David Gilmour Feels the ‘Magic’ of Working with His Kids on New LP (Exclusive)

• ‘Luck and Strange’ is former Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s fifth solo record and his first in nine years
• The album features contributions from his wife Polly and their three kids Romany, Charlie and Gabriel
• “Everything is just smiling on me at the moment. I’m really enjoying myself,” he tells PEOPLE

On Luck and Strange, former Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmour’s upcoming solo album, it’s all in the family. His wife, the novelist and journalist Polly Samson, penned the words, and Gilmour’s three grown children — daughter Romany and sons Gabriel and Charlie — made contributions to the record via singing and songwriting. To Gilmour, having his family members on his new album was liberating from what he used to do on his previous solo outings. 

“I don’t feel that I have to do things a certain way,” the British rocker, 78, tells PEOPLE. “I don’t have to use a certain type of musician or anything else.” He also adds: “There’s something about voices from the same family that I think has a magic to it.”

Showcasing Gilmour’s signature guitar playing and voice that have been synonymous with Pink Floyd for decades, Luck and Strange (out on Friday, Sept. 6) is his first new album in nine years – an occasion he is marking with a string of shows in Rome, London, Los Angeles and New York City beginning on Sept. 27. Gilmour is so enamored with his latest record — which also features veteran musicians such as drummer Steve Gadd and bassist Guy Pratt — that he recently described it as the best work he has done since Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon. 

“The joy I have had making this album, the joy I still have listening to it every day, which I do on every car journey and everything else—I’m still really madly in love with it,” he says of Luck and Strange. “I think it’s a really fine piece of work. Polly’s lyrics are the best she’s written. Everything is just smiling on me at the moment. I’m really enjoying myself.”

It isn’t the first time Gilmour has collaborated with his family on music. Between 2020 and 2021, during the pandemic lockdown, he launched the Von Trapped series, which consisted of livestream musical performances from his home featuring himself accompanied by his family members. But don’t call it nepotism as Gilmour says it’s different from that.

“Romany writes, plays the harp and sings,” he says. “She has a beautiful voice. It’s something that she has earned. Charlie is a great writer himself. He’s written a very good book [Featherhood] and he is writing another one. Polly is an author nonpareil. We had so much fun doing those [livestreams].”

A part of Gilmour’s enjoyment of making the new record can be attributed to producer Charlie Andrew, whose previous credits included indie rock acts Alt-J and Marika Hackman. Andrew’s lack of familiarity with Pink Floyd’s music was interesting to Gilmour, who had previously collaborated with longtime producers Bob Ezrin and Phil Manzanera. 

“I felt a new approach was needed,” Gilmour says. “I was talking about my frustrations of finding this perfect person to Polly, and she jumped on the internet and started looking for producers. And she found this Charlie Andrew, who’d won a Mercury Prize. Polly listened to Alt-J and other things he produced and she said, “Hey, listen to this. This is interesting.” So I listened and said, “Yeah, let’s give it a try.” He came down and listened to some things, and declared himself very keen on coming on board.”

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The lyrics on Luck and Strange by Samson, 62, who has been Gilmour’s songwriting partner for 30 years, touch on the themes of aging and mortality, which took on a greater resonance during the lockdown. 

“At the time, we thought [COVID] was a death sentence for particularly old people,” Gilmour says. “It was really quite frightening. There was talk of 20% of the population dying from this thing, and we were very scared. Mortality was a subject that we [in Pink Floyd] talked about then and have ever since – it’s one of my topics going back to “Childhood’s End” and “Sorrow.” It’s something we all have to think about at some time. These songs came up one by one over a period of time, and they were just the conversations that we have been having for years about the world that we live in.”

The album’s soulful and bluesy title track poignantly features former Pink Floyd, Richard Wright, on keyboards. It was based on a 15-minute jam recorded at Gilmour’s barn in 2007, a year before Wright’s death at age 65. 

“We felt that by the end of [the 2006 On an Island] tour that we were really gelling and playing very well together as a band,” says Gilmour. “So I invited the core of the band to come down and jam a bit. The morning that we started, I plugged in my Gretsch Duo Jet guitar and played that little riff, and everyone joined in one by one. People’s ears pricked up like, ‘Oh, something’s happening.’ We edited some of the joining in down a little bit, but the whole of the introduction and the verses are that very first jam.”

One of the intriguing tracks from the new record is “Between Two Points,” a cover of an obscure 1999 song by the British indie music duo the Montgolfier Brothers; Gilmour’s new rendition features Romany, 22, on lead vocals.

“That song was one Polly and I knew well and loved,” says Gilmour. “Polly said, ‘Why don’t you cut a backing track and see where we go?’ So one afternoon, I pieced a rough thing together and sat in front of a microphone with the lyrics and read them and thought, ‘Actually, I’m just not this person in these words. They’re fantastic, but they’re vulnerable and troubled in a way that I don’t think people think I am.’ Polly said, ‘We could get Romany to give it a go.’ She was very grumpy, but eventually sang it and magic happened right there in front of our eyes.”

Also keeping it within the family, Gilmour’s son Gabriel, 27, sings background vocals on the album while his older brother Charlie, 35, has a co-writing credit on the majestic orchestral-laden track “Scattered.” A lyric from that song — “A man stands in a river, pushes against the stream/Time is a tide that disobeys and it disobeys me” —  inspired the album’s cover art.  “He wrote two or three verses,” says Gilmour of Charlie’s contribution, “a couple of the verses are mine, and a bit of other brilliant inserts came from Polly. That idea of the man standing in the river trying to hold back the flow is a very visual and appealing idea.”

The album’s most recent single, the uptempo and rhythmic “Dark and Velvet Nights,” is based on Samson’s poem for the couple’s wedding anniversary. “It was sitting on my desk in my studio room,” Gilmour recalls “I put it down in its demo form and wanted something to sing on it, just to see how words would sound on it. So I picked Polly’s poem up, and it had that serendipitous thing where they just fitted.” 

The lovely “Sings” is probably the most romantic song on Luck and Strange, somewhat uncharacteristic of the reflective and somber music that Gilmour made with Pink Floyd. “The warmth and tenderness and deeply personal thought of those words are matched by the music, which is like sitting in a warm bath or wrapped up in your bed. Before it had lyrics, [producer Charlie Andrew] had a whiteboard on the wall with songs and musical tracks and what should happen. And that one had, ‘Lyrics, urgent,’ written next to it. He loved it.”

As he is preparing for the upcoming tour, the rewarding experience of making Luck and Strange has already inspired Gilmour to make a follow-up record. “I have songs and pieces of music and half-formed things that go back years and years,” he says. “So I’ve got a library of things and I’ve got new songs. Polly and I are both quite keen to get on with doing another one. I know I say that after every album…but we genuinely are going to get on with this, and Polly will push me until we really get on with it.”

Meanwhile, Pink Floyd’s music continues to be more popular than ever, even as the band has been on hiatus. Last year marked the 50th birthday of The Dark Side of the Moon, and its follow-up, Wish You Were Here, will celebrate a golden anniversary as well next year. Gilmour, however, is looking ahead rather than back.

“I’m loving what I’m doing 1725661978,” he says, “getting ready to do some shows with a bunch of exciting musicians who are mostly a little bit younger than me, and looking forward to starting on some new work in the new year. So I don’t spend a lot of my time worrying about Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here’s birthdays, I’m afraid.”