Roger Waters has been responsible for some of the most timeless and beloved music in all of rock and roll. As a founding member of Pink Floyd, he created the concepts for the band’s landmark albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and The Final Cut.

Between 2010 and 2013, Waters toured the world performing The Wall to spectacular success. It was during that tour that Waters got the creative juices going that resulted in his first studio album in 25 years — after Amused to Death in 1992 — called Is This The Life We Really Want? Excerpts from an interview:

Q How did the song,Déjà Vuhappen?

It was the genesis of the whole thing. When I was on the road doing The Wall I always had a guitar in the hotel room and this is a song that I wrote at some point when we were on the road, with then taking it and teaching it to the rest of the band, saying, “Hey. What do you think of this?”

Q For this album, you decided to work with producer Nigel Goodrich, who has famously worked with Radiohead in the past.How was that?

Very rarely do I relinquish the reins of power in these situations but Nigel has very strong opinions about the way he wants to make records, and he’s good at making records. And it became very clear when we started recording the first couple of little bits of music — one of which was the song Déjà vu and the other first thing we did was Broken Bones — that I could either stick my oar in every two minutes or work on a completely new discipline for me, which is keeping my mouth shut and waiting to see what happens!

Q The Last Refugeeis a song that calls to our better selves. How do you feel about this refugee thing affecting security?

Well, none of the figures bear out any of the paranoia and that is the actual point of the thing. The injuries caused by radical extremism of any kind from anywhere are infinitesimal compared with any other cause of injury within the society in which you live. It is complete irrelevance. Everybody knows that this is been one of the most popular methods of controlling a population throughout history.

Q A song like Picture Thatis such a driving song, The line that sticks out to me, aside from all that other stuff is, “there is no such thing as being too greedy.”

Yes.Well, I’m just quoting directly from the nincompoop US president. That’s what he says. He believes that. That is one of his truths. He believes that greed is a good thing. He is Gordon Gecko, which is why it’s so interesting that he has been elected to the highest office in the land.

Q The title piece of the album, Is This The Life We Really Want, is such a great question.

I’d written a poem in 2008 called "Is this the life we really want?" which was just before the first Obama presidential election. And so we were coming off five years after the invasion of Iraq, we were just at the end of Bush II and of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Karl Rove and all those. And so there was a great feeling of maybe. And it was me asking the question, is this the life we really want? Do we really want to live in perpetual war? Which we were looking at and which we still are. So it’s still a relevant question.

Q There is such tenderness and anger in The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.

You wait until you see a picture of her. Because she’s real! She’s actually in a documentary movie called Dirty Warsthat a guy called Jeremy Scott, an American filmmaker, made. There’s one bit of it about a missile, a cruise missile attack on Yemen by Americans.

This is a girl who’s killed by the cruise missile but we have film of this particular child who, when I saw this kid — I just went, "Oh" in pain. So that’s kind of what that song is about.

Q The first song we were given to introduce us to this deep and sobering work is the song, Smell the Roses. This song also includes the girl in The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.

It was the last piece of the jigsaw. I had to go and sit and kind of scratch my head. I wrote tons and tons of stuff and eventually it became that. They all got mingled up with her because she’s in it. She’s in the end of it, “Just a line in the captain’s log/just a whine from a rescue dog/ another kid didn’t make the grade/come on honey it’s a fair trade/”.

It’s an outpouring of grief but it’s also angry.