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.
When they got to work on a project like The Wall, the band hierarchy behaved differently. 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 sole reason the song has any feeling, and other songs like ‘Young Lust’ are among the best straight-ahead rock songs they’ve ever recorded.
In comparison, ‘Is There Anyone Out There’ is a slightly different beast. At this point, the listener is seeing deep into Pink’s head as he stares outside the wall to see if he can reconnect with the outside world again. The acoustic guitar line they chose may have been stunning, but Gilmour was more than prepared to delegate his guitar duties to someone else to complete the task.
In 1992, Gilmour stated that the major reason he did not participate on the track was that he lacked the discipline to play the fingerpicking lines, adding, “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 do it properly fingerstyle.” While Gilmour could have played the passage with a pick, there’s a sense of desperation in hearing only the fingerstyle that works best for the song.
That music generally conveys an exotic tone when played, but in the context of the story, it only emphasizes Pink’s disconnection from reality, as if he’s trapped in a mental black hole and drifting across space. If anything, the lonely guitar makes ‘Comfortably Numb’ feel even more triumphant in comparison. Hearing Gilmour’s solo feels like bringing someone back to life when they’ve gone so deep inside their head.
