Peter Gabriel, Up

Diving deep into life, death, contemplation and grief, an album whose pleasures reveal themselves slowly.

Album of the Week, October 17, 2026

Peter Gabriel’s album Us came out when I was in college, in 1992. As the subsequent decade passed there was a live album, Secret World Live; some soundtrack songs; and the OVO project. I began to despair of Peter releasing another album of original material ever again. Though there were rumors of an album being worked on, it almost felt like a joke because the rumored album title was one that was being used by other artists.1 And when Up finally appeared in September 2002, twelve days after the first anniversary of 9/11, I felt an immense relief. Surely, I thought, this would be the longest time between albums that Peter would ever go. Heh.

I also felt, honestly, concern. Because while we were all still mourning a year after 9/11, the depths of his despair as it surfaced on Up were striking. Has Peter been hospitalized? Listening to this album for the first time, it seemed as though the answer was yes, that the therapy that had gotten him to such a helpful place around the time of Us had let him down. But on subsequent listens I found hope and beauty among the emotional desolation.

Up is also a Peter Gabriel album, with all that implies: immaculate production, anthemic sweeps, and a long list of musicians who had recorded with Gabriel before or who had come through Real World Studios and found themselves sitting in on a Peter Gabriel recording session as well as recording their own albums. In addition to the stalwarts Tony Levin, Manu Katché, David Rhodes, and Shankar, they included percussionist Ged Lynch, former drummer for Black Grape and the Ruthless Rap Assassins; Daniel Lanois and David Sancious, both of whom had affiliations with Gabriel going back to So; Passion–era collaborators Hossam Ramzy and Assane Thiam; composer/producer/session player Jon Brion; bassist and Pentangle co-founder Danny Thompson; the Black Dyke Band, who played on OVO; the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; and Gabriel’s daughter Melanie on backing vocals. There were a whole cluster of musicians, influential producers in their own right, who showed up to contribute arrangements, play instruments, or generally bask in the aura, including Bob Ezrin (brass arrangements), Stephen Hague (percussion), Will Gregory (string arrangements), and Mitchell Froom (backwards guitar) in addition to Brion and Lanois. And there were, improbably, the Black Boys of Alabama, a gospel group formed at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talladega in 1939 and whose first album on the Real World Label, Spirit of the Century, won the Grammy award for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album in 2002.

“Darkness” is appropriately titled; his most abrasive sound since Peter Gabriel 3, the song has screaming guitars and giant percussion as Peter recites a series of confessions from the heart of a depressive episode: “Every fear I swallow makes me small… I’m afraid I can be Devil Man / And I’m scared to be divine… I’m afraid of loving women / And I’m scared of loving men…” The so-called monster that he chases through the forest ultimately turns out to be “curled up on the floor / just like a baby boy,” as he confronts the dark reality that the things he fears most are helpless and small and deep inside. The bombast of the song makes it feel like a Bob Ezrin production, but it’s actually Will Gregory’s string arrangement sawing away behind the rest of the musicians and propelling things forward. The song ends with the image of the monster curled up on the floor, with a heartbeat of a synth line fading away.

The strings continue into the intro of “Growing Up,” though that cello line appears to have been programmed rather than played. The main part of the song builds on a shuffling drum beat and whooshing synths, but Gabriel’s lyrics take us on a journey from the womb through birth and life as “my ghost likes to travel / so far in the unknown,” ultimately moving through the final transition: “the breathing stops … in a transition once again / such a struggle getting through these changes.” The ghost ultimately confides its disconnection with life: “It all seems so absurd / To be flying like a bird / When I do not feel I’ve really landed here.” The track builds off a massive groove, but the meditative lyrics don’t seem at home above the beats (though perhaps that’s the point).

The third track, “Sky Blue,” floats in on Daniel Lanois’ steel guitar, feeling as though it comes from the same emotional center as “Blood of Eden” or “Don’t Give Up.” The narrator becries his alienation: “Train pulled out said my goodbyes, sky blue / Back on the road alone with the sky, sky blue … So tired of all this traveling / So many miles away from home.” But the narrator paradoxically finds beauty in the distance and motion: “Warm wind flowing over the Earth / I sing through the land, the land sings through me … There’s a presence here no one denies, sky blue … I keep moving to be stable.” The slow 6/8 groove builds up to a wordless hymn as the Blind Boys of Alabama join to sing the cry at the end, accompanied by David Sancious’s Hammond organ. The track had been around since the Us sessions, but the addition of the Blind Boys take it over the top, finding the emotional center of the song in the narrator’s wordless cry to creation.

“No Way Out” comes closer to more traditional Gabriel territory, but is still immersed in the fear, despair and difficulty of facing death. The track builds up from a tight Danny Thompson acoustic bass line, with shuffling drums (both programmed and live) joined by Hossam Ramzy’s tabla under an insistent David Rhodes guitar line and a spare piano line. Here the narrator confronts the death of a loved one: “Someone runs to make a phone call / And the man kneels on the ground / There’s a tightening in my chest / I know that I’m drawn in / Oh God, let it not be you.” The chorus is more direct: “Don’t leave us / Don’t leave like this / Don’t leave me here again / I’m not quitting on you / There’s no one else.” The song is epic in emotional scope but only captures a brief flickering moment of despair; the band’s coda, in its crashing cymbals and circling bassline, leaves us in anger and despair.

That ultimately yields to the dark, spare opening of “I Grieve.” Originally written for the soundtrack of City of Angels, the American remake of Wings of Desire,2 it finds us in a moment after the fighting is done and the narrator is left only with the grief and anger of figuring out how to move forward: “It was only one hour ago … Looks like it always did / This flesh and bone / It’s just the way you were tied in / Now there’s no one home.” But the narrator moves past the feeling of abandonment: “Let it out and move on / Missing what’s gone / They say life carries on … Life carries on in the people I meet / In everyone in the street / In all the flies and rats / The rot and the rust / The ashes and the dust…” Ultimately the soul lives, he thinks, and the body is “just the car that we ride in / The home we reside in.” The narrator ends having made this transcendental argument but still acknowledging the emptiness left behind: “Now I can find relief / I grieve.”

What follows is a rarity in Gabriel’s catalog, a funky soul-inspired track that works as a mean groove while completely falling flat lyrically. “The Barry Williams Show” has a fantastic deep Tony Levin bass line, some great New Orleans style shuffle drums, and a killer horn line. Unfortunately it also comes with a fairly uninteresting vocal and lyrics that skewer reality television hosts like Jerry Springer, which firmly dates the song. It’s also not clear whether it is punching up at the host or down at his guests, which is not the sort of ambivalence you want in a song like this.

From sneers to the quiet echoes of a disturbed mind, “My Head Sounds Like That” takes us back into Gabriel’s survey of human experience, with a song that shows us how it feels to perceive the world through depression, where everything scrapes along jagged exposed nerve endings, both paradoxically dull and unbearably bright. It’s a painful song for anyone who’s had to live the experience of a visitation of the Black Dog, but it’s also quietly beautiful with the sounds of the Black Dyke Band behind the pain.

With an opening guitar riff that feels like a deliberate return to pop forms but which is actually Peter playing a Telecaster sample through a keyboard, “More Than This” finds the narrator contemplating the liminal, unseen things just beyond perception as he decides that there must be something more to the world, decides that the sense that is made when people are put together is like the sense constructed from words one after another. “So much more than this, there is something else there / When all that you had has all gone / And more than this, I’m alone, feeling so connected / And I’m all there, right next to you.” The song aches up against the edge of resolving the minor key chords that comprise it; Gabriel’s self-harmonies climb up the scale, landing on the minor tonic in a way that suggests that they’re really hanging on the edge of resolving to something brighter.

We don’t get that brighter in “Signal to Noise,” though the song (which I discussed in my post about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Night Song, does tie into the central message of finding that connection between people as the narrator begs to “turn up the signal, wipe out the noise.” How much of his catalog boils down to the resolution of this song: “Receive and transmit”! There are echoes of songs from “Secret World” all the way back to “On the Air” in those words, and ultimately a central thesis that we’re all better off when we actually open up the channels of communication one to the other. The incredible Nusrat vocal that anchors the song, extracted from the inaugural performance of “Signal to Noise” on Peter’s 1995 VH1 special, explains why the song holds such a strong place in PG fans’ hearts, as much as the centrality of his message. The choice to underpin this version with strings rather than a bombastic rock sound adds immensely to the rising tension at the end that is ultimately unresolved.

The album ends with “The Drop,” Peter playing piano and singing a melody that he couldn’t make fit OVO but which here anchors the album with the visual of paratroops jumping off into the unknown: “One by one, they’re going out / You watch them dim / One by one, you watch them fall / And wonder where they’re falling to.” A koan, and the only song shorter than three minutes on an album where the rest are more than twice as long, the tune echoes bits of “Downside Up” but ends, unresolved, on an open fifth, leaving us to decide the destination.

Gabriel toured behind Up (the “Growing Up” tour) and then seemed to drop back into the shadows. He released a few loose singles in the late 2000s, but much of what he recorded seemed like stock-taking projects: a long-in-progress collaborative album from the Real World recording weeks called Big Blue Ball; his Scratch My Back project featuring covers of other singers’ work; his orchestral album New Blood (and companion live album Live Blood), featuring arrangements of his own works; and several compilations and live albums. It seemed at the time like the end. But the lesson of Gabriel’s discography is to never count him out. In 2023, twenty-one years after Up, he released the album i/o, taking advantage of Bandcamp’s subscription features to push out a track a month to subscribers, which may have helped the famously distractible Gabriel stay focused on the project. He’s repeating the process right now with the album’s sequel, o/i. But though we’ll end our survey of his studio albums here, we’re not quite done with Peter, or this series, yet, as you’ll hear over the next two weeks.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: I didn’t own Up on vinyl when I started this series, so I ended up using a few tracks written for the album as bonus tracks, including “Signal To Noise.” But there are a few other gems connected to these sessions out there, including this one from The Long Walk Home which uses the Blind Boys of Alabama part from “Sky Blue” as a standalone soundtrack cut:

BONUS BONUS: Peter has done a lot of live performances in Real World Studios for video and album releases. Here’s one recorded during the run-up to the “Growing Up Live” tour in 2002:

Footnotes

  1. Not only did R.E.M. release their own Up in 1998, but Ani DiFranco had her own Up Up Up Up Up Up in 1999. ↩︎
  2. A completely unnecessary film given the brilliance of Wim Wenders’ original. ↩︎

Peter Gabriel, OVO

An unlikely source for the great musician’s most personal song, in a cast album for a musical that had 999 performances in the Millennium Dome.

Album of the Week, October 10, 2026

Even in the moment, in the mid-1990s following the release of Us, it seemed like Peter Gabriel was all over the place while simultaneously being invisible. Interactive computer entertainment via the then-new medium of the CD-ROM? He was there, with XPlora 1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World (reviews now differ: was it a computer game or an extended advertising campaign? Having played it back in the day, I can say with confidence: it was slow) and Eve. There were talks about a theme park. But new music under his name was slow to appear, until in 2000 an odd album appeared. A soundtrack, but for a live show rather than a movie; a concept album with an impossible-to-describe concept; and a Peter Gabriel album with almost everyone except Peter Gabriel on lead vocals. What, exactly, was OVO?

First of all, it was the soundtrack to the Millennium Dome Show, intended as a massive multimedia event but remembered today mostly as an expensive flop. The show, built inside a massive dome on London’s Greenwich Peninsula near Canary Wharf that now houses the O2 Arena, was meant to commemorate the Millennium and, not coincidentally, to announce to the world that Tony Blair’s New Labour was creating fabulous things in Great Britain. Ultimately the show, which ran for a year, did not draw the crowds the organizers anticipated; though the 6.5 million visitors who saw one of the 999 shows were reportedly happy with the experience, organizers had planned for more than 10 million.

