Midway through a conversation with David Gilmour about the former Pink Floyd singer and guitarist‘s terrific new solo album, “Lock and Strange,” it’s time to ask him about something he said.
“Those things that come back to haunt you?” Gilmour says and laughs.
But it’s no gotcha query; it’s this: Gilmour, who comes to Southern California for four shows at the end of October, has described the new album as his best work since Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece “Dark Side of the Moon.” So the question is, What is it about this album?
“Every album you do is your favorite at the time,” Gilmour says. “You obviously have to be a little careful about what you say and do about these things.
“But this one, the joy that I had making it, the joy that I still have listening to it every day,” he says. “I do listen to the whole album all the way through nearly every day still, months since we finished.
“Very often with a piece of work, with an album, you absolutely love every second of it, but when it’s done, you don’t really listen to it that much. And that’s a strange thing. But this one is not like that. I’m really loving listening to it. There’s a cohesion to it. I think I’ve written fewer lyrics on this than any other album for years, and that’s sort of given [his writer wife and longtime lyricist] Polly [Samson] the opportunity to make it into more of a cohesive body of work.
“I really have an image of it, a visual image of the album as one whole thing,” Gilmour continues. “I’m not talking concept albums here or anything as old-fashioned as that. But there is something that is tied together all the way through without being deliberate or forced or intentional.
“So that joy, which I hope other people will feel, is really the reason I think it’s so good.”
“Luck and Strange,” Gilmour’s fifth solo album and first new work since 2015’s “Rattle That Lock,” arrives on Friday, Sept. 6.
The tour behind the new record brings Gilmour to the Intuit Dome in Inglewood on Oct. 25, followed by three nights at the Hollywood Bowl from Oct. 29-31. Outside of five shows at Madison Square Garden in November, these are currently your only chances to see Gilmour in the United States.
“Writing music, writing these tunes, is a rolling process that goes on and on,” Gilmour says on a video call from the old barn he converted into a recording studio years ago at his English home.
“I’m constantly coming across pieces of music that I recorded five years ago, 10 years ago, in some cases as long as 30 years ago. Half-formed songs which haven’t quite made it onto something.
“Some of the ones on this new album are brand-spanking glossy new,” he says, but not all. “One of them has the chorus from a demo I recorded with my 2-year-old son in the room. He was going, ‘Sing, daddy, sing!’ very loudly in the room while I was trying to put this little thing down.
“Now he’s 29,” he adds.
About a year and a half ago, Gilmour and his wife decided to take a variety of works in progress and shape them into an album. They left their farmhouse in West Sussex for two rooms in London: one a studio, the other for Samson, a novelist and poet, to write lyrics in.
“We’d do four- or five-day working weeks every week because we wanted to knock the slowness on the head, get that snowball rolling down that big hill, and move on,” Gilmour says. “And that worked brilliantly well in my view.”
He and Samson have written songs together going back years, both for his solo albums and the final few Pink Floyd records. Typically, he’d play her pieces of music as he worked so she could pick and choose ones to provide lyrics for.
“I work on my own, making a tiny bedroom sound like the L.A. Sports Arena, and at the end of the day I’ll head into the house, have a glass of wine, maybe, and play what I’ve been working on for Polly and whoever else is there,” Gilmour says. “If something has that little spark that catches her ear, she’ll say, ‘Could I have that one on a piece of tape?’ as we used to call it.
“She’ll sometimes go for a four-hour walk with it, playing her headphones, until what the song is about decides to reveal itself to her,” he says.
The title track “Luck and Strange,” like many of the tracks on the album, touches on themes of aging and mortality, blending wistfulness and hope over dreamy melodies and Gilmour’s lyrical guitar lines. (The song also features keyboards by the late Richard Wright of Pink Floyd, with whom Gilmour and others created the basic track while jamming in Gilmour’s barn in 2007.)
Samson’s lyrics reflect the seeming golden age as England recovered from World War II and social strictures loosened.
“Our prime minister, Harold Macmillan at the time, said, ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ and a lot of freeing of conventions happened,” Gilmour says. “A lot of great music happened. There was big change in our world for what at the time looked like for the better.
“But now I would say we are moving into a bit of a darker time,” he continues. “There are wars. There are lunatics running countries, naming no names.
“I guess the question is, was that normal? Or is this normal? Or is it a cyclical thing?”
For ‘Dark and Velvet Nights,” Gilmour discovered that Samson had unknowingly already written lyrics for one of the harder rock grooves on the record.
“I can’t quite remember where the groove came from, but it was banging away in my head, this particularly sort of rhythm,” he says. “I thought I’ll try and pop into my studio and waste some time putting it down. Didn’t turn out to be a waste of time.
