Most artists want to push themselves when they come into the studio. It gets tiresome if every track sounds the same as the last one, and if it means changing things up in the mixing process or playing something you’re not sure you can pull off, it makes the ultimate product all the more satisfying when everything comes together. However, there are some songs that artists cannot master, and David Gilmour said that he could never play the guitar breaks of The Wall’s ‘Is There Anybody Out There’.
If Pink Floyd needed a guitar solo, they couldn’t have done better than Gilmour in the rock world. He was one of the driving factors behind the band’s transition after Syd Barrett quit, and his riffs on songs like ‘Money’ and ‘Time’ are as important to the songwriting as anything Roger Waters wrote at the time.
By the time they started working on The Wall, the band hierarchy had changed. Since Waters created the concept for the album, half of the album felt like he was using the band as a bunch of backing musicians who couldn’t get away from anything he hadn’t written for them.
That’s OK as long as there’s a compelling story behind everything, but Gilmour did manage to take home some of the album’s best tracks. As much as this is Waters’ story, hearing Gilmour’s solo on ‘Comfortably Numb’ is the only reason that the music has any feeling, and other songs like ‘Young Lust’ are among the best straight-ahead rock compositions that they’ve ever
‘Is There Anybody Out There’ is a bit of a different beast by comparison. At this point, the listener is looking deep into Pink’s mind as he looks outside the wall to see if he can make contact with the outside world again. The acoustic guitar line that they picked may have been absolutely beautiful, but Gilmour was more than willing to hand over his guitar duties to someone else to get the job done.
Recalling in 1992, Gilmour said that the main reason he didn’t play on the track was because he didn’t have the discipline to play the fingerpicking lines, saying, “There were quite a few [session musicians] on there. There’s a guy playing the Spanish guitar on ‘Is There Anybody Out There’; I could play it with a leather pick but couldn’t play it properly fingerstyle.”
While Gilmour could have played the part with a pick, there’s a lot of desperation in hearing just the fingerstyle that works better for the track. That style usually evokes an exotic tone whenever people play it, but in the context of the story, it just further emphasises how far gone Pink is from reality, almost as if he’s stuck in a mental black hole and drifting through space.
If anything, this lonely guitar makes ‘Comfortably Numb’ feel all the more triumphant by comparison. When listening to someone who is that far gone inside their head, hearing Gilmour’s solo sounds like bringing him back to life.