Second, it was a concept album, but a meandering one. The Skypeople live in the trees, while the Earth People were originally agrarian but develop iron technology, creating alienating cities in towers, such as the Tower That Ate People. Sofia of the Earth People nevertheless falls in love with Skyboy of the Skypeople. Sofia’s brother, who built the tower, grows paranoid about the Skypeople and jealous of Skyboy, and imprisons him in the tower. The desperate Skypeople attack the tower and free Skyboy; Sofia’s brother, understanding at last his folly, dies atop the tower, and the Skypeople bring it down, killing Sofia’s mother in the rubble. Sofia, bereft, finally finds Skyboy again and goes with him above the clouds, ultimately bearing his child, a boy named OVO (the caps are in the score); at his birth a tree springs from his grandmother’s grave, rapidly growing into a giant oak. When catastrophic rains come and endanger earth and Skypeople alike, Sofia has a dream that the world is upside down and that one can sail away to safety into the sky. Inspired by the dream, she places OVO in a nest and sends him sailing into the sky to find hope and a safer place. While the story has deeper emotional resonance than Mozo’s radio-born revolution, it’s plenty bonkers.

But last, OVO contains some of Peter’s most personal writing, with some melodies dating back to So, and some truly gorgeous sonic landscapes, even if he doesn’t sing most of it. It’s all delivered in something that’s more musical theater than rock album, complete with recurring themes, big set numbers, and a broad cast of characters.

“The Story of OVO” opens with a grimy groove which immediately subverts the listener’s expectation: yes, that’s rap, and yes, that’s Neneh Cherry, alongside American rapper Rasco. Gabriel apparently chose this approach because he wanted to interest a broader range of listeners in the material, and he knew “kids listened to rap.” Hamilton it ain’t, but the track does what it needs to do, which is to move the plot along atop the deepest beats on the album.

We subvert expectations once again with “Low Light,” which immediately turns aside from the groove into an ambient soundscape that wouldn’t have been out of place on Passion but is even deeper and more enveloping. The stunning Irish voice on the latter half of the track belongs to Iarla Ó Lionáird, a sean–nós singer who had released his first solo album on Real World in 1997 and was also a member of the beat-driven Irish and West African crossover ensemble, the Afro Celt Sound System. There are undercurrents throughout the work of musical themes that will appear later in the album, including the “Downside-Up” theme.

“The Time of the Turning” is something else again, an acoustic ballad with vocals by electronica singer Alison Goldfrapp, a few years away from her star turns on the album Black Cherry and the hit single “Ooh La La.” Alongside Goldfrapp is none other than singer-songwriter Richie Havens, voicing the perspective of Sofia’s father and his traditional agrarian ways. But Goldfrapp warns us, “It’s the time of the turning/And we’d better learn to say our goodbyes.”

“The Man Who Loved the Earth/The Hand That Sold Shadows” revisits the groove from the opening track as an instrumental, so you can hear the play of the buzzing didgeridoo against the bass line and thundering drums. The only problem with the arrangement is the odd interjections from the villagers as they build their constructions of iron, which sounds like something in between the didgeridoo and scratching. In the last minute and 30 seconds there’s a hard cut to a more ominous percussive rhythm, driven forward by a hooky, whistling synth and David Rhodes’ monster guitar.

“The Time of the Turning (Reprise)/The Weaver’s Reel” brings Goldfrapp back for one more chorus, accompanied by a brass band, before we abruptly transition into a frantic Celtic dance, anchored by the redoubtable Richard Evans but also by the Dhol Foundation (a South Asian drumming ensemble based in London), Johnny Kalsi and James McNally (members of the Afro Celt Sound System), and a host of Celtic musicians. The net effect is a thesis statement that will be familiar to listeners of Sheila Chandra: that there is a through-line among the music of the Irish, the South Asians, and West African cultures. It’s the adrenaline climax of the album, and it pointed the way to where the Afro Celts and others were heading in blending these musics into something you’d want to dance to.

“Father, Son” is a rare introspective moment, and a rare instance of Gabriel’s vocals on the record. As the industrialist Ion mourns the death of his father, he reflects on their relationship in a piano-driven ballad. It stands completely apart from the rest of the material, and was written earlier. The lyrics, as the two men have an emotional breakthrough while doing yoga together, are both concrete (“spine against spine”) and incredibly moving. Emotionally it feels of a piece with other introspective Gabriel songs like “I Grieve,” which had appeared on the soundtrack to the movie City of Angels some years prior, and it continued in Gabriel’s set lists for years after; I remember being struck by its impact at Gabriel’s 2001 WOMAD performance in Redmond, Washington.

“The Tower That Ate People” introduces a new theme driven by snarling guitars courtesy of David Rhodes and tight drums from Manu Katché. Gabriel’s vocals here are treated and, in his own words, influenced by Dr. John as he snarls out his paranoia in the role of Ion. The music would fit well alongside earlier songs like “Steam” and some of Gabriel’s forthcoming projects, which we’ll hear more of later.

“Revenge,” as the Skypeople attack the Tower, is a massive drum number with the Dhol Foundation playing alongside programmed drums and a thrumming keyboard line. It’s brief and leads into the grief-filled “White Ashes,” anchored by vocals from Omi Hall as the villagers sort through the rubble of the Tower.

“Downside-Up” opens the third act with one of the most thoroughly realized and dramatic tracks on the album, a duet between the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan. Fraser doesn’t get the opportunity to do much of her trademark vocal acrobatics here, but Skyboy’s part was written for Buchanan’s haunted baritone and he sounds fantastic here. It’s a full-blown PG song, with his full band joined by former Super Étoile de Dakar members Assane Thiam and Babacar Faye—in fact it’s really two PG songs in one, with the gentle “Downside-Up” theme grafted to the more rhythmic “Ovo” theme in the second half as they celebrate the infant’s arrival.

“The Nest That Sailed the Sky” gives us one last instrumental, with the brass band joined by Shankar and a string and synth-driven soundscape for another track that wouldn’t have been out of place on Passion. It leads into the cast finale, “Make Tomorrow,” as we hear from Buchanan, Fraser, Richie Havens and Gabriel in their grief and hope as they send OVO into the sky, and snippets of the “Downside-Up” and “Ovo” themes blend into moments of percussion that recall the more conflict-driven moments of the album. When the percussion and growling didgeridoo re-emerge to underpin the “Make Tomorrow” theme, we get a sort of synthesis moment that gives us hope that all the forces can actually work together, which one suspects was the narrative point.

Gabriel’s grand musical may not have ultimately congealed into a fully coherent statement, but it still stands as a unique point in his repertoire as the only musical theatre in his solo repertoire and his first major concept album since Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Gabriel would make more soundtrack albums following this, including The Long Walk Home (soundtrack to The Rabbit-Proof Fence), but he would also finally release more original songs. In fact, simultaneously with OVO he was working on another album, a proper sequel to Us, which would finally be released two years after the ambitious concept. We’ll hear that one next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Peter performed some of the music live with the musicians on the project on the promotional circuit. Here he is with Fraser and Buchanan on the Jools Holland show a few weeks before the album was released:

BONUS BONUS: Peter took the material from OVO into live performances through the 2000s, and in his 2010 orchestral project New Blood. Here’s a performance from his “Growing Up” tour, and from the New Blood concert film Taking the Pulse:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: This wouldn’t be Peter’s last collaboration with the Afro Celt Sound System. It was with delighted disbelief that I heard his voice on their song “When You’re Falling” on the air in 2003. Here’s a live version of the song from an unspecified television program:

Sheila Chandra, ABoneCroneDrone

The last studio album from the great vocalist shows how melody emerges from the great oceanic drone, bringing us within a deep sound world.

Album of the Week, October 3, 2026

The last studio album Sheila Chandra released on Real World was rather different than its predecessors. While Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices explored the intersections among British folk song and traditional South Asian ragas (among others), and The Zen Kiss added in themes of the lived experience of women across multiple cultures, ABoneCroneDrone strips away much of the experience, as well as language. What’s left is drone and pure melody.

In some ways ABCD is the most straightforward of Chandra’s albums, with different meditative vocals atop drones played by longtime producer Steve Coe, along with contributions from bagpiper Paul James, didgeridoo player Jim Mills, and engineer Stuart Bruce (contributing guitar harmonics). There are six tracks (“ABoneCroneDrone 1 – 6”), each clocking in at between seven and eight minutes long. What’s not simple are the melodic ideas explored along the way.

The opening track is birdlike, with an almost pop melody over a bed of vocal drones. The voices come and go in the mix, and develop harmonic complexity slowly with fourths and sevenths creeping into the open fifths. At the end whistling overtones add even more to the unfolding ocean of sound. The second layers birdsong over the drones from Chandra’s voice in open fifths and a drone constructed of layers of bowed instruments. When the didgeridoo hits it’s startling, adding an intense bass note to the landscape. The rest of the track swims in harmonics, with hints of melody swimming in and out of the sonic bath. The third begins where the second left off, but here the drone brings in layers of sevenths and ninths, building conflict into the open sound. Chandra’s vocals build in a patter of syllables, leading into a more open raga-like exploration of the tone row. The track culminates with a full-throated melody that disappears as soon as it arrives; an almost subliminally distant bagpipe fades the track out.

The second half begins with Chandra’s voice creating a melodic space against an open fifth, pulling a tune seemingly directly from the drone as her voice circles the spaces between its poles, then falling silent to let the drone speak. In the fifth movement, the drone is infinitely more complex, with the instruments seemingly playing notes all up and down the octave; Sheila’s voice comes out of the texture to limn a melody before falling silent again to let the drone speak. At the central point she begins to overlap her vocals, with one melodic high point harmonizing against a lower melody before the drone fades out. Finally, the ending sees a drone that cycles in time, pulsing against the sounds of the ocean and Sheila’s voice in the lowest part of its range. Sheila’s melody feels like a more traditional song here even as it drifts and pulls against the drone, but ultimately the drone lulls us back to the sea, to the ultimate cradle of creation.

ABCD is a unique achievement, a pure exploration of sound that is by turns philosophical and blissful. Following the album’s release, Chandra’s career rolled on into the 2000s, with a mix of live performances and greatest-hits collections on both Real World and Indipop. But in 2009 she suffered an incredibly ironic setback, experiencing painful symptoms that eventually were diagnosed as burning mouth syndrome. The condition prevents her from speaking or singing without suffering intense pain, effectively silencing her voice. She has started a second career as an author, and has occasionally recorded brief statements, but has otherwise retired from music.

Next time we’ll change gears to see what Peter Gabriel was doing all during the 1990s while his label was busily releasing music from his collaborators.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: It’s not often that Sheila performed in a pop context after the Monsoon days, but this 2006 performance with Lou Rhodes (who was, it seems, the voice of the late 1990s band Lamb) was an exception to the rule. From a February 2006 performance called Daughters of Albion, the two performed a faithful cover of PJ Harvey’s “Down by the Water”:

BONUS BONUS: The Lord of the Rings movies featured amazing vocalists (Enya, Annie Lennox, Elizabeth Fraser) on all three soundtracks, but none more surprising than Sheila Chandra. Though her songs had appeared in TV and movie soundtracks for years, in 2002’s The Two Towers, composer Howard Shore wrote “Breath of Life” and “Arwen’s Fate” especially for her:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Coincidentally, last week saw the release of Chandra’s final album for Real World. Echo is a collection of live performances, mostly of material from the first two albums, and is an excellent on-ramp into the mystery of her voice and her heady blend of British folk and traditional South Asian music:

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Night Song

Nusrat’s final collaboration with Michael Brooks opens fascinating new directions in sound.

