Gilmour becomes animated as he discusses the performance in Pompeii, but otherwise he's a soft-spoken man of relatively few words — perhaps the result of decades spent alone in the studio turning bits of inspiration into songs we all know.

Sitting at a grand piano in the penthouse of the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, the No. 14 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists quietly confesses that sometimes he composes on piano and that he took saxophone lessons to be supportive when his young son was learning the instrument.

Gilmour keeps no regular writing schedule but said a "tiny little moment of magic" might pop into his head at any time. He records notes on his iPhone and revisits them later in his studio.

"I do spend a lot of time working away on my own," he said.

When Samson writes lyrics, as she did for the title track of the new album, she also works alone: listening to the tracks over and over through headphones as she walks for miles through the couple's coastal neighborhood.

"Because I know him so well, it's very easy to have him as a character in my head and to be able to look at the world as I imagine the world looks to him," said Samson, a fiction writer whose novel "The Kindness" was recently published in the U.S.