The musicians David Gilmour said touched his heart the most
When you’ve been in the rock star world for as long as David Gilmour, there comes a point where you almost become numb to any kind of new music.
It’s not that the charts don’t have anything good when you look at them, but compared to some of the greatest tunes that came out back in the day, it’s hard for some of the greatest rock stars to become that invested when they first got rocked by people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. But even with as many classic artists that Gilmour saw as a kid, he felt that a few have yet to wear out their welcome whenever he puts on their new record.
But that’s no tall order when you talk about the same person who saw Jimi Hendrix in his prime when he first played in London. There isn’t a single guitar player in that room who wasn’t weeping when they saw what Hendrix could do, but compared to every other guitar player who wanted to play as fast as possible, Gilmour wanted to approach every one of his solos more like a conversation than anything else.
His guitar playing was always more lyrical than what you would hear out of your average guitar genius, and a lot of that came from him internalising every single piece of rock and roll that he heard. He was able to channel a lot of different genres whenever he played, and while anyone could tell that he was used to making the same kind of bluesy bends that people like Jeff Beck did, it was impossible to find any reference point for the solo in ‘Comfortably Numb’ when you first hear it.
Even though he does a lot of talking with his guitar, Gilmour was also much more interested in artists who had something to say. He didn’t get into the business to play the same kind of smooth guitar lines that everyone else was doing, and when listening to the way that the best songwriters phrased their songs, Gilmour could get just as much happiness out of listening to someone quote their own heart rather than play some ripping solo.
He could appreciate people like Eddie Van Halen, but people like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen were always the ones that touched him deeply, saying, “There are lots of things that other people bracket in with what we or I do, but I don’t quite recognise it. I mean, I’m much more likely to be inspired and moved by something by Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen or a number of other people than the ones that people think are like us.”
Which is shocking, coming from a guy who never considered himself the primary lyricist in the band. Polly Sampson was the one behind many of the lyrics on the later Floyd albums without Roger Waters, but while she gets a lot of flak in the fan community, it’s not like she doesn’t have her fair share of fantastic lyrics that could stand alongside what Waters had done when he first started to write about empathy.
And one quick thing: you notice how neither of Gilmour’s favourites were prog bands? That’s because Gilmour never considered himself progressed in the truest sense of the word. He definitely had the same long songs that people like Genesis and King Crimson did during their prime, but when you look at what they had been doing throughout their career, Floyd was looking to be something a bit more esoteric than bands that tried to turn their music into exercises.
It was an endurance test to make it through some of their albums when they were recording them, but when they were finished, they at least had a statement to show for it that wasn’t only the typical rock and roll songs. They made statements just like Dylan and Cohen did, and that was much more important than any kind of musical decathlon.
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