The December issue of Relix features a cover story on David Gilmour along with articles on Dead & Company, John Fogerty, Widespread Panic, Dave Rawlings Machine, Grace Potter, Kurt Vile, Glen Hansard, Drive-By Truckers, Alex Bleeker And The Freaks, our annual Holiday Gift Guide and much more. Here’s a first look at the Gilmour feature…

David Gilmour’s guitar sound is completely distinctive: the tone, the touch, the phrasing. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Pink Floyd—which is to say anyone who’s turned on a radio in the last 40 years—knows Gilmour’s work and has at least one of his riffs buried deep in his or her cerebral cortex.

Seconds into his recent solo album, Rattle That Lock, Gilmour’s guitar introduces itself and reminds you of all this. The album opens with a swirly, atmospheric intro to the instrumental “5 A.M.” before the guitar blasts through like a high-powered beam of light slicing through dense London fog. It may as well scream, “I am David Gilmour and this is my album.”

Gilmour laughs at this thought. While at his London studio prepping for a short European tour, he admits that he’s certainly aware of the distinctive power of his guitar. He doesn’t shy away from the idea that those first notes are a means of saying hello and reminding listeners of who he is.

After all these decades as a singular player, does Gilmour still have to work to achieve this distinct sound?

“No, I don’t,” he says. “It’s something that just arrives naturally at this point. I’ve no idea how or where it comes from. It’s nothing I ever attempted. I don’t know if anyone could actually set out to sound as distinctively as possible. It was just one of those strange mysteries. I think there’s some kind of strange peculiarity or my lack of coordination between hands that gives it something rather off and, thus, distinct. I’ve thought about it a lot but I can’t come up with precisely what it is. It’s a gift, I suppose.”

In many ways, it is a gift that just keeps on giving. Pink Floyd were the biggest band in the world during their peak—a remarkable six-year run that included 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, 1975’s Wish You Were Here and 1979’s The Wall, all multi-platinum hits worldwide. Bassist Roger Waters wrote the lyrics for these epochal works, but Gilmour composed much of the music and sang the most memorable songs. His guitar playing was magnificent throughout, with parts that were essential to the songs, not mere adornments or instrumental passages.

“David Gilmour wrote solos that millions of people can hum,” says Warren Haynes, who has studied Pink Floyd’s music for years and recently released a live reworking of their music, The Dark Side of the Mule. “You can’t separate his guitar parts from the songs and that’s incredibly rare. He created something uniquely him, which is the ultimate accomplishment as an instrumentalist.”

Gilmour’s distinct tone, lyrical playing and singing voice run like a continuous thread through the work of Pink Floyd and his four solo albums. Yet, Gilmour doesn’t feel burdened by any pressure to live up to his own esteemed history.

“I work pretty hard, tirelessly and obsessively on any project until I think it’s about as good as I can get it,” he says. “You always think you can take it a little bit further, and I finally feel ready to finish when I’m hovering over, wondering what else I can possibly do to a track. By then I’m always pretty convinced that what I’ve done is good, and I sort of suffer shocks later if people don’t like it.”

Much of Rattle That Lock is a collaboration between Gilmour and his wife, writer Polly Samson, who penned the lyrics to half the songs, including the title track. “Rattle That Lock” is inspired by John Milton’s 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, which explores man’s downfall in 10 books—not exactly typical rock fare.

“Polly’s a writer and just had a book out earlier this year called The Kindness, which had a theme that was very related to Paradise Lost,” Gilmour says. “She spent a lot of time reading the book and trying to understand what it’s all about and, having spent the last three or four years working on that, she found she couldn’t let go of Paradise Lost that easily and it made its entrance again on this song.”

Many of Samson and Gilmour’s collaborations come about after she hears pieces of her husband’s music, sometimes even unfinished songs, and feels lyrical inspiration. Some of the snippets and different pieces of music were assembled by co-producer Phil Manzanera. The Roxy Music guitarist served in the same role on 2006’s On The Island, Gilmour’s previous solo album, and he also plays in his touring band.

“Phil is a very old friend, and he’s full of enthusiasm and a great help when putting together these things,” says Gilmour. “I have thousands of little bits of demos that I occasionally go through, but he loves doing that kind of hunting. And he’ll make little notes, join things together on tape and say, ‘You could do this and have a lovely song.’ A couple of tracks started out that way. ‘Today’ and ‘Faces Of Stone’ both came about through that sort of process.

“Songs have to reveal themselves to you in a way,” Gilmour continues. “Some of the choosing process is the songs choosing themselves. One of them might inspire Polly to write words, for instance. If that happens, the song will move right up the priority list. Same if I hear a vocal melody presenting itself. I consider myself a singer as much as I am a guitar player and I love the popular song—the voices and everything mixed together that makes a song a song.”

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One of Samson and Gilmour’s collaborations is “A Boat Lies Waiting,” a bittersweet reflection on the death of Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright, who passed away in 2008 following a battle with cancer. The song also includes gorgeous harmony vocals by Graham Nash and David Crosby.

“Rick had a 60-foot yacht and he loved sailing it around the world,” says Gilmour. “The music to ‘The Boat Lies Waiting’ was written first and the rhythm of the piano reminded Polly of a rolling boat on the ocean, and it’s very easy to make the connection to Rick—for those of us who knew him well. Other people, of course, knew Rick primarily as a musician, but he was an old seafarer for much of his life. It was as much a part of his identity as being a musician, and as much how we thought about him.”

Wright left Pink Floyd in the late 1970s, during the recording of The Wall, at a time when his bandmates felt that he was not pulling his weight. He returned to the band almost a decade later, though only as a contributing musician instead of an official member. (He was eventually restored to being a partner in the band.) Whatever issues there were between the old collaborators seemed to have been fully buried, and Wright regularly performed in Gilmour’s solo touring band until his death. The guitarist has profoundly felt the loss of his longtime friend and musical collaborator.

“Sometimes, you don’t realize what you’ve got until it’s gone,” says Gilmour. “There have been many moments since [Rick’s death] when I have been looking for something—a keyboard, a piano, a certain sound to complete a song, and the person I would naturally go to for those things is no longer around. It is difficult developing that kind of rapport—a telepathic musical relationship—with people I do not know as well.

“Our relationship developed over many years and we knew what the other was thinking. We could communicate so much without saying more than a few words or nothing at all. We were a step ahead of each other all the time. I knew what he was going to do next and he knew what I was going to do next. That’s not something that’s easily replaced.”

In the world of Pink Floyd, no keyboardist could possibly come up with more complementary parts to a David Gilmour melody or guitar line than Rick Wright. Throughout their greatest works, Gilmour and Wright’s musical ideas mesh seamlessly into one.

To read more, pick up the December issue of Relix…