Album of the Week, September 26, 2026

In retrospect, it’s amazing that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan took six years to follow up Mustt Mustt, his crossover qawwali + club album that he recorded for Real World with Michael Brook in 1990. Not only did the album do fairly big numbers—Real World has claimed over 600,000 albums sold, not counting sales in the Indian subcontinent—but the cultural impact was big, with reports that British youth in particular were turned onto more traditional qawwali music thanks to the album. But Nusrat was focused on his more traditional format, as we’ve heard, and it wasn’t until 1995 that Brook coaxed him back into Real World Studio to make a follow-up.

The plan was different this time. Brook learned from the first encounter that Nusrat’s best vocal moments happened in the middle of improvisational flights, some of which lasted an hour or more. So instead of constructing loops and trying to marry Nusrat’s music up to them, here Brook started with Nusrat doing lengthy improvisations and then built the tracks up from there. This meant that while some tracks still featured members of Nusrat’s party, including tabla player Dildar Hussein and harmonium player Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan, there were a few of the usual Real World suspects as well, including multi-instrumentalist Richard Evans, bassist Mick Karn, and Senegalese percussionists Masamba Diop (talking drum) and Kauwding Cissokho (kora), as well as session musicians James Pinker (drums) and Jo Bruce (organ, drums, woodwinds). The overall sound is quite different from both Nusrat’s traditional material and Mustt Mustt, but still recognizably Nusrat.

“My Heart, My Life” foregrounds some of the musical differences introduced by this new method. The kora, played by Kauwding Cissokho, calls back to the guitar that featured in Nusrat’s early recordings on Love and Devotion and gives the opening a spare, delicate sound. Nusrat’s vocals respond to it, being less full throated than when he is fronting the party. Diop’s talking drum is here less full throated than the normal tabla but provides a strong rhythmic foundation over which Nusrat builds a multi-tracked, chantlike chorus. There’s a subtle bass throb underneath the otherwise placid surface, and Nusrat erupts above the top just once, for a run that brings the brilliant edge of his voice forward.

“Intoxicated” builds up over a foundation of electronic strings and percussion from Brook’s synths, joined by Jo Bruce’s Hammond B3 organ. Once long ago, I trashed the Charlatans (UK) for using the noble Hammond as a rhythm instrument, but that’s exactly the role it plays here, running alongside Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan’s harmonium in a slow shuffle with Mick Karn’s bass and the drum loop. Nusrat again is in a lower vocal gear, but still gives us some sangam runs against the loping beat. The result: plenty of vocal pyrotechnics, lifting the track from a mere groove to something more… well, intoxicating. Gradually the groove falls away to just Nusrat and the harmonium, landing the number mid-thought.

“Lament” is just Nusrat and James Pinker’s drums (sludgily distorted by Richard Evans’ effects) with Brooks’ infinite guitar laying soundscapes around them. He performs a modal chant that is tonally reminiscent of the shuffling “Allah, Mohammed, Char, Yaar,” but which dissolves into the slow waves of guitar. “My Comfort Remains” rises up out of another shuffle of electronics, Nusrat’s voice shifting from major to minor on the chorus and moving around the blue note on the verses. We get a sustained set of improvisations in parallel on the raga over the bed of electronics, but just as it seems likely to take off into infinity, the kora rises up with a countermelody that takes us down from boiling, keeping things at a simmer as Nusrat improvises a series of rhythmically shifting vocals that Brook aligns in space around the listener, surrounding us with a Nusrat chorus.

“Longing” opens with a wistful guitar that could have been on a Daniel Lanois record, over a trembling reverb. Nusrat and the harmonium step forward in the sound then fall back, only to surge forward again over a gentle patter of drums that is gradually joined by Dildar Hussain’s tabla. The longing is unresolved, the whole song pivoting around the transition from the third to the fourth and back, some nasty guitar work swirling around the fourth as Nusrat ramps up to something like full volume in double-tracked chorus vocals into the outro, until suddenly the guitar halts as if a plug were pulled.

“Sweet Pain” opens with an intro that sounds a lot like it came from the Sling Blade soundtrack, several years before Lanois released it. But after the intro, Brook shifts the song into a minor range as Nusrat joins, improvising over the slow burn of the instruments until suddenly he takes flight. The ensuing vocal improv feels a little like the vocal flight of “Mustt Mustt,” but settles back into the ambience at the end.

The title track, “Night Song,” is just a drone from Brooks and some light keyboard work under Nusrat’s voice as he explores an augmented minor scale. The combination of the drone and voice lends an oceanic feel that is at once earthy and mysterious. A different sort of mystery, a melody that takes us around the notes of the raga, opens “Crest,” its simple descending scale picked out by the bass as Nusrat’s voice flies into a full impassioned melisma. But here comes a drum beat, and suddenly we’ve resolved up the octave for a moment as we reach the crest of the harmony, and finally fall back down to the fifth, settling just above that opening descending scale. The combination of that incredible voice and the insistent guitar riff underneath sounds like nothing Nusrat had ever recorded before. You can practically hear the tectonic plates shifting at the birth of a new sound. But as quickly as it comes, it settles back down into the liquid sounds of the guitar, fading out.

The collaboration between Brook and Nusrat reached new territories on Night Song, and one can only speculate where else they might have gone together. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wonder. Nusrat recorded with Brook in 1995, and toured through much of 1996 (including the show I saw in Washington DC in August that year). But he was slowing down. The following summer, having been ill for months, Nusrat flew to London for treatment of liver and kidney problems, then was rushed to a nearby hospital where he died of a sudden cardiac arrest on August 16, 1997, just two months shy of his forty-ninth birthday.

With Nusrat’s passing, a phase of Real World’s development ended, though new records didn’t; there were untold hours of his recordings still in the vault, and releases like the 1985 WOMAD recording have allowed fans to continue to be enthralled by his vocal acumen. There’s even one more that we’ll get to in this series, in a few weeks. But next time we’ll listen to an even more experimental album from another Real World artist.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Following Nusrat’s death, a collection of remixes of Nusrat/Brook recordings by Asian DJs, Star Rise, was released later in 1997. Here’s a remix of “My Heart, My Life” by Talvin Singh:

BONUS BONUS: One of the more noteworthy posthumous Nusrat tracks was his final collaboration with Peter Gabriel, a track that made its first official appearance on Peter’s 2002 Up album, but which had first been performed on a VH1 performance in 1996; Nusrat’s vocal on the song was taken from this appearance. The song was well enough known to fans even before its 2002 release that when Peter asked fans to vote for their top favorite lesser-known songs to be part of his 2001 WOMAD set, “Signal to Noise” made the cut. Here’s the 2002 album version, followed by the 1996 live one:

Laurie Anderson, Bright Red

A brilliant work that coalesces personal and global tragedies into a searing song cycle, this 1994 record stands among Laurie’s best.

Album of the Week, September 19, 2026

For all the brilliantly trenchant observations that Laurie Anderson made in her 1980s recordings, there was one topic that was rarely the focus of her songs. Though “O Superman” had the military-industrial complex and the doomsday clock wired into its synthesized “ah ah ah,” the United States had not been in outright war during the entirety of her recorded career. That changed abruptly in January 1991 with the commencement of Operation Desert Storm and what eventually became known as Gulf War I.

That conflict, and the questions it immediately posed about the lethality and morality of technological war, looms at the heart of Bright Red, alongside reflections on more personal types of grief and loss. Accordingly, Laurie chose a more stripped down sound with fewer instruments; the record is made with a relatively smaller number of collaborators, including percussionist Cyro Baptista, drummer Joey Baron, bassist Ben Fenner, guitarists Gerry Leonard, Greg Cohen, Jamie West-Oram, Adrian Belew, and Marc Ribot, and accordionist Guy Klucevsek However, producer Brian Eno, whose electronics amplify, stretch, and alter the sounds on the record, is the single biggest influence on the sound of the record, even factoring in a special guest on Side 2.

“Speechless” sets us down in martial territory right away, with Laurie’s voice accompanied only by a sharp snare roll as she tells the story of a woman out for a fast, hard joyride with her lover. We gradually get the feeling that this isn’t a happy relationship: “You did all the talking and me / I didn’t make a sound / If I open my mouth now / I’ll fall to the ground.” Laurie names her reference in the chorus, a short story by Annie Dillard about an eagle who was found dead with the skull of a weasel hanging onto its neck. Like Dillard, Laurie imagines the weasel hanging on for dear life even in death as she contemplates the narrator’s place in the relationship: “And me? I’m going in circles / I’m circling around / And if I open my mouth now / I’ll fall to the ground.” The music circles ominously around the tonic throughout the whole song, never getting off the ground.

“Bright Red” floats its narrative over a bed of electronics, as Anderson and Arto Lindsay alternate the words of each verse: “Did” “she” “fall” “or” “was she” “pushed.” There’s a menace in the song, especially in the second verse: “Come here, little girl, get into the car. It’s a brand new Cadillac, bright red.” There is a sense of non-specific threat underpinning the song, and the quotation from Isaiah, about the desolation of Babylon, does not clarify it:

“Puppet Motel” is built off a nasty riff, snare and bass distorted and edgy under Laurie’s manipulated vocals. The lyrics play out a series of dystopian future images, with the “puppets” “having virtual sex, eating virtual food/no wonder these puppets/are always in a lousy mood.” The theme of alienation induced by modern technology is clear, but I’ve always connected this song to a more specific literary dystopia, William Gibson’s cyberpunk Sprawl stories. The puppet parlors like the House of the Blue Lights, in which humans serve as prostitutes disconnected from their bodies via neural cutouts, seem like a clear forerunner to the Puppet Motel. And if we are the puppets, Anderson seems to ask, what are we allowing ourselves to do while our conscious minds are dulled and distracted by technology?

“Speak My Language” is one of two songs on the album to have previously appeared, in substantially altered earlier forms, on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ Faraway, So Close! The album version is built atop a spare percussion loop, with timpani and snare building the foundation for the bass to slide ominously beneath Laurie’s vocals and a wistful accordion: “Daddy, daddy/It was just like you said/Now that the living/Outnumber the dead.”

“World Without End” lands its anxiety in both an apocalyptic landscape (“I remember where I came from/There were burning buildings and a fiery red sea”) and a more direct grief, the death of a parent. The lines “When my father died we put him in the ground/When my father died it was like a whole library burned down” locate both a deeply specific grief and a broader civic mourning. It’s tempting to read this now as a response to the unthinking “patriotic” embrace of high-tech warfare in Gulf War I, especially given the “fiery Red Sea” reference. 

By contrast, “Freefall”  is a more figurative disorientation, with the narrator pulled into a vortex, “drowning in the deep.” This one seems a more personal disconnection, a literal alienation: “I got your letter, I couldn’t read it / It was a cryptogram / Did you say ‘take me with you’? / Or ‘take me as I am’?” The Brian Eno ambient soundscape below again builds from percussion, with thin threads of guitar and spare synths building out the landscape underneath. The conflation of disasters physical and personal carries into the last track on the first side. Two years after Hurricane Helene, I still have trouble listening to “Muddy River”; its evocation of an apocalyptic flood is both uncomfortably vivid and wholly inadequate compared to the devastation of the real thing. Laurie’s sudden cut to the human scale—“But when the muddy river starts to rise / It covers us all / And when I look into your eyes / Two tiny clocks, two crystal balls”—locates us away from the global apocalypse and into the mere tragedy of a human landscape ending. As though there is anything “mere” about the end of relationship, of “the known world.”

