“The Great Gig In The Sky” by Pink Floyd

"The Great Gig in the Sky" is the fifth track on Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon, and its heart is a voice with no words at all. Richard Wright wrote the music, and session singer Clare Torry improvised over it, wailing, keening and finally sighing into silence; it's one of only three Floyd songs with an outside singer on lead.

It started out as a Wright chord sequence nicknamed "The Mortality Sequence" or "The Religion Song", played on stage in the first half of 1972 as a plain organ piece under readings from the Bible and bits of Malcolm Muggeridge's speeches. By that September piano had taken over the lead. On the record Wright plays both, with David Gilmour's pedal steel, Roger Waters on bass and Nick Mason on drums, and Alan Parsons engineering. It finally came out as a digital single in 2023.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.