“The cradle rocks over an abyss and common sense tells us that our existence is only a brief ray of light between two eternities made of darkness,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in the incipit of his autobiography. Speak, I remember. “Although they are a pair of absolutely identical twins, man, as a rule, looks into the prenatal abyss more calmly than the one he is heading towards (at about four hundred and fifty heartbeats per hour)”.
Old age and the inevitability of death are not very rock'n'roll topics, or perhaps they have become so by force since a good part of the protagonists of the golden age are heading towards 80, when they have not already passed it. They are certainly themes that interest David Gilmour who peeked at that passage by Nabokov in the 70s while he was on a plane. Fifty years later, the passage on the glimmer of light between two eternities has emerged in a song composed with his wife and writer Polly Samson. It is called A Single Sparkit's soft, it has an old-fashioned singability and somehow dictates the tone of the album Luck and Strange which has to do with death, old age, ghosts, memories, love, family.
Since he started making solo albums again in 2006, with his extraordinarily dilated time and zero desire to be a rock star, David Gilmour has done nothing but confront the cumbersome and essential legacy of Pink Floyd. Just as he reluctantly took over the leadership after the epochal row with Roger Waters, who, egocentric as he was, mocked him thinking he was incapable of getting the band back on its feet, as a soloist Gilmour has partly indulged and partly frustrated the expectations of certain fans, who want from him the album that Pink Floyd will never make again or at least something similar. They want eternity, but he is only capable of giving them a brief glimmer of light.
Also Luck and Strangewhich coincidentally will be released on September 6, Roger Waters' 81st birthday, is based on this conflict, even though it is billed as a breakup album. There's this story that producer Charlie Andrew asked Gilmour why every song has to have a solo, changing the tone of the album with this question and another about the habit of placing fade-outs at the end of songs. It's a nice story, but the truth is that seven out of nine (if you don't count the already famous Yes, I Have Ghosts) the songs on the album that contain guitar solos. And they are performed wonderfully well.
This is to say that Luck and Strange It's not a radically different album from the previous ones, even if Gilmour may have actually benefited from the presence of a producer who wasn't intimidated by his story, one who asked him «Rick who?» to the umpteenth story about his friend Richard Wright. The songs without solos are the 46-second instrumental Short life And Singswhich is therefore the only real song without the traditional solo. Gilmour is Gilmour and is bigger than a sentence from Andrew and a beautiful narration.
And so there are some sounds that maybe you wouldn't expect, but there are also many passages that remind you of Pink Floyd from various eras, in addition to the sound of a beating heart that is so Dark Side of the Moon. More than the change of producer and musicians, in the album I feel, at least on a spiritual level, more clearly the influence of the Von Trapped Family live shows, the online home shows made all together passionately by Gilmour's extended family during the lockdown, a cocoon (as the musician calls it in Sings) where he felt protected. The live broadcasts were a way to launch Samson's novel A Theatre of Dreamers set in Leonard Cohen's Hydra and gave the musician the opportunity to indulge in his more folk side, moving even further away from the Pink Floyd idea that music should be an elaborate show and not just a little jam session among friends.
And so Luck and Strange is a cosmic-existential folk album in which it is easy to trace the influence of Pink Floyd and at the same time enjoy the more homely and less ambitious style of a musician who has no intention of spending too much time on tour (and who wants to make another album as soon as possible). The suspended atmosphere, the dripping piano notes and the drawn-out guitar notes of the rather conventional instrumental Black Cat pave the way for Luck and Strange. If it sounds like it has something of Pink Floyd, it's because it's based on a 2007 rock-blues jam (present here as a bonus track) that featured Rick Wright on Hammond and electric piano, and you can hear it. The lyrics have to do with the fortune of having grown up in a happy era, the '60s, before harsh reality came knocking on our doors again, recently with the war in Ukraine that hit the guitarist hard, being his daughter-in-law originally from Kharkiv. Being the children of a “golden age”, having been influenced by the “masters of the six strings of an expanding universe”: Gilmour calls it the fortune of the baby boomers, Nabokov would perhaps call it “the contrapuntal genius of human destiny”.
A man of few words, a musician who prefers to say the unspeakable with his guitar rather than the banal with words, Gilmour relies on his wife for the lyrics as always, who at this point is the person with whom he has collaborated the longest in his life. With a work of filing done in close contact with her husband, Samson makes him tell in The Piper's Call of the crisis of the early 90s, when the musician snorted too much cocaine and had accepted the classic Faustian pact, the soul in exchange for success, a story that is very Welcome to the Machine even though the music is a mix of acoustic folk and ruggedness The Wall so much so that in the instrumental special one feels like singing “oooooh, I need a dirty woman”.
As far as Covid is concerned, Gilmour was very scared and in Sings sings about the comforting feeling that lockdown offers, so comforting that you never want to get out of it. It's a love song both for his wife and for the possibility of isolating yourself from the pain of the world and therefore has chiaroscuro colors, as well as a chorus with a melody that has the typical naive elegance of certain 60s pop. The lyrics of the powerful Dark and Velvet Nights It is a reworking of a letter written by Samson to her husband on their wedding anniversary. Charlie Gilmour (son of Samson and the poet Heathcote Williams) is among the authors of the words. Scatteredthe couple's daughter Romany sings the Montgolfier Brothers cover Between Two Points explaining with his candor that we must laugh at the punches that life gives you and making us understand that Luck and Strange It's not meant to be a big album, but a family affair.
One day someone will write the definitive essay on rock in the old age. Every time a record like Luck and Strange we are divided between those who love it madly because it recalls the past and those who criticize it harshly because only a shadow of the past remains. They are both right and both exaggerate its merits and defects respectively. We must surrender to the evidence and take the best of this era in which the generation luck and strangethat of Gilmour and Waters, Dylan and McCartney, Jagger and Simon and all the other rockers born in the post-war period, is exploring virgin territory. Probably none of them in the '60s and '70s thought that in 2024 they would continue to make music and therefore to tell their story, directly or indirectly, using rock which was a youthful and disruptive style, which did not want to sing about death and decay, but rather offer with its prodigious vitality a way to exorcise them and delude themselves that they would never arrive. And instead here we are.
David Gilmour approaches the subject in his own way, that is, with the class and magnificent calm of a musician who may not have made peace with Waters, but with the legacy of Pink Floyd, yes, and who even when he tries to do things slightly differently cannot help but evoke the beautiful records of the 70s. He goes around saying that this is his best album since The Dark Side of the Moon and it's an exaggeration and he knows it too, even though he prefers it Wish You Were Here. But it's true that Luck and Strange has its own stamp and charm, a singular way of being melancholic, but never to the end, of telling in a contemplative and never gloomy, nor even desperate way the brief glimmer of light and the eternity made of darkness, as when in A Simple Spark Gilmour sings that despair makes him bend at the knees and he does it in a lovely way.
In case On an Island And Rattle That Lock they haven't convinced you, Luck and Strange is the definitive proof that Gilmour is not, cannot be the guitar hero that many would like to have back, but a 78-year-old who prefers to play with his harpist daughter and sing about small feelings instead of touring the world with shows made of gigantic music and universal messages. Fortunately he has lost neither the magnificent color of his voice, nor the touch that makes his solos (yes, precisely those that theoretically should no longer be there) particularly eloquent. Like when he starts playing in Scattereda song about the absurd claim of stopping the passing of time, and you get lost in the flow of the music and you think that what he can't say with words, Gilmour says with his fingers.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