As the record flips, Laurie thankfully lightens the mood in “Beautiful Pea Green Boat.” Though the alienated mood persists, the alienation is relocated from personal relationships to childhood, as she muses “I’m lying in the shade of my family tree / I’m a branch that broke off.” She recalls her mother reading her stories, and then quotes almost the entirety of Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,” omitting only the three couplets regarding the marriage of the Owl and the Pussycat and their dining on “mince and slices of quince.” Omitting or perhaps forgetting, as the lyric says during the introduction: “I can’t remember now / What happened then / Dear Mom, how does it end?” The narrator can’t allow her childhood memories to surface a happy ending, even the ending of Lear’s story. But the arrangement subverts Anderson’s glum mood, particularly Guy Klucevsek’s accordion. (And yes, the insanely distorted guitar sound that closes out the song is courtesy none other than Adrian Belew!)

“Love Among the Sailors” tells the story of a “hot wind blowing… [that] moves across the oceans and into every port / A plague.” Laurie’s song mourns the loss of the love among the sailors, who, Walt Whitman-like, are referred to as “hombres. Sailors. Comrades,” and who are taken by the plague. Laurie continues to process the death of artistic colleagues from AIDS, angrily challenging the fundamentalist Christian view of the plague as divine retribution: “And if this is the work of an angry God/I want to look into his angry face.” The anger continues on a more interpersonal level in “Poison,” as the narrator marvels at her anger over a lover who leaves her to move in with her downstairs neighbor: “I can hear the two of you playing records / Moving furniture and fooling around / Did I drink some poison that I don’t remember now? … Did I do something in another lifetime / that was really, really mean?” The narrator reflects on the pain and anger that stay deep within her: “A small bullet, a piece of glass / And your heart just grows around it.”

“In Our Sleep,” by contrast, brings us into a new relationship, a new heartbeat, as mantralike Anderson repeats “In our sleep, as we speak/Listen to the drums beat/As we speak” in duet with the guitar and voice of Lou Reed. The two had met in 1992 at a festival curated by John Zorn and had started to collaborate; this record represented the first of their joint performances to be issued, the year Lou’s divorce from Sylvia Morales became final and a full fourteen years before Laurie married him.

The moment of peace transitions into the electronic cricket noises of “Night in Baghdad,” which borrows sounds from earlier in the record (the sighs of “Speak My Language”) as well as from earlier in her career (the bass line of “Sharkey’s Night”) as the heartbeat underneath a journalist’s report from the Gulf War. “It’s so beautiful/It’s the Fourth of July/It’s like a Christmas tree/It’s like fireflies” the narrator says of the explosions in the sky, before turning “I wish I could describe this to you better/But I can’t talk very well right now/Because I’ve got this damned gas mask on.” She transitions from the war to the personal as she asks: “Did you ever really love me? Only when we danced. And it was so beautiful. It was like the Fourth of July. It was like fireflies…”

The heartbeat slows and transitions to “Tightrope,” the longest of the songs on the record and the most evocative. Over a Brian Eno soundscape, Laurie opens the song with a dream of death, in which the narrator’s life is represented as a theme park with a boardwalk and a massive Ferris wheel that sweeps its passengers (Laurie’s old boyfriends, “with their new girlfriends”) under the water as it turns. She is herself perched high above on a tightrope, above her relatives, and fears that if she takes a wrong step, “if I fall / I’ll crush them.” She feels keenly the temporariness and thinness of her connections: “This long thin line. This song line. This shout / The only thing that binds me to the turning world below… This tightrope made of sound / This tightrope, made of my own blood.” This precarious image would seem to be a likely place to end the song—and in fact, in the first version on Faraway, So Close!, the song ends here. But this version carries on, having founds some peace with the precariousness of existence and with the ending of her relationships, as Laurie paraphrases the William Percy French poem, “Remember me is all I ask / And if remembered / Be a task / Forget me.”

The album closes with one more glimpse of the challenges of technology, here more humorous, in “Same Time Tomorrow.” She ponders the question of progress, describing a clock stuck blinking twelve noon and asking “Is time long, or is it wide? What I really want to know is, are things getting better or are they getting worse?” A live version of the song then recapitulates apocalyptic quotations from the “Bright Red” side of the record, but on the record, she cryptically quotes the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert: “Now I in you without a body move,” adding “and in our hearts, we fly,” leaving us to decide whether the apocalypse has a happy ending.

Bright Red channels all sorts of images—the death of a parent, the AIDS epidemic, war, flood, the eagle and the weasel—into a convincingly powerful portrait of lost love that bristles with connections to the universal. It’s a body blow of a record and one that may stand as an artistic high point among many in Laurie’s discography. She continues to record—I particularly enjoy the follow-up to Bright Red, her spoken-word recording The Ugly One with the Jewels—but for me these first four albums are the heart of all her output. Next week we’ll hear a milestone album from another Peter Gabriel collaborator.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: A different version of “Tightrope” was featured in the film Faraway, So Close, Wim Wenders’ sequel to Wings of Desire. Like his Until the End of the World, the soundtrack is a marvel and worth seeking out on its own merits. (The soundtrack also features an alternate version of “Speak My Language” which I can’t find on streaming services).

BONUS BONUS: Laurie’s touring show in 1994-1995 was “The Nerve Bible.” There was a companion book, Stories from the Nerve Bible, that was a retrospective of her entire career to that point. I took my wife Lisa while we were first dating to see the show at the Kennedy Center, which is how we discovered her dislike for Laurie Anderson performances. (It was a great show.) This video purports to be a recording of the full show from its 1995 date in Kansas City, Missouri:

Sheila Chandra, The Zen Kiss

Chandra’s second album for Real World Records is both a magnum opus of the female voice and an instrument of alchemical transformation.

Album of the Week, September 12, 2026

Following Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices, Sheila Chandra continued her exploration of voice and drone, of the interconnections between breath and thought, of voice and listener. She noted in the original liner notes to The Zen Kiss, “My last album … illustrates crossing between different musics within a single vocal line. The Zen Kiss has moved on. The structure of my songs have become more challenging now that those connections have been absorbed into my sub-conscious.” What results on this 1994 album is a set of vocal performances that range from meditative drones to traditional songs to vocal experiments, that range from British folk song to Indian raga to soul music to kannakol vocal percussion, sometimes all in the same performance.

Even more than Weaving, the album is a solo performance, with only producer Steve Coe adding drones. As before, Chandra recorded in a Bristol studio and mixed the album at Real World Studios. But with all the similarities, there’s an important difference: instead of lyrics drawn from ragas and folk songs, here Chandra wove a series of stories about women and their roles that was positively revolutionary for pop music in 1994, to say nothing of world music.

“La Sagesse (Women, I’m Calling You)” is the most direct expression of this new lyrical focus. Singing an obbligato that starts out as a raga and turns into a soul riff, Chandra sings “Oh, women, whose wisdom is in dreams… where do I go to find images of woman woman-made?” The track is entirely unaccompanied, putting the focus solely on Chandra’s incredible voice, as she seamlessly blends ragas and soul improvisation. The track transitions directly into “Speaking In Tongues III,” another of the series of kannakol spoken percussion compositions that began on Weaving. Here Chandra explores both the tonal ranges of the percussion that the form imitates and a broad range of tempos and meters. She expands the types of syllables in use as well, with umlauts and other sounds helping to shape the release of the sound.

“Waiting” reintroduces drone accompaniment under Chandra’s song of anticipation: “Like a desert bloom I sit at your feet / Trolling for a raindrop to fall from your lips / Waiting to be awoken and born by your calling.” The song passages are alternated with ragas, explorations of the song’s tone-row. In Chandra’s vocal we hear an expression of love carried to reflection and ultimate unity between the singer and the beloved. At one point in the improvisation there’s a familiar melodic progression, outside the conventions of the raga, that recalls the melody of “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

“Shehnai Song” is a deeper drone work, in which Chandra uses pitch bending around the raga for a sitar-like effect. It’s a brief but striking fragment of a song, followed by “Love It Is A Killing Thing,” a British folk song ornamented with flourishes that are simultaneously rooted in traditional Indian and soul music. Here, as in “La Sagesse,” Chandra’s voice is left unadorned to maximize the impact of her amazing vocal control.

The last song in the series of kannakol performances, “Speaking In Tongues IV” is even wilder than its predecessors, using sung interludes, digital effects, and a cut-and-paste aesthetic to broaden the sound palette to its widest. Chandra has said that she could not have written this work without hearing what a sampler could do, but that “the human sampler is ultimately the best.” Compositionally she races from rapid to languid and back, from normal volume to subliminal, almost ASMR-like whispers.

Another reviewer has called “Woman And Child” the centerpiece of the album, and both its position leading off side two and the unusual spoken word composition support it. Over a background of drone and bells, she tells the story of a woman with her infant child that foregrounds the eroticism in the physicality of mother/child relationship. The narration draws the connection between everyday nature, sensuality and spirituality. As much as I listened to woman-forward music in early 1994—and this was after Under the Pink and Exile in Guyville—I wasn’t ready for this at the time. I thought Chandra’s description of the erotic physicality of nursing was exaggerated and felt unprepared to listen to this intimacy. Thirty years on, having raised two children, I understand how much I didn’t know then.

Chandra turns to Spanish for the unaccompanied “En Mireal Del Penal,” again underscoring the connections between Spanish, Arabic and South Asian music. Unlike her performance of de Falla’s “Nana” on Weaving, here she embraces some of the passing tones and accidentals in the tone row even as she interweaves raga improvisations between verses.

“A Sailor’s Life” is Chandra’s most direct embrace of the British folk tradition. The song, a ballad with eighteenth-century roots, was famously performed by Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention in an eleven-minute-long version. Here the performance is stripped back to just drone and voice, but you can hear echoes of Denny’s restrained vocal ornaments in Chandra’s approach, which again brings echoes of Indic valleys to the traditional ballad. The shorter version here underpins the tragic swing from the roguish “A sailor’s life, it is a merry life” that opens the performance, to the same lyric sung a cappella that closes the song after the sailor’s death by drowning, as well as the girl’s desolation after the sailor’s passing.

The Latin plainchant of “Abbess Hildegard” would seem an unusual inclusion in the album’s narrative arc. But the alternating chant verses and ragas connect the famed twelfth-century nun, polymath and composer to the album’s exploration of feminine strength. At the time of the record there was a resurgence in interest in Hildegard, whose music was suddenly everywhere thanks to releases by the early music ensemble Sequentia (their 1994 Canticles of Ecstasy on the Harmonia Mundi label was a best seller) and a 1994 BBC documentary. “Kafi Noir,” in the same key but not the same tone-row, closes the album with an extended raga meditation that brings all the vocal traditions of the album together. Particularly striking are the subtle organum (parallel fourth and fifth) harmonies that seem almost like harmonic overtones emerging from the richness of her voice.

The Zen Kiss is ultimately both about the power of the female voice and an alchemical experience. The kiss of the title is the passage of breath from the singer that transforms the listener. The sheer power and virtuosity of Chandra’s voice ultimately dissolves boundaries between traditional styles and cultures. And ultimately the interpretive grace and power of her performances make the album a statement of female strength that is still stunning to absorb three decades on.

