Songfacts®:

• "A Single Spark" is the fourth track on David Gilmour's 2024 album Luck and Strange. The song contemplates life's brevity and offers the metaphor of a tiny spark of light, suspended between two eternal voids, to illustrate the fleeting nature of human existence.
• The title had been kicking around in Gilmour's subconscious since the 1970s when, during a flight, he happened to glance at the book the guy next to him was reading - Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory.
  
  "The full line," he recalled to Uncut magazine, "was 'a single spark suspended between two eternities' – meaning that this is ultimately what life amounts to."
• Polly Samson, Gilmour's longtime collaborator and wife, stepped in to flesh out the lyrics after Gilmour casually quoted the Nabokov line. Samson, who's been writing with Gilmour since The Division Bell era of Pink Floyd, summed up the album's overall tone rather succinctly: "It's written from the point of view of being older; mortality is the constant."
• Recording Luck and Strange took place over five months between Gilmour's Medina Studio in Hove and Mark Knopfler's British Grove Studios in London. The album had a fresh twist in the form of Charlie Andrew, best known for his work with Alt-J, who was brought on board at the suggestion of Polly Samson.
  
  "I looked at all the people I knew, but I'd got to a point in life where I wanted to move things forward in a different way," Gilmour explained to The Sun.
  
  Enter Andrew, a man blissfully unaware of Pink Floyd's musical legacy. "Charlie came down to the house," Gilmour recalled, "and he had a total lack of knowledge of the side of the industry I come from."
• In an industry where people often bend over backwards to appease rock legends, it's oddly satisfying to know that even David Gilmour can get cranky when someone throws him off. Case in point: Tom Herbert, the bassist brought in by Andrew. Herbert, whose work with alternative rockers The Invisible and post-jazz band Polar Bear clearly impressed Andrew, contributed a low-end drone effect to "A Single Spark" that left Gilmour scratching his head. "He was doing something I don't really understand," Gilmour admitted to Mojo magazine, adding with a self-deprecating chuckle, "I was quite grumpy for a day or two."
• As if the existential musings and sonic experiments weren't enough, Luck and Strange also boasts grander touches like strings and choirs. Arranged by Will Gardner, these were recorded in the cavernous Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire.