We’ve reached the penultimate Music Monday for Valkyrie and it’s a Pink Floyd song to finish the main posting run. Coming Back to Life comes from Pink Floyd’s 1994 album, The Division Bell, and from their 1995 live album, Pulse.

There are two things I absolutely adore about this song. The first is the extended guitar solos. I grew up listening to the likes of Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler and the moment I heard David Gillmour’s playing on this track, I knew I’d found another great guitarist to listen to and enjoy. To borrow a phrase from a music journalist, he has a very etherial tone to his playing on this track and it was about as far from the at-the-time fashion as you could get. (For context, Grunge was still on-trend, although BritPop was right around the corner.)

The second is the lyrics. There’s something very powerful about the line “killing the past and coming back to life” that always gives me pause when I hear it and the rest of the lyrics are similarly arresting. They never fail to make me think and sometimes I will simply stop what I’m doing and just listen to it.

The overall result is that this whole track is one of my absolute favourites and it does, quite often, find itself on my writing soundtrack, even if it’s not wholly appropriate. In this case, though, it does fit. If Afraid of Sunlight is where Kari is at the start of Valkyrie, Coming Back to Life is where she is at the end. Not totally healed, not totally fixed, but moving in the right direction.

The Elsehere Soundtrack on Spotify has been updated to add this in.

That’s all for now. Happy reading and listening!