A Boat Lies Waiting

Album: Rattle That Lock (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • Part of this song dates back to the mid-1990s. David Gilmour explained to Uncut: "The rolling piano in the second half of that song was me playing a piano into a minidisc player a long time ago, before On An Island. I tried to redo it – Roger Eno (Brian Eno's brother) came down and played on it – but in the end I thought my original, with people wandering around the house clattering and things going on in the background, had the right atmosphere so I stuck with that."
  • Listeners may be able to hear the sound of Gilmour's then-baby son, Gabriel, in the background. "That was a song, that was a piece of music that I played originally 20 years ago," said Gilmour to the Canadian Postmedia Network in 2015. "And I played it on a piano in my house with people wandering around, washing up dishes and clattering and I had a new baby, Gabriel, the one who's playing piano on another (new) track ("In Any Tongue"), you can hear him squawking as a newborn baby on that track."
  • The lyrics are a tribute to Gilmour's Pink Floyd bandmate and keyboardist Rick Wright, who died in 2008. "(My wife) Polly (Samson) wrote those words which sort of bring Rick to mind really," said Gilmour.
  • This features backing vocals by both Graham Nash and David Crosby. The CSN legends also sang on the title track of Gilmour's previous album 2006's On An Island.
  • The song opens with a recording of Rick Wright talking about death:

    It's like going into the sea
    There's nothing


    Gilmour told Mojo: "The rolling piano was a bit like waves, and Rick's big thing was sailing. He practically lived on his boat, sailing across the Atlantic. He was an old salt by nature."

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