“It was all sounding really great, I was really loving the groove of it, and I thought, ‘Right now, I want to sing, but I don’t have any words,’” Gilmour says. “And a poem that Polly had written for me for our wedding anniversary was sitting on my desk on top of a pile of papers and notes and bits of music, and I just picked it up.
“In that serendipitous way, the scansion fitted almost perfectly,” he says of how the words fit the rhythm of the music. “I just sang it and played it later for Polly. She said that’s brilliant and obviously adjusted things here and there. We fiddled with it as one does and turned it into that lovely song.”
Collaborators old and new
With the songs in good shape, Gilmour set about finding collaborators with whom to make the record. Some, such as keyboardist Roger Eno and bassist Guy Pratt, were old friends with whom he’d recorded in the past.
“I plucked up my courage and rang Steve Gadd,” he says of the legendary drummer who’s played on scores of classic songs from Paul Simon and James Taylor to Steely Dan and Chick Corea. “Said to him, ‘Could you give me a week in London?’ And he said, ‘Sure!’”
But perhaps the key decision he made, with a nudge from Samson, was hiring Charlie Andrew, a producer best known for his work with the modern British band alt-J, to oversee the album in the studio. Andrew, who is in his early 40s, is roughly half the age of the 78-year-old Gilmour, and that worked perfectly for what Gilmour wanted, he says.
“I’ve done a fair bit (of producing) myself, but I wanted another outside opinion and I couldn’t think who would be best for the job,” Gilmour says. “There are a lot of people around who I’ve worked with before, who I know and love. But this felt like something new was needed.
“I would sit and moan to my wife, Polly, about how hard it is to find someone,” he says. “She comes up with a lot of suggestions. Think about this guy. This guy did Paul McCartney. And she came across (Andrew), started playing some alt-J music to herself, and thinking, ‘This has really got something very nice to it.’ Played it to me and said, ‘Why don’t you give him a ring?’”
Gilmour called Andrew and invited him to the farmhouse to listen to the music he’d been making. Andrew came, listened, and said he’d be thrilled to do the record, Gilmour says.
Andrew brought along drummer Adam Betts, bassist Tom Herbert, and keyboardist Rob Gentry. Gilmour, who during the pandemic lockdowns, did regular livestream performances as the Von Trapped Family with his wife and kids, recruited his daughter Romany to sing and play harp.
“It was one of those lucky things,” he says. “I can’t tell you how great he has been for the project, for me. He has a very healthy lack of knowledge of my work, of Pink Floyd’s work, and anything else to do with it.
“So you’re starting off from a point of quite essential honesty, where there’s no sort of mythological barriers in the way. He felt free, and I was very thrilled that he felt free to offer his opinions in a very direct way. That was incredibly productive.”
Gilmour was still finishing up plans for the music he’ll play on tour. As with his last shows in Southern California, two nights at the Hollywood Bowl and one at the Kia Forum in March 2016, he’ll likely play two sets divided by an intermission this time, too.
“What I sort of want to do is cover the whole period to some extent,” he says of the Pink Floyd songs he’ll play. “All the way through from that first incarnation I was part of (starting in 1967) through to ’85. And then the ’85 to ’95 years, there’s two albums in there. A bit from all those, and from some of my solo albums. Definitely from ‘Rattle That Lock.’
“I’m concentrating more on songs that I essentially was the driving force behind writing the music,” he says of the Pink Floyd catalog from which he’s often performed such songs as “Comfortably Numb,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V),” and “Wish You Were Here” on past outings.
The current shows and settings are light years from that which Gilmour and Pink Floyd experienced on their first trip to Los Angeles and the United States in the summer of 1968.
“We stayed in the Landmark on that drive north of Hollywood. It’s the one where Janis Joplin died,” he says. “It was a madhouse. And we didn’t bring much gear with us from England because we were on a tiny, tiny budget. We didn’t actually have a tour booked. We were picking up dates and doing them all over the States.
“It wasn’t like it became,” Gilmour says. “It was very, very, very belt and braces. But we got to know a bunch of very nice people. We spent some time hanging out with Alice Cooper and his band. They were very jolly, nice people. And the Chambers Brothers I hung around with for a while back in those days. Very nice, great guys. We went and hung out with Frank Zappa at Tom Mix’s cabin in Laurel Canyon.
After two nights at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles in July, the band drove north for four shows at the Avalon in San Francisco and two more at the Sound Factory in Sacramento in August. Returning to Southern California, they played another two shows at The Bank, a long-forgotten venue in Torrance.
“I can’t remember how long the whole tour was, but there wasn’t much of it in place before we left England,” Gilmour says. “All the gear that we had fitted in the back of a station wagon, and our roadie Peter Watts would drive it to the next town and then go to a music shop to rent amps and things like that for the shows.
“Not the way people think it was,” he says, and laughs. “Yeah, it was fun.”
