How 'A Momentary Lapse of Reason' Replaced Waters' Lyrical Dictatorship with a Songwriting Workshop

After Roger Waters left, David Gilmour and producer Bob Ezrin essentially turned songwriting into a collaborative crash course. They brought in outside lyricists like Anthony Moore, Phil Manzanera, and Patrick Leonard—people who could help Gilmour shape musical ideas into finished songs. This was a complete 180 from the Waters era, where he wrote nearly every word alone and often presented them as finished poems.

The most tangled writing history belongs to “Learning to Fly,” which credits four people: Gilmour, Moore, Ezrin, and keyboardist Jon Carin. Gilmour had a basic guitar riff and a few lines; Ezrin and Moore helped turn it into a coherent story about risk and liberation. “One Slip” also had a messy birth—G