sign that said ‘Watch for children.’ I did. It seemed like a fair trade.”

He once tried to pitch a sitcom to network TV called Hedberg, in which he’d play himself. He told the execs: “The show starts when I get out of prison for a crime I didn’t commit. But then, I get committed for a crime I didn’t prison.”

They passed.

Hedberg was a writer, whether he wore the label or not. The literary bent was always there—compressed, subtle, and stoned.

“I haven’t slept for ten days. That would be too long.”

“I like rice. It’s great if you’re hungry and want 2,000 of something.”

“I used to play sports. Then I realized you can buy trophies. Now I’m good at everything.”

He died in 2005 of a drug overdose. Thirty-seven. It didn’t feel like a cautionary tale. It felt like losing the weirdest angel at the party.

Twenty years later, no one’s filled the silence he left behind.

“An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an ‘Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order’ sign, just ‘Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.’”

There’s a scene early in Lake George when Don (Shea Whigham), a weary ex-con assigned to off a mobster’s girlfriend, squints through the grime of a windshield that hasn’t been cleaned in years.

The camera holds long enough for you to wonder whether he’s even trying to see, or if he just prefers his world this way—filtered, fractured, and deliberately dirty. It’s one of the many small, deliberate touches in Jeffrey Reiner’s Lake George that sets the film apart from your typical crime thriller.

The setup is familiar: Don, fresh out of prison and riddled with a deep moral ambivalence, is sent to kill Phyllis (Carrie Coon), the whip-smart, world-weary moll of his boss.

What unfolds, though, is something grittier, slower, and more textured than a simple hit-gone-wrong. There’s violence, sure. There’s betrayal and paranoia.

But Reiner seems more interested in what happens between those beats: the way a character lights a cigarette with his off-hand because the dominant one is in a sling; the way Don half-limps down motel stairs, suggesting an injury we’ll never quite get explained; or the way no one ever bothers to clean a damn window in this world.

Those dirty windshields serve as more than atmosphere. They’re metaphor, mood, even mirror. Reiner shoots many scenes from inside cars, looking out through smudges and streaks, as if to suggest that clarity—of thought, of purpose, of truth—is perpetually just out of reach.

It’s a subtle choice, and one most films wouldn’t linger on, but here, it becomes almost a character in itself: the haze through which these people view each other and themselves.

Whigham is outstanding as Don, delivering a performance that’s all restraint and regret. He plays the role like a man who’s seen the worst parts of himself and is still figuring out if he deserves to be alive.

Coon matches him beat for beat, giving Phyllis a cunning softness that keeps you guessing which side she’s really on. The chemistry between them doesn’t sizzle so much as smolder—two people too damaged for flirtation, but drawn to each other’s wounds.

The pacing is deliberate—some might say slow—but Reiner earns it by layering his film with tension and atmosphere rather than plot twists. You don’t watch Lake George to find out what happens next; you watch to sit in its murky moral ambiguity, to appreciate the stillness between its bursts of violence.

This isn’t a movie for everyone. It resists easy resolution and offers little catharsis, particularly the finale.

But for those willing to watch through the dirt, Lake George offers a beautifully grimy view of redemption—uncertain, fogged over, and worth squinting at.