Chandra wasn’t done with this exploration of her voice and we’ll hear the last album in that arc in a few weeks. Next week, though, we will hear a different perspective on strength, grief and loss from another artist we’ve heard before.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Sheila went out on the promotional circuit for the album, and did a brief interview on the BBC program Pebble Mill along with a performance of “Speaking in Tongues III.” The stunning live work, stripped of vocal effects, underscores the brilliant power of her voice:

Remembering

Drone reconstruction of the World Trade Center, NYC, 2026. Courtesy Getty Images

Twenty-five years ago was a long time, long enough for me to have written down my thoughts about the day several times before; long ago enough for the act of remembering to yield to the act of editing, redacting, and constructing a narrative thread of the day.

In September 2001 I was in the second year of business school. On a brilliant blue Tuesday morning, I had just finished writing a blog update and had gone into the library to study. Starting up my web browser to download some course notes, I hit the message on Yahoo (images weren’t loading) that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I went looking for more information and found it at Dave Winer’s Scripting News blog.

Shellshocked, I left the library and walked into the lobby of E-52, MIT Sloan’s main building, where I joined a gathering crowd of students, faculty, administration staff, and others watching the coverage. I saw the videos, and I saw the second tower go down on live TV as I watched. After a while I walked next door to the E-51 lobby, worried about my friend Kate’s fiancé Oli who worked in the financial district. I ran into my finance professor, who was just coming out of class and had no idea what was happening. I told him that both towers had come down and the Pentagon had been hit. “Oh my God,” he said, as if he had been slapped. I found Kate. At the time she hadn’t heard from Oli (he was fine). We just sat and watched and listened.

Lisa had planned a trip to Italy with her parents that was due to leave that day and was with them in New Jersey. The worst part was the train ride back to Boston—there were no planes. She still won’t talk about that journey.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned that my UVA friend Doug Ketcham had been in the Cantor Fitzgerald offices that morning. I sat with the grief of what had happened to him for fifteen years, until I attempted to describe Doug Ketcham to one of my TFC colleagues during a rehearsal for John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls.” And I could not speak. I was suddenly dumbstruck by the immense unfairness of what happened to him: twenty-seven years old, a rising star at Cantor Fitzgerald, who retained enough presence of mind to call his parents from underneath his desk after the first plane hit the towers to tell them that he loved them.

Later on 9/11, I heard that MIT wasn’t taking more blood donors because their infrastructure couldn’t process the mass rush of volunteers. That was before we learned that there was little need for blood, before the awful scope of the casualties in New York and Washington became clear.

That evening, I left my apartment building to make a run for some needed groceries. I saw a young muscular man in his mid-twenties wearing a t-shirt, obviously homemade. The t-shirt said on the front, “Die Raghead Scum.” And In the corner store, I heard a soft spoken talk show host explaining that this wasn’t really America against terrorism but the civilized world against terrorism, because you didn’t know who would be next. I agreed with this assessment, but then he went on to say, “There’s a surprisingly small number of countries in the world that are civilized. Outside of the US and Canada, Europe and Japan, most of the rest of the world are barbarians.”

A week later, with no air traffic and the world still eerily quiet, we started seeing monarch butterflies. One dogged our steps returning to our apartment along Richmond Street. Another one fluttered along beside the Longfellow Bridge, careered across the traffic, and over the other side of the bridge. When we saw it, it was winging lazily across the Charles. There were more of them. Practically every five minutes–on Massachusetts Ave, in the shadow of Calder’s Great Sail… I couldn’t decide, and it seemed very important at the time: had they been there all along and were just leaving? Or had they just arrived from another place, just when we most needed to see them?

Two years later we were in the midst of the 2003 Iraq War, a war fought with the pretext of a 9/11 connection that didn’t exist (the attackers were largely from Saudi Arabia and had no backing from Saddam Hussain). I wrote, “if we’re still in mourning even as we invade and remake nations, we are in danger of seeing the decisions we must face through eyes clouded with the smoke of the past. So I am going to let others remember the day, and I’m going to continue to do my part by asking questions about actions taken in the names of the fallen that I believe do them no honor.”

In 2008, I wrote about Steinski’s sound collage “Number Three on Flight Eleven.” A previously unreleased track collected that year on the veteran mix artist’s retrospective “What Does It All Mean?”, it takes the recorded phone call of American Airlines flight attendant Betty Ong from on board Flight 11 and sets it sparingly above an almost subliminally ominous drone and beat, and in counterpoint to another speaking voice reciting lyrics by Paul Opperman from the Silos’ “When the Telephone Rings” and poems by Basho. It’s an unsettling, frightening track and I can’t listen to it more than once in a blue moon. And yet, there’s something in the end that carries a note of redemption: a repeating coda, the voice of the American Airlines call center reassuring Betty Ong, who’s holding on the line communicating the last moments aboard the hijacked plane, repeating “Yes. We’re still here.”

We’re still here.

As John Irving, who as a novelist is one of our greatest living students of violence, put it in The Hotel New Hampshire, the real question in this violent crime is: did they get the us in us? Did the attack violate us so deeply that it touched our core and twisted who we were? Or are we still here?

There can be no one simple answer. But in the course of that 2016 performance of “On the Transmigration of Souls,” I decided that it is the souls of the living who need the transmigration. We must allow ourselves to be changed, to not continue to stand, breath held, on the edge of that dreadful day. We who must resolve upward.

A fleuron, a typographical symbol that looks like a flower, dividing sections of a post

Other remembrances: Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Universal Hub.

F.G. Rathbun, Virginia Glee Club conductor and hymn composer

F.G. Rathbun, courtesy Rathbun-Rathbone-Rathburn Family Historian

A brief one today, about a peripheral feature in early Virginia Glee Club history. Frederick G. Rathbun (1862–1903) conducted the Glee Club for a single season, but lived an unusually varied and rich life in music outside of his experience with the Glee Club.

Rathbun was born in South Lee, Massachusetts, which is about a fifteen-minute drive from Tanglewood, in 1862, and attended New England Conservatory, making him one of only a few Glee Club conductors with conservatory training (the others: Frank Albinder and James S. Constantine). Following his marriage to Ida S. Warren, he and his bride moved to Virginia, where he was the organist at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Hampton and a music teacher at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). Sometime in the following years he was connected with the University of Virginia Glee Club, and became their conductor for the 1895–1896 season, succeeding Harrison Randolph.

1895–1896 Virginia Glee Club. Rathbun is third row, fourth from right

When I found the photo above, fifteen years ago, I thought with little evidence that Rathbun was likely a student. There is, it is now clear, no evidence to support this assumption, as he appears in no yearbook or directory as a student. So how did he find his way to Charlottesville?

The best guess is that he spent time in Charlottesville pursuing his other musical career, composition. He published his first work, the “Wythe Rifles Quickstep,” with the Dise Company of Philadelphia in 1885, and went on to publish dozens of other compositions, including the 1891 Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by Hampton Students. His best known work, though, might be the hymn “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say,” setting a text by Horatius Bonar.

Rathbun, “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say,” from Favorite Sacred Songs for Church and Home, 1921

Unfortunately, Rathbun’s wife died in 1898, and though his family rallied around him, he too passed away in 1903 following the death of his brother.

The above biography is heavily indebted to a 1987 Rathbun family genealogical newsletter that leaves open several questions: Where was Rathbun living while serving as organist in Hampton? The family history says “nearby Virginia City,” but the only thing that turns up by that name in the state is out near Blacksburg. Also, how did he wind up as a Glee Club conductor while remaining the organist in Hampton? His 1903 grave marker says he was the organist for nearly 20 years. With luck, we’ll get more information about Rathbun that will explain the mystery.

Ayub Ogada, En Mana Kuoyo

The Kenyan musician’s sole Real World album is a mesmerizing window onto music both specific to the Luo tradition, and universal.

Album of the Week, September 5, 2026

I’ve been reading some things on social media about “Shoot Your Shot September”: making a radical change in your life to do the thing you always wanted to do and the hell with the risk. I suspect that’s what Ayub Ogada’s early life was like. Born Job Seda in Mombasa, Kenya in 1956, he secured a film role in Robert Redford’s Out of Africa under his birth name when he was twenty-nine years old—after playing in a rock band that incorporated musical influences from his native Luo culture for six years previously. He then decided to head to London and see if he could make his fortune; busked on the London streets and in the Underground, scraping by. That bold decision was rewarded when he was invited to play the 1988 WOMAD festival, and rewarded again when another act canceled, stretching his ten-minute performance slot into a full set. Among the impressed onlookers: Peter Gabriel.

Ogada ended up being invited to one of the recording weeks at Real World. There’s no detailed sessionography from the studio, so it’s hard to tell if he recorded his guest appearances on Peter’s Us as well as his guest spot on Geoffrey Oryema’s second album all in the same week as recording his only album for the label. What is clear is that he got a chance to do all three, playing and singing insinuating melodies that sound like sunshine with the combination of his baritone voice and his nyatiti, a traditional 8-stringed lyre of Luo origin.

“Obiero” opens with the nyatiti and Ogada’s voice, an impossibly sunny melody accompanied by subtle percussion and slightly un-subtle Hammond organ (though the single chord played by future Propellerhead Alex Gifford is more subliminal than anything else). I first heard an earlier version of this song on Gabriel’s Plus from Us compilation, which featured tracks from his various collaborators on the Us album, and the version here on Ogada’s own album is positively baroque in comparison to the sparer original.

“Dala” is instrumented even more sparsely, with only nyatiti and small bells (see the bonus videos for an image of them) accompanying Ogada’s multi-tracked vocals as he sings a homecoming song. The liner notes observe: “Home, not as in your house, but as in spiritual home. One person is alone, two people may dance, three people they open the door, four people begin to walk all the way home. Let’s get together and make it like home.”

Sometimes the nyatiti gives a more complex pattern that is itself percussive, as it does on “Wa Winjigo Ero.” The lyre pattern circles over a stretch of about a fourth with octaves, and Ogada’s melody is strongly rhythmic as the song evokes a careless young man leading his herd homeward: “A young man doesn’t look after the cattle, he walks home before them, so he doesn’t even know if all the cattle are behind him. Luckily for him the cattle have all got bells. People say to him, it’s okay, we hear then now.” The percussion gives us the sound of the bells and the overall song has a slight marching cadence.

“Thum Nyatiti” is another circular pattern on the nyatiti, this time accompanied by David Oladunni on the djembe and with the same simple percussion. Ogada emphasizes the driving, percussive nature of the nyatiti on this track, about which he says “the music of the lyre is the voice of the Luo.” A more complex rhythm—triple triplets—underpins “Kronkronhinko,” a paean to the Ghanaian Queen Mother, Yaa Asaantewa, who led the War of the Golden Stool of the Ashanti people against Great Britain. We also get Ogada’s piercing whistle on this track.

“Chiro” sees Geoffrey Oryema return the favor for Ogada’s appearance on his song “Hard Labour,” adding backing vocals alongside Zak Sikobe’s guitar. The vocals are complex but tell a simple story: “Go far, see the world, but don’t forget where you came from.” Sikobe also appears on “10%,” which he co-wrote, a political song responding to the idea that it’s okay if 10% of the population are suffering. Ogada also plays a flute—either an imbele or a wea—alongside the chorus on the latter song; all in all the mix is insinuatingly catchy.

“Ondiek” feels like a more somber version of “Obiero,” as Ogada sings about the dangers of duplicity: “Beware the hand that seems to feed you! A hyena in human form – watch out, where he walks the earth burns.” After two verses and a chorus, Sikobe adds a skittering guitar line, lending a slight feeling of South African mbaqanga (familiar to Western listeners from Paul Simon’s Graceland).

