The Great Gig In The Sky - 2011 Remastered Version

Pink Floyd keyboard player Rick Wright wrote this song, which is about life, gradually descending into death. Hence the angrier and more intense first half with a dying person refusing to "go gently into that good night."The second half is gentler, as the dying person gives into the inevitable and fades away. In the March 1998 issue of Mojo, Wright explained: "For me, one of the pressures of being in the band was this constant fear of dying because of all the traveling we were doing in planes and on the motorways in America and in Europe."

When the band was working on Dark Side of the Moon, most of the songs didn't have titles. They referred to this as "The Religious Section" or "The Mortality Sequence."

This is one of a few Pink Floyd songs to use a female vocal. Alan Parsons, who engineered the album, brought in a singer he knew of named Clare Torry. Parsons explained in Rolling Stone, March 12, 2003: "She had to be told not to sing any words: when she first started, she was doing 'Oh yeah baby' and all that kind of stuff, so she had to be restrained on that. But there was no real direction - she just had to feel it." David Gilmour stated in Mojo, March 1998: "We'd been thinking Madeleine Bell or Doris Troy and we couldn't believe it when this housewifely white woman walked in. But when she opened her mouth, well, she wasn't too quick at finessing what we wanted, but out came that orgasmic sound we know and love."