David Gilmour’s guitar playing is so recognizable, even after all these years, that it goes beyond a signature style and approaches its own musical language. Perhaps the right word is “voice.” When I hear Gilmour’s guitar, I always know that it is Gilmour who is speaking to me even when I don’t understand his sui generis and storied dialect. In a pop musical universe of interchangeable— sometimes even sampled and recycled—sounds, this is high praise.
Here is a new tune, “Louder than Words,” released yesterday, taken from 1993’s Division Bell sessions. It is part of a new Pink Floyd album, The Endless River, which will be released on November 9. According to NME, the band has announced that The Endless River will be the last new Floyd music they will release, though Gilmour has some solo tracks forthcoming which feature the late PF keyboardist Rick Wright. Also Roger Waters, who left the band in 1985, is angry about something.
Says Gilmour of his newly released creation, “The music for ‘Louder Than Words’ is from those final sessions, the three of us playing together on the houseboat Astoria with Rick’s idiosyncratic keyboards reminding me now that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. At the start of the album I asked Polly [Samson] to write the lyrics. She felt that what I played her didn’t need words, that hearing us play was more interesting. In the end she wrote just this one, which expresses, beautifully I think, the way the three of us, me, Nick and Rick have something when we play together, that has a magic that is louder than words.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eJZKbtmFF0#t=184