“Kothbiro” opens with the nyatiti playing a pattern like raindrops, setting up a ballad that calls the children and the cattle back to the house. The harmonies of guitar, lute and voice tell a sadder story, as we wonder if the children will ever return. Gifford plays a subtle piano line over the instrumental verse.

The final song, “En Mana Kuoyo,” feels even more strongly like mbaqanga, with Sikobe’s guitar intertwining with the lute and his own overdubbed bass. This is African music for driving down the street with the top down, an indelible feeling of summer.

Ogada only recorded one album for Real World, but he continued to be active musically, recording an album with his band Union Nowhere in the late 1990s and appearing at the Live 8 concert The Eden Project in 2005. He moved back to Kenya and recorded a few more albums with English musician Trevor Warren before his death in 2019. Next week we’ll return to another Real World musician who was intersecting ancient and modern musical styles.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Real World has done a good job of preserving and sharing its performance history. This performance in particular, from 1991, is great because you can not only watch his fingerwork on the nyatiti, you can also see the source of the bells that are the rhythmic accompaniment for so many of his songs, and they’re probably not where you think they’ll be…

BONUS BONUS: Here’s a second live performance of “Obiero” by Ayub Ogada at Real World Studios from 1995:

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Love and Devotion

Album of the Week, August 29, 2026

This week is another round of traditional qawwali music from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and it has a complicated release history. Originally there were two records, released separately in 1986 for WOMAD Records following Nusrat’s triumphal 1985 performance, Love Songs and Devotional Songs. These were rereleased on Real World following the 1992 liquidation of WOMAD as a standalone entity due to mounting debts.1 The records were subsequently combined on a CD under the title Devotional and Love Songs; it was this version that was in my collection. The first-time-ever vinyl reissue from earlier this year flipped the order, putting the love songs first.

Because the original performances date to 1986, the group is much closer to the 1985 WOMAD performers than the group that recorded Shahbaaz. Specifically, there are the usual suspects: Majahid Mubarak Ali Khan and Maqsood Hussain on vocals, Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan on vocals and harmonium, Mohammed Iqbal Naqbi, Asad Ali, Ghulam Fareed and Kaukab Ali in the chorus, Dildar Hussain on tabla, and two additional instrumentalists: Rahmat Ali on harmonium and Majawar Abbas on mandolin and guitar. The recording also features the young Rahat Ali, Nusrat’s pupil, who was only ten years old at the time.

The title of the record refers not only to its subject matter but also to the styles of music represented. The “Love” side is the traditional ghazal, an ancient (ca. 615-700) Islamic love song form that spread via the Persian administrative force of the Moghul empire into South Asia, where its primary language movedf from Persian into Urdu. “Woh Hata Rahe Hain Pardah” emphasizes the difference in form via its instrumentation, which here includes Abbas’ guitar in addition to the normal harmonium and tabla. Nusrat’s performance leans heavily on the repetitions of the melodies with the chorus, with occasional moments of vivid improvisation.

The guitar opens “Yeh Jo Halka Saroor Hae” as well, with some unexpected harmonies and articulations. The poet writes about love as intoxication, literally: “Your bewitching looks intoxicate. I have turned to drink and am in a constant spell.” If the title sounds familiar, it’s because it was this song that Jeff Buckley essayed a surprisingly competent performance of in the extended Live at Sin-É, but he didn’t work from this recording; he appears to have had a copy of a 1988 Nusrat album that was released under the titles Greatest Hits Vol. 3, Yeh Jo Halka Halka (in a 1991 German release), and later Intoxicated Spirit. The arrangement here is different; after the guitar intro and the first statement of the tune, the party improvises on the bridge of the tune rather than the opening lines. In the last two minutes, Nusrat’s improvisation takes off, engaging a third melody that he uses to bring the party back to the start.

A more contemporary song, “Biba Sada Dil Morr De” unusually starts in a minor key, as Nusrat pleads, “If you cannot remain before my eyes, please give me back my heart”… a universal trope. The performance gives room for Nusrat to stretch out on some higher sangam improvisations, and the other members of the party get some high lines as well. Nusrat also inserts a long section of single-note syllabary that becomes a more traditional scale-wise improvisation, and he and the party “trade licks” through the end of the performance. Another version of this can be heard on Live at WOMAD 1985.

“Yaadan Vichhre Sajan Dian Aiyan” is a traditional Punjabi song lamenting the death of the beloved. Here the mandolin puts us into the minor key, but most of the work is done by the party, who navigate the downward chromatic direction of the melody with ease. Nusrat’s improvisations negotiate the tone row of the piece with his customary blistering pace, but other members of the party add their own flavor with extended melismas and other improvisations. It’s Nusrat’s last scalewise melody that is the most dramatic, though, comprising an augmented minor progression that he rips through twice before returning to the main melody with the party.

Not all the ghazals are about romantic love. “Sanson Ki Mala Pey,” another traditional Punjabi song, talks about a woman whose love for Lord Krishna intensifies so much that she loses her own identity and becomes incorporated into the divine. The opening melody improvises across the scale in the guitar with unusual leaps, and the party’s statement of the melody is unusual as well with an eighteen-beat melodic pattern, organized as six slow triplets. So there’s an unusual waltz feel to the song that, coupled with the unusual chord progression, lends the feel of a Western folk song. Until the party begins its high improvisation, you could almost imagine this track (with English words) as the closing song of a downtempo set.

The Devotional and Love Songs compilation excluded two tracks, one from each of the original albums, from its running order to fit within the limits of a CD. “Un Ke Dar Pen Pohchne to Payen” is one of these, the last track on the Love Songs album, here restored to the running order in the double album. The sunny major key melody, with its unusual use of the ninth in the melodic progression, cheekily conveys the spirit of the lover: “What shall I do when I reach my beloved’s doorstep? Don’t ask, for I shall not tell you.” There are multiple improvisational asides as the party navigates the song, and a slight accelerando conveys the eagerness of the narrator at least as much as the intensity of the party in their performance.

We are back to the devotional qawwali music with “Allah Hoo Allah Hoo,” previously heard on Live at WOMAD 1985. This recording, true to the reputation of Nusrat’s pre-Real World sets, is much briefer, limiting the amount of time each member of the party gets for their improvisation and resulting in a more focused, punchier performance. The addition of mandolin to the instrumentation helps to move things in a sprightlier direction as well.

“Yaad-E-Nabi Gulshan Mehka” is also given an upbeat reading, with Nusrat leading the way in quick rhythmic variations of the melody almost as soon as it’s stated. We’re in a major key, which seems appropriate for a song reflecting on the “fragrance of the garden of the Prophet Mohammed.” “Haq Ali Ali Haq,” which also appears on Live at WOMAD, starts in a more reflective mode but quickly picks up momentum as the party negotiates the intricate, turning melody. This performance provides a little more stretch room for the performers, with high solos from the party and some meteoric sangam from Nusrat. The party performs a circling take on the melody that moves up and down the scale. All told, though, one appreciates the truth of the reviewer who noted that Nusrat’s other Real World albums provided opportunities for magic to happen by letting the performance stretch out over fifteen or twenty minutes; as complex as this rendition is, it feels like the band is just getting started (and in fact the song is subjected to the indignity of a fade-out).

“Ali Maula Ali Maula Ali Dam Dam” is a devotional Manqbat (a song sung in praise to the Sufi saints) praising Hazrat Ali. Here it’s sung largely homophonically, with little of the extended improvisation in the first half of the performance and with alternating single-voice solos from the different lead singers of the party. There’s a truly dizzying bit of sangam in what sounds like triple-tongued rhythm from Nusrat near the end; if you listen carefully you can hear his young pupil Rahat, here only 10 years old and not given his own mic, singing along behind the master.

“Mast Nazroon Se Allah Bachhae” is the sole ghazal on the “devotional” half of the album. Here the form feels similar to his performance of “Kali Kali Zulfon Ke” on Shahen-Shah, with the qawwal and party intoning the chorus twice and then Nusrat interrupting the third repetition with the first of many solos. The party continues to provide call-and-response support throughout.

The final track, like “Un Ke Dar Pen…,” was cut for space from the 1992 Devotional and Love Songs compilation. “Ni Main Jogi De Naal” is a devotional song dedicated to the jogi or devoted seeker. With a bright opening on mandolin and harmonium, Nusrat and the party sing overlapping iterations of the devotional, alternating with solo verses that elaborate the story of the jogi. In the end they achieve the sort of liftoff present in the best Nusrat performances, engaging in a sort of collective musical frenzy that ends in a final tempo downshift and a last utterance of the chorus.

Nusrat’s next album for Real World was 1994’s traditional The Last Prophet, which has yet to see a vinyl release. He followed that with something less traditional, and we’ll get to that soon. Next time, though, we’ll hear from one of his Real World labelmates, who had already made his world debut through a collaboration with Peter Gabriel.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: This two-hour Channel Four program presents a live 1993 Nusrat concert from London, highlighting the diverse and very large crowds that Nusrat’s traditional qawwali music was bringing during this time.

Footnotes

  1. The liquidation resulted in consolidation, as the WOMAD assets were subsequently acquired by the Real World group. ↩︎

Sheila Chandra, Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices

Voice, drone and the universality of musical expression.

Album of the Week, August 22, 2026

Sheila Chandra had a career arc: actress on the BBC drama series Grange Hill, lead singer in the band Monsoon, top 20 UK hit with “Ever So Lonely.” Then her label wanted her band to drop its Indian influences. She quit the band, went deep into traditional music until she came out the other side, blending influences from traditional British folk music—or, as she notes, “many of the vocal ornaments that are used in British folk are also used in Indian music… And I became interested in the crossover point between those influences.”

She made records in isolation, having retreated from live performing, until she decided it was time to return, and spent time at Real World Studios during a recording week in 1991. That experience may have helped her decide to take the new record she had just made, with just her voice and a drone—so she could perform the material live, completely by herself—and license it to Real World Records for distribution. The approach led to a trio of albums on Real World that she, and critics, still view as her best work, starting with the release of 1992’s Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices.

“Speaking in Tongues I” plunges us off the deep end from the beginning. The performance features Indian vocal percussion, a style called konnakol, which translates to “reciting the rhythmic syllables.” But where traditional konnakol performance is rhythmic within the context of a larger performance, Chandra’s performance here varies rhythm, meter and vocal register to create entire sound worlds. She’s remarked that she wanted the title to invoke the concept of possession, to reflect the degree to which the performance takes flight, and the ending, with its three repetitions of an incredibly tongue-twisting syllabary, reflects the theme of stepping off the edge into something big and new.

Chandra has said that the “ancestors” here are not blood ancestors, but rather all of humanity—or at least the part that sings. “Dhyana and Donalogue” gives us a taste of this approach, with an 11th century Irish ballad juxtaposed against a meditative vocalization (dhyana means “meditation” or “profound reflection”) inspired by Muslim practice. The performance is so quiet and uncluttered that you can hear Chandra shift her vocal resonance from a lower register into a sharper tone within the same breath.

“Nana/The Dreaming” incorporates the music of another ancestral culture, in this case a traditional Spanish lullaby as adapted by the twentieth century composer Manuel de Falla. Set over a drone, it foregrounds the Islamic influences of medieval Spanish culture, even more so as Chandra combines it with a North Indian style improvisation in the same tone row (raga).

“Ever So Lonely / Eyes / Ocean” embraces the idea of combining multiple works that use the same raga, but in this case it takes the form of a greatest-hits medley. “Ever So Lonely” was the first Asian Fusion hit in the British pop charts, and “Eyes” comes from the same debut album; “Ocean” was a later song written by Chandra’s producer and former Monsoon bandmate Steve Coe for her. The combination works like a single utterance of loneliness, desire and reflection. The first side ends with “The Enchantment,” a traditional British folk song broken up in the same way that an Indian ghat might be expanded and improvised upon in Indian classical music.

