Today, David Gilmour releases the music video for “The Piper’s Call,” the lead single off his next album Luck and Strange, which Sony Music will release on September 6.
Filmmaker Gavin Elder directed the video recorded when Luck and Strange were being made. In addition to co-producer Charlie Andrew, Polly Samson, Romany & Gabriel Gilmour, world-class drummer Steve Gadd, bassist Guy Pratt, engineer Matt Glasbey, keyboard player Rob Gentry, assistant engineer Luie Stylianou, and Wesley the dog, the video was shot at Ely Cathedral in Astoria and in Brighton.
For “The Piper’s Call,” David Samson, his co-writer and longtime colleague of the previous thirty years, wrote the lyrics while Gilmour wrote the music.
This is Gilmour’s first album of original music in nine years, Luck and Strange, which was recorded over the course of five months in Brighton and London. David and Charlie Andrew, who is most known for his collaborations with ALT-J and Marika Hackman, produced the album.
Regarding this new collaboration, David says, “We invited Charlie to the house, so he came and listened to some demos, and said things like, ‘Well, why does there have to be a guitar solo there?’ and ‘Do they all fade out? Can’t some of them just end?’ He has a wonderful lack of knowledge or respect for this past of mine. He’s very direct and not in any way overawed, and I love that. That is just so good for me because the last thing you want is people just deferring to you.”
Polly Samson, Gilmour’s co-writer and collaborator of the last thirty years, wrote most of the lyrics for the album.
Regarding the poetic subjects addressed in Luck and Strange, Samson remarks, “It’s written from the point of view of being older; mortality is the constant.” David also said, “We spent a load of time during and after lockdown talking about and thinking about those kind of things.” Additionally, Polly has found working with Charlie Andrew to be liberating. “He wants to know what the songs are about, he wants everyone who’s playing on them to have the ideas that are in the lyric informing their playing. I have particularly loved it for that reason.”
Eight new tracks and a lovely rendition of “Between Two Points” by The Montgolfier Brothers are included on the CD, which also incorporates photographs and artwork by the well-known artist Anton Corbijn.
Will Gardner provided the string and choral arrangements for the record, which also features contributions from Guy Pratt & Tom Herbert on bass, Adam Betts, Steve Gadd, and Steve DiStanislao on drums, Rob Gentry, and Roger Eno on keyboards. Richard Wright, the late Pink Floyd keyboardist, is also featured on the title tune, which was captured in 2007 during a jam session in David’s barn.
Charlie Gilmour wrote the lyrics for the album’s last track, “Scattered,” which served as the inspiration for the photograph and design of the album’s cover, which was created by Anton Corbijn.
David remarks about collaborating with his family on Luck and Strange, “Polly and I have been writing together for over thirty years and the Von Trapped live streams showed the great blend of Romany’s voice and harp-playing and that led us into a feeling of discarding some of the past that I’d felt bound to and that I could throw those rules out and do whatever I felt like doing, and that has been such a joy.”
