David Gilmour raised some eyebrows during the summer. In an electronic press kit shared with press, the Pink Floyd guitarist commented that his new album, Luck and Strange, is “the best album I’ve made since Dark Side of the Moon, since 1973.”
That’s certainly a bold comparison — though in subsequent conversation Gilmour notes that Dark Side‘s successor, Wish You Were Here, is actually his favorite Pink Floyd album. But it nevertheless made clear how happy he is with his fifth solo album, and first in nine years.
“The album feels like a solid body of cohesive work,” Gilmour, 78, tells Billboard via Zoom from the Astoria Recording Studio, in a houseboat docked on the Thames in London that he bought in 1986. “It’s the cohesiveness of the whole thing — the writing, the work, the thrill it still gives me to listen to it all the way through as an album. There’s a consistency of thought and of feeling that runs through it that excites me in a way that makes me make those comparisons.”
The nine-track Luck and Strange is, he adds, the product of a “liberation” he felt going into the studio.
Gilmour was working on new material when the pandemic hit in 2020, bringing the world to a stop — but also opening some new vistas for him and his family. Gilmour’s wife and frequent lyricist Polly Samson published a novel, A Theatre For Dreamers, the week of lockdown, which scotched planned promotional appearances. Their son Charlie came up with the idea of doing livestreams, during which Gilmour would play some songs by Leonard Cohen, who was a character in the book.
“It started pretty much only on Holly’s book as a focus,” Gilmour recalls, “but then it became broader. We got our daughter Romany to sing along and play with me, and that showed me that we have got that lovely sort of family tonality that happens — Beach Boys, Everly Brothers, other people. These artists that we loved in the past. All these things came together to create a different mood and a different feeling for the making of this album. It left me feeling I don’t need to stick with any pre-rule book or anything that’s gone before. I can be freer to do anything I feel like. That became emphasized for me.”
As he set out to make Luck and Strange in earnest, Gilmour veered from previous collaborators such as Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, Chris Thomas and Bob Ezrin and brought in a new (and younger) face with Charlie Andrew, a Music Producers Guild Award winner who worked with alt-j on its Mercury Prize-winning An Awesome Wave, James, Bloc Party and others. One of his first questions — “Do we need another guitar solo here?” — made clear that Gilmour was open to fresh input this time out (though rest assured there are plenty of guitar solos on the album).
“His lack of being over-awed by my reputation was a big plus for me,” Gilmour says. “Pink Floyd wasn’t one of his influences…but (Andrew) liked the music I was working on, and I liked him. Polly liked him very much; she found him, really, and my acceptance of what he was showing me and the direction he was proffering was an interesting and exciting way for us to be moving forward.”
“I didn’t specifically know a lot of his previous work, and I purposefully didn’t immerse myself in it as I just wanted to come at it with a fresh angle,” Andrew tells Billboard. “All I tried to do is keep it coherent as a body of work and make sure that there’s a flow to it. When we started out one of the first things I asked David was, ‘What are we making this for?’ For me, there’s more to it than ‘here’s a bunch of songs’ and just release them. I think it should be a bit more of one whole thing. I know David thinks the same.”
Luck and Strange — recorded primarily at Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios — also features drummers Steve Gadd, Adam Betts and Steve DiStanislao and keyboardist Roger Eno and Rob Gentry, along with longtime bassist Guy Pratt, who started playing with Pink Floyd in 1987 and has remained by Gilmour’s side ever since. (He’s also part of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets band.)
“It felt much more like a family,” Gilmour says, “much more like a group of people working toward a common end than I’ve felt for quite awhile.”
While not a concept album, Gilmour acknowledges that themes of mortality and retrospection unite Luck and Strange’s mostly midtempo songs — two of which, “Black Cat” and “Vita Brevis,” are instrumentals, and one a cover of the Montgolfier Brothers’ “Between Two Points,” sung by daughter Romany. She plays harp on the album as well, while son Gabriel Gilmour provides some backing vocals. “You discover the record as you work on it,” producer Andrew notes. “You don’t start it knowing exactly what it’s going to be. I really wanted to understand what the lyrics were focusing on, and Polly has been an incredible help in that regard, taking me and the musicians through the lyrics and what they mean.”
Particularly poignant is Luck and Strange‘s title track, which began in 2007 and includes the late Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright, who was part of Gilmour’s touring band at the time.
“It’s wonderful to have a track that he’s actually a part of,” says Gilmour, who included a lengthy “barn jam” version of “Luck and Strange” as a bonus track. “Rick’s unusual playing style pours out of it and makes me sad that he’s not around to take more part in what I’m doing. Obviously, I worked on it later to add in these bridges and choruses and things. I don’t know why, in 2015 or ’14, that I didn’t listen to that track and go, ‘Yeah, let’s go,’ but this time it demanded to be heard and worked on, so we did.”
As Luck and Strange comes out Gilmour is gearing up for a tour, his first in eight years, that begins Oct. 9 with the first of six shows at London’s famed Royal Albert Hall. He’ll also play four Los Angeles area dates — starting Oct. 25 at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif., and moving to three concerts at the Hollywood Bowl — and five at Madison Square Garden in New York, wrapping up Nov. 10.
“I’m thinking more modern times than old times,” Gilmour says of the setlist, “but there’ll be some songs from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s. All the way through, there’ll be some stuff, but I’m focusing perhaps a bit more on the new album and the newer material.” And, he hopes, there will be more new material in less than the nine years he took before making Luck and Strange.
“My intention is to gather some of these people together and get back and start working on something else in the new year,” Gilmour says. “What you want is a few things to get started with and hope it all starts flowing, and that’s what I’m hoping will happen.”