David Gilmour Recalls The Experience Of Writing 1987 “Sorrow”

The Making of A Classic

The production of Pink Floyd’s thirteenth studio album “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” was not without problems. It was the first LP without founding member Roger Waters and while working on it, there were legal problems about the use of the band’s name. It was different from its predecessors because it wasn’t a concept album and they recorded it on David Gilmour’s houseboat.

Gilmour called it “an alarming time” especially with the departure of Waters who was “a big big part of it, obviously — a major talent and our primary lyricist.” The closing track for the LP was “Sorrow” and as the latest preview for Pink Floyd’s The Later Years box set, they released a 2019 mix of the song.

Gilmour recalls “the moment the whole lyric for ‘Sorrow’ came to me like magic from nowhere. I sat down and just basically wrote down five verses for a song which I had no music for. … I’ve never done it that way round before — it’s always been music first. With ‘Sorrow,’ the words came first and then I wrote the music to fit it, and went in and demoed it and put it all together in the studio.”

He adds, “That, for me, was the moment when I thought we were all in the clear; it was the direction we wanted to be going, and it was a good song. It gave context to the other songs and made me have confidence in where we were going.”

Check out the remix version below.