Chordal Accretion in Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here'

In 1975, Pink Floyd released what I consider to be their best album, Wish You Were Here. The album consists of five tracks:

1. 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V)
2. 'Welcome to The Machine'
3. 'Have A Cigar'
4. 'Wish You Were Here'
5. 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts VI-IX)'

This blog will focus on the chords of the three middle tracks, and on how the chords of tracks 2 and 3 combine to yield the chords of track 4, a process I am calling chord accretion.

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Despite its seven-and-a-half-minute length, 'Welcome to the Machine' employs only four chords: E minor, C major, A minor, and A major. Of those four, the A major might be the most curious because it is heard only once (during the second verse, at 4:18), where it substitutes for the A minor chord heard during the initial verse. The obvious question, then, is why? Why does the second verse use an A major chord where the first verse uses an A minor? What is the point of making that substitution? Before we can answer that question, we first need to progress to the next track.

welcome_to_the_machine.pdf
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Like its immediate predecessor, 'Have A Cigar' also uses only four chords: ​E minor, C major, D major, and G major. Notice that two of these four chords (E minor and C major) were used in 'Machine', while the other two (D major and G major) were not.

have_a_cigar.pdf
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So we have seen how 'Machine' uses the chords E minor, C major, A minor, and A major, ​and how 'Cigar' uses E minor, C major, D major, and G major. Now, given the title of this blog, can you make an educated guess regarding what chords are used in the title track? I'll give you a hint: There are six of them.

Those six chords are E minor, C major, A minor, A major, ​D major, and G major. They should be very familiar since they are the combined harmonies from the two previous tracks - no more, no less. This is what I mean by the term "chordal accretion".

Here's the same concept using color-coded mathematical symbols:

The chords of 'Welcome to the Machine' (E minor, C major, A minor, A major)
+
The chords of 'Have A Cigar' (E minor, C major, D major, G major)
=
The chords of 'Wish You Were Here' (E minor, C major, A minor, A major, D major, G major)

wish_you_were_here.pdf
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So, getting back to that curious A major chord in 'Welcome to the Machine', the reason it's an A major in the second verse instead of A minor is to help set up this chordal accretion process, which culminates in the focal  point of the entire album, the title track.