Art & Creativity Quote by Roger Waters

Waters frames songwriting as a binary, but the bluntness is a tell: he is defending craft in an industry that loves mystique. “Either you write songs or you don’t” sounds like a shrug, yet it’s a gate swung shut on poseurs, session-built personas, and the idea that “artist” is just a vibe you can rent. Coming from a musician whose work is famously authored, conceptual, and argumentative, the line reads as a small act of territorial control: authorship matters, and it comes with obligations.

Then he pivots to something almost domestic: a “natural desire” to make records. That phrase softens what could be read as ambition into impulse, as if albums are not commerce but consequence. The subtext is practical and ideological at once. Practically, songs want an afterlife beyond the room they were written in; recording is the way they travel, accrue meaning, and meet an audience at scale. Ideologically, Waters is making a case for the record as the real canvas, not the playlist drip or the attention-economy single. For him, a “record” isn’t just documentation; it’s architecture, sequencing, argument, world-building.

The context is a career built on albums that behave like novels: cohesive, polemical, obsessive about narrative control. In that light, “natural desire” is almost a self-portrait of compulsion. If you’re the kind of writer Waters claims to be, the song isn’t finished until it’s fixed, framed, and fired into the culture as a whole object.