On the Turning Away
The solo that closes “On the Turning Away” runs nearly four minutes, and every note matters.
Roger Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985. He was convinced he was taking the band’s soul with him. The lawsuits were vicious, the press declared Floyd dead, and David Gilmour disagreed.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason was Gilmour’s answer. He built a Pink Floyd album around guitar rather than concept, melody rather than message. Critics at the time dismissed it as Pink Floyd lite, missing Waters’ lyrical depth. They weren’t entirely wrong. But they missed what Gilmour understood, which is that sometimes the sound is the meaning.
The song opens with one of Gilmour’s most beautiful guitar tones — clean, sustaining, impossibly warm. It builds slowly, adding layers of synth and choir, but it always returns to that guitar.
The lyrics are about compassion, about refusing to ignore suffering. On the turning away from the pale and downtrodden. No more turning away from the weak and the weary. They’re earnest in a way Waters rarely allowed himself to be. There’s no cynicism here, no dark irony. Just a straightforward plea for empathy, delivered over a bed of sound that makes the message feel earned.
Live, the song fills stadiums without ever losing intimacy. The light show pulses. The crowd sways. None of it leans on the words.
Waters built cathedrals of anger. Gilmour built cathedrals of light, and he built them out of the only thing he had left after the soul supposedly walked out the door. Four minutes of guitar, no message underneath it, and the message arrives anyway.