“The Call” is intended to evoke the Islamic “call to prayer” tradition, which we heard Baaba Maal perform in a Senegalese interpretation on Passion – Sources. Chandra points out the difference in vocal placement, with more resonance in the facial mask (often called a “nasal” sound) as a key difference in the style, which otherwise leverages the vocal improvisation on a a single raga that we’ve heard in other works here.

“Bhajan” is a performance of ancient texts over a guitar drone, which makes them feel more powerful and a little less intimate. Unlike some of the other works here, the single musical anchor is the drone; each fragment uses a different raga. The intensity of the spiritual reflection provides the unifying factor through all the works.

And speaking of intensity, “Speaking in Tongues II” revisits the konnakol practice of the first track and ramps it up to eleven, applying multiple production techniques (reverb vs. dry, sonic manipulation of the vocal, etc.) to make it sound as though the continuous performance is composed of multiple segments edited together. Chandra says this was a deliberate choice, as she perceived she was being dismissed as a “studio artist” who couldn’t perform live; for this record she created deliberately difficult vocal percussion exercises with the sole purpose of being able to recreate them exactly live to silence the doubters!

“Sacred Stones” opens with an improvisation on the drone, here an open fifth that leaves a wide amount of room for melodic exploration. Textually, Chandra combines Indian prayers, Latin prayers, and alleluias into a single invocation of the sacred. The tune flows into the closing track, “Om Namaha Shiva,” a mantra invoking the god that Chandra names “the destroyer of ignorance.” To my ears the performance invokes both the South Asian musical forms and the British folk melodies that she weaves through the rest of the record. It ends as a meditation on divinity and the nature of destruction… and creation.

Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices cemented Chandra’s reputation as an innovating musical thinker, and her subsequent live performances at WOMAD and elsewhere established her as a confident musician. She would take things even further, as we’ll hear soon. But next week we’ll hear some more traditional South Asian music in a massive collection that was released through Real World a few months after this album.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Chandra’s work translated directly to the stage, and there are a lot of live performances to draw from. Here’s “Ever So Lonely / Eyes / The Ocean” in a 1992 performance at World in the Park:

BONUS BONUS: An interview with Chandra from 1992’s WOMAD Festival in Finland leads into a short performance segment of her “Speaking in Tongues” material:

Peter Gabriel, Us

The artist’s most emotionally direct album digs in the dirt to yield a richly organic collaboration featuring some of his most enduring songs.

Album of the Week, August 15, 2026

When Peter Gabriel released his new album Us on September 28, 1992, it seemed like an eternity had passed since his last pop album, So, in 1986. (How little we knew!) Over the past weeks we’ve looked into some of what he was doing during the period—the Passion soundtrack and sister album Passion – Sources, massive world tour, WOMAD, and starting the Real World label and launching the western careers of some of his key contributors. But it has to be said that part of what he was doing was recalibrating. For the former art-pop auteur, life could never be the same after So. He had to find a new way to make music.

He also had to come to terms with himself. His marriage to Jill Gabriel, long strained, ended in divorce in 1987 in the middle of the massive world tour. He was famously linked with actress Rosanna Arquette for some time after his divorce, but the relationship was not long lasting. The dissolution of his marriage resulted in depression and therapy, which continued for six years. The divorce and his therapy both influenced the songwriting on Us, his most personal album to date.

To make the album real, he turned to a group of collaborators both familiar and new, many drawn from the sessions in the massive state-of-the-art studio he built in a former mill building complex in Box, Wiltshire, England. There was the core band, by now familiar: Tony Levin, Manu Katché, David Rhodes, producer Daniel Lanois, engineer David Bottrill; frequent collaborators like Shankar and Peter Hammill; collaborators from Passion including Hossam Ramzy, Doudou N’Diaye Rose, Kudsi Erguner, Assane Thiam, Manny Elias, and the Babacar Faye Drummers; and collaborators drawn from the nascent Real World label including many of the Passion names, the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble, and Ayub Ogada. There were also some brand new faces, including Meters guitarist Leo Nocentelli, Lanois’ producing partner Brian Eno, ascendant electronic producer William Orbit, duduk player Levon Minassian, and incandescent vocalist Sinéad O’Connor.

“Come Talk to Me” begins in a silence that builds to a shout: layers of keyboards crescendo up to a bagpipe solo over the bass, thundering drums courtesy of the combined forces of Katché, the Babacar Faye Drummers, and a 1980 drum loop from Doudou N’Diaye Rose, and a response on the duduk. Peter’s vocals are direct and intimate, reaching out to someone who has been incommunicado, asking for a bridge over which they can rebuild a relationship; he’s subsequently disclosed that the rift was with one of his daughters. The chorus features harmony vocals from Sinéad; Peter had met her doing an Amnesty concert in Santiago, Chile in 1990 and invited her to the studio, and having her very present voice on the opening track effectively signals that this album is about dialog and communication. It’s also a showcase for his collaborative work with the artists of Real World: that choir that enters after the bridge, the storied Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble, were recording their album for the label, The Wild Field, at the same time Gabriel was working on Us.

The contrast as the album flows into “Love to Be Loved” is marked. Cool where “Come Talk to Me” is hot, the second track is all about minimal groove, with both the late William Orbit and the legendary Brian Eno contributing programming and keys. Katché’s drum programming and Hossam Ramzy’s tabla (as well as Daryl Johnson’s hand drum) anchor the rhythm along with Tony Levin’s bass. And the lyrics take us on an emotional journey, starting from talking about the need for contact (echoes of “I Have the Touch”) to a startling transition in the bridge in which Peter confesses, “This old familiar craving / I’ve been here before, this way of behaving… Let it pass, let it go, let it leave / From the deepest place I grieve / This time, I believe.” But even that isn’t the end, and we get to the root of it: “Though it takes all the strength in me / And all the world can see / I’m losing such a central part of me / I can let go of it… I recognize how much I’ve lost / And I cannot face the cost / ‘Cause I love to be loved.” The track’s stark honesty about the need for physical relationships and letting go of destructive behaviors, even as other relationships are falling apart, is striking; one really feels those years that Peter spent in therapy at work here. And it’s a jam.

That brings us to “Blood of Eden,” which feels like the most primal, innocent love song Peter has ever written. It comes out of an idyllic opening with the doudouk over layers of keyboards, and Peter sings about the darkness in his heart and the “heated and the holy.” The song is surely one of the best known from the album thanks in no small part to Sinéad O’Connor’s pure vocals in the chorus duet (and the face morphing of the two singers in the video), but the lyrics are a bit of a hodgepodge, with the heated and the holy looking down from on high “so secure with everything they’re buying.” The narrator returns to “the union of the woman and the man” as a retreat to paradise even as he acknowledges the worm at the heart of the apple: “All the while the distance grows between you and me.” There are echoes here of “Don’t Give Up,” both in the duet structure of the song and the plight of the narrator, but the catastrophe seems more emotional than economic here. This was one of the songs that underwent the longest gestation, with multiple versions and arrangements extant; the liner notes hint at this when they credit Richard Chappell for the mix from which the bridge section was drawn, and another version of the song appeared even before the album was released on a soundtrack (see the bonus section below). Other versions have been released to Peter’s fan club on Bandcamp.

“Steam” underwent a similar evolution, with a stunning “Quiet Steam” appearing as a b-side to the album’s first single. But there’s plenty to recommend the released version, starting with the funky guitar of Leo Nocentelli of the Meters. The horns aren’t given quite as much prominence as they are in the song’s spiritual predecessor “Sledgehammer,” but they’re still pretty tasty, and the Babacar Faye Drummers add an edge to the percussive energy that is otherwise all Motown. One fun thing to listen for is Peter’s keys, here easily distinguished because he’s switched from the airy synth sounds of the Prophet to a fairly convincing Hammond organ soundalike, adding to the sweaty funk of the mix.

“Only Us” returns to a more open, idyllic sound, with a duet between Peter and Kenyan musician Ayub Ogada. This is another track with contributions from William Orbit, but here the vibe is organic rather than chill. Shankar and ney flautist Kudsi Erguner contribute to the feeling of limitless nature, and Peter’s lyrics signal the song’s centrality to the album’s overall concept as he refocuses on relationships and people: “Seduced by the noise and the bright things that glisten / I knew all the time I should shut up and listen / And I’m finding my way home from the great escape… Yes I can read you loud and clear … The further on I go, oh the less I know / Friend or foe, there’s only us.” I realized as I was relistening to the album that this was a track that had slipped under my radar, but it repays listening to again.

The second half of the album starts with “Washing of the Water,” easily Peter’s most gospel song starting with just bass, snare and piano accompanying Peter’s unvarnished vocals. This too has echoes of “Don’t Give Up”—we could be over the same river that flowed through the earlier song. But here the protagonist gives in to the lure of the water, choosing to accept the call to immerse himself in grief as he mourns the loss of the relationship. The horns under the bridge as Peter sings “Letting go, it’s so hard / The way it’s hurting now / To get this love untied / So tough to stay with this thing / ‘Cause if I follow through / I face what I’ve denied / I’ll get those hooks out of me / and I’ll take out the hooks that I’ve sunk deep in your side.” The acceptance of the dissolution of the relationship, the unhooking and the desire to finally sleep, feels like a brutally sad step, but also like emotional honesty and progress as the narrator names the pain that is at his core.

The progress of Peter’s emotional journey is most vivid in “Digging in the Dirt,” a metaphor for the hard work of therapy as Peter allows himself to express anger as well as sadness and grief. The rage of the narrator boiling over in the chorus—“Don’t talk back, just drive the car”—is shocking when it comes to the surface, the “something in me / dark and sticky” rising like Sting’s monster crawling to the surface of a dark Scottish loch. Significantly, though, the narrator doesn’t stay stuck in this moment of rage; he takes a step back, asking, “Stay with me, I need support,” and goes digging to “find the places I got hurt.” By the end of the song (a fantastic slow groove built atop Babacar’s djembe, Assane Thiam’s tama, and Hossam Ramzy’s surdu, with Leo Nocentelli joining David Rhodes, Manu Katché, and Tony Levin plus more background vocals from Ogada, this time joined by Peter Hammill and Richard Macphail), the narrator has even opened up his area of concern to “find the places we got hurt,” acknowledging the difficulties he’s caused his partner. I remember watching the video for this song live, introduced by Gabriel on MTV, in a student lounge and thinking, “I guess Peter’s been in therapy”; the vivid claymation of Peter sinking into the grass covered by insects and worms is among the most memorable video images of him in his entire ouevre.

“Fourteen Black Paintings” follows. The longer CD format allowed Gabriel to expand beyond the 45-50 minute limit of an LP, and this composition, which reads like a cross between Passion and “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37),” is the beneficiary, as it surely would have been cut for time otherwise. Yet it’s significant in its own way; Peter’s only known collaboration with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, the song is an echo of “Biko” in its call for the people to embrace their power and bring about change. There’s also some vivid percussion from Babacar and Assane Thiam alongside the doudouk and electric violin that build the atmosphere of the song.

All of which makes “Kiss That Frog” even more of a shock. A playful metaphor-song that plays as a straightforward fairy tale, Peter’s lyrics have rarely been so direct, and his singing is unusually free, especially in the scat choruses at the beginning and end of the song. If “Steam” is a lesser shadow of “Sledgehammer,” I’d rate “Kiss That Frog” as a superior successor to “Big Time.” Both more open and more generous in its worldview, it’s also downright funny: “Let him sit beside you / Eat right off your plate / You don’t have to be afraid / There’s nothing here to hate.” When Gabriel shifts perspective from the narrator to the frog, croaking “Kiss that frog / You may get your prince,” it’s a laugh-out-loud moment. When I was a cynical, critical teen I disliked the song for exactly the same characteristics that make it enduring (and endearing) now: the extended metaphor, the straightforward pop, the echoes of gospel and R&B in Peter’s harmonica and “fake organ” and Marylin McFarlane’s backing vocals. This is one of the few songs on the record that doesn’t have an extensive list of guest musicians, just programming by David Bottrill and Richard Blair, a percussion loop from the Adzido Drummers and shakers from Manny Elias, and David Rhodes’ guitar.

The album closes with “Secret World,” another contender for the theme song, as Peter sings with open regret, but “no guilt and no shame, no sorrow, no blame,” about the dissolution of the relationship and about moving on: “All the places we were hiding love / What was it we were thinking of?” The song, again built on a drum loop from Doudou N’Diaye Rose (the album’s secret MVP), is an open ballad sung with regret but also with forgiveness, and with a sort of intimacy not present in the singer’s earlier works: “So I watch you wash your hair / Underwater, unaware / And the plane flies through the air / Did you think you didn’t have to choose it? / That I alone could win or lose it?” After many works berating himself for the dissolution of the relationship, Peter dispassionately observes that it wasn’t only up to him, and allows himself to absolve some of the guilt, shame, sorrow and blame. It’s probably the most mature reflection on the end of a relationship in pop music, certainly in Peter’s work, and it puts truth to Peter’s dedication to Jill and to Rosanna Arquette in the liner notes: “To Jill, for giving up so much in all the time we were growing up together. To Rosanna for all her love and support that I didn’t properly acknowledge.” And it’s all wrapped in a tasty groove, with one of Tony Levin’s most sinuous bass lines as the foundation.

Us in many ways is clearly a direct successor to So in terms of the ambition, artistic scope, and stadium-readiness of its sound. But where its 1986 predecessor is the slickest thing Gabriel has ever recorded, Us embraces the organic, acoustic, and human side of music making. The collaborations from Passion and the experiences producing and recording—and singing alongside—so many great world musicians seem to have opened Peter up to a more human way of making music. It also evolved his songwriting in ways that opened new opportunities in his career; when we check back with some of his later work we’ll explore that thought some more. But first we’ll listen to another voice on his Real World label, one who didn’t participate in the making of Us.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: “Blood of Eden” appears in a different version, based on an earlier approach to the song, in Wim Wender’s great 1991 film Until the End of the World, accompanying a scene that hints at nuclear catastrophe — or at least an EMP. Here’s that scene (but you should really watch the whole movie):

BONUS BONUS: “Washing of the Water” would seem to be a non-obvious choice to perform on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to promote this album, but that’s where Peter went in this incredible performance with Shankar, Joy Askew on keyboards, Tony Levin on acoustic bass—and with Branford Marsalis, who was music director for Jay’s band at the time, sitting in on soprano sax:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Much of the b-side material that came from the Us sessions consists of alternate takes of the album tracks, but “Bashi-Bazouk” is the exception. An instrumental that feels a bit like Passion given a dance floor treatment, it’s got a shocking opening and a mean groove:

BONUS X 4: Just as Passion – Sources served as a Real World sampler for the artists appearing on Passion, so there was Plus From Us. Sadly the compilation has never been released on vinyl, but there’s a lot to like here: Ayub Ogada, the Meters, solo tracks from Rhodes, Levin, and Katché, and more.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Shahbaaz

A mesmerizing collection of traditional and modern song from the great qawwali master.

Album of the Week, August 8, 2026

If you’ve just done a big crossover album, as an artist you have an implicit choice: do you continue mining that vein, coming closer and closer to pop? Or do you return to the music that made you famous? Following the success of Mustt Mustt, one imagines this was a choice facing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at some point. After all, the album, and his appearances at WOMAD and other Western festivals, were gaining him increasing fame. But his choice was to double down on the traditional repertoire that had been his life, and he released Shahbaaz, an album with four tracks of traditional qawwali music that, as the liner notes by Pervais Khan observe, take us “on a quest to find new and even more daring paths to the sublime.”

The album, as before recorded in Real World’s Big Room, features many of the members of Nusrat’s party, including his brother Farrukh, long-time tabla player Dildar Hussein, and his young student Rahat Ali, who once again both participates in the choruses and receives live instruction in the art of qawwali while the performance is underway.

“Beh Haadh Ramza Dhasdha” drops us directly into the mix, as harmonium and tabla give us six bars and Nusrat and the chorus immediately wordlessly improvise over the melody for another six before beginning the qawaali song. Nusrat and the party improvise vocal responses after the melodic intervals, until Nusrat interrupts the fourth repetition to climb the scale, inviting Rahat to follow. At around the three minute mark, Nusrat briefly pulls the song into a different mode before bringing it back, and the song continues in this manner, with the party continuing in a more traditional fashion while Nusrat continually interjects in different scales and patterns, illustrating the message of the song, “He manifests Himself in many forms.”

We’ve heard “Shahbaaz Qalandar” before, in that 1985 WOMAD performance. This rendition runs about three minutes longer, partly due to a longer harmonium introduction and partly due to Nusrat’s interjection of additional lyrics in several places which are then picked up and elaborated by the party. The party works into a frenzy at the end with a chant of “Ali, Ali,” but doesn’t engage in the overlapping chorus lines that made the prior live version so fascinating; it’s still a riveting performance.

“Dhyahar-Eh-Ishq Meh” is a modern song setting poetry of the twentieth-century writer Mohammed Iqbal; the tune is rhythmically complex and provides a good opportunity for Nusrat to engage in pyrotechnics in multiple scales. It isn’t two minutes before Nusrat turns the conventional minor tonality into something more modal and unleashes a blistering run; a minute later, he breaks the pattern with a series of low utterances on the tonic before doing a series of up and down runs. The “bridge” is two winding runs in that modal scale. At the end of the tune, Nusrat shifts the rhythm into a different world before bringing it back to the hypnotic main tune.

“Jewleh Lal” enters directly with the entire chorus singing the title to open the chorus: “Jewleh Lal, Shahbaaz Qalandar, your joyous disciples dance at your door.” Both “Jewleh Lal” and “Shahbaaz Qalandar” are hymns of praise to the South Asian Sufi saint and poet Sayyid Shah Hussain Qadri, who was popularly known as Lal Shahbaaz Qalandar (ruby-coloured, noble and divine spirit, spiritual man), with Jewleh Lal meaning the “red bridegroom.” Lal Shahbaaz Qalandar is one of the key Sufi saints, as is clear from the heights of ecstasy the party reaches through the repetition of the hymn over the nearly twenty minute running time of the song. It helps that Nusrat’s setting is catchy, major-key, and a combination of a simple scalewise melody and a high shout to the saint. The tune allows Nusrat ample room for sangam explorations as the party continues to anchor the performance with the repetitions of “Jewleh Lal Shahbaaz” on the high tonic. As each member of the party solos in turn, the tempo imperceptibly increases until the group settles to the final repetition, exhausted with the ecstasy of praise.

The album continues to be a favorite of mine, and I imagine other listeners, for the sheer unbridled ecstatic heights that the party reaches in both “Shahbaaz Qalandar” and “Jewleh Lal.” I know the latter was a favorite of many fans because they were shouting for it at the Nusrat concert I attended almost exactly thirty years ago, on August 3, 1996 in the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC. Nusrat’s tours would continue to emphasize his traditional material even as he collaborated on record with many other western musicians. We’ll hear more of both those musical directions from him before the series is over. But next week, we’ll check back in on what one of those Western musicians was doing all this time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: “Shahbaaz Qalandar” is likely one of Nusrat’s most-performed songs and there are many live versions available. This one comes from a historic open-air concert in New York’s Central Park that was held on August 14, 1993, and gathered a huge crowd, including some unlikely listeners (whom we’ll discuss later):

Roland Hayes

E. Azalia Hackley Collection, Detroit Public Library.
Roland Hayes pictured with a diamond tie pin presented by King George V, of England on April 23, 1921.

I sang a composition arranged by Roland Hayes this Sunday at church. Our church’s regular choir doesn’t do the summer services, so I sometimes sign up to sing a solo one week. This year I learned that we would be preaching from Luke 2, which tells stories of Jesus as a boy, and went looking for solos that drew from those stories. I found one: an arrangement by Hayes of an African American spiritual, “Little Boy (How Old Are You?).”

I was unfamiliar with Hayes, which is somewhat criminal. Not only was he the most well-known African American classical tenor of the early part of the twentieth century, his name spoken in the same breath with Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson, but his adopted home base was Boston. He didn’t start there; he was born in Curryville, Georgia, near where his mother had been enslaved, and he learned spirituals and hymns from the elders in Curryville’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church, which his mother had helped to found. After his father’s death, his mother moved the family to Chattanooga, and he studied music at Fisk University and toured with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. He moved to Boston, where he studied with Arthur Hubbard, who encouraged the young man to take lessons at his house so that the white students at his studio wouldn’t be bothered.

Young Hayes had drive. He paid for his lessons with money earned from jobs as a messenger for the Hancock Life Insurance Company. He made his New York debut with Walter F. Craig’s orchestra in 1916, but was determined to launch a solo career, which he did by renting out Jordan Hall for his first concert, then Boston Symphony Hall for his second. He did his own publicity, taking out newspaper ads and using the phone book to call Bostonians. It worked; he filled the hall. The concert was a financial and artistic success. He began doing house concerts for wealthy patrons including Isabella Stewart Gardner. But he was still not taken seriously as a classical musician.

So he went to Europe, where he repeated the playbook in London, then other capitals. The photo above dates from this period; that’s a diamond tie pin that was given to him by the King of England. When he returned, he was finally able to command the artistic respect due him; he premiered with the Boston Symphony in 1923, and sang as a soloist with the orchestra in ten performances from 1923 to 1944, under both Pierre Monteux and Serge Koussevitsky. He reduced his performing schedule after this, but still gave yearly recitals at Carnegie Hall and taught.

Hayes made his earliest recordings in 1923, for Aeolian Vocalion, and made many other recordings for Columbia, Vanguard and other labels. 1954’s release of The Life of Christ, a recital with Reginald Boardman on the piano, featured the tune “Little Boy (How Old Are You?),” which is the rare solo written about the events at the end of Luke 2, when the 12-year-old boy Jesus went missing from his family to go and sit among the teachers at the Temple. It’s an affecting song, and hopefully my performance did it a little justice. You can hear Hayes’s performance of it below:

Geoffrey Oryema, Exile

An album mixing traditional music from Uganda and modern reflections, by turns joyous and sober, from a musician in exile.

Album of the Week, August 1, 2026

Imagine you’re a music student, and your father is a senior government minister who gets assassinated when you are 24 years old. Your family is part of an ethnic minority in Uganda, the Acholi people, who are economically marginalized and systematically targeted by Uganda’s dictatorial leader Idi Amin. It’s a crazy situation and you’re afraid for your life, so you get smuggled out of the country in the trunk of a car. You seek asylum in Paris, taking odd jobs and teaching yourself guitar. And then imagine you get invited to play at Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival. This was the path to fame followed by Geoffrey Oryema, an Ugandan exile who became one of the most well known East African musicians of his generation.

Oryema was a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who played the nanga, an African harp, as well as guitar and many percussion instruments. