Sorrow

The opening guitar line was recorded live in the empty Los Angeles Sports Arena. Not a studio, not a plate, not a pedal — an actual empty building, miked so the natural reverb of all that vacant space came back into the take. Eight seconds of David Gilmour playing into a room with nobody in it.

That detail tells you most of what you need to know about A Momentary Lapse of Reason. It is the Pink Floyd album nobody defends. Roger Waters was gone — he had called the band a spent force and sued to keep them from using the name. Critics savaged it as corporate rock wearing prog clothes, and they weren’t entirely wrong. Waters had been the lyrical heart of the band and its conceptual engine, and when he left, Gilmour could have just cashed checks on the legacy.

He went and stood in an empty arena instead.

“Sorrow” is about grief, but not the loud kind. It is the grief of a man standing at a distance from his own life, watching it happen to someone else. The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land, Gilmour sings, and the line is delivered with the flatness of someone reporting weather. There is no weeping in it. There is numbness, the kind that comes after the weeping is done.

The words can only carry so much of that. The guitar carries the rest. Gilmour doesn’t solo on this song so much as testify — each bend, each long sustain holds more than the lyric can say. The words describe sorrow. The guitar is sorrow. That is the whole transaction, and he made it in a building with the reverb of his own absence built into the sound.

It is not The Wall. It was never going to be, and it isn’t trying to be. It is a man whose collaborator walked out, who had every reason to coast, choosing instead to go find a tone in an empty room and keep the emptiness in the recording.

He recorded the opening alone in a vacant arena. You can hear the room. That was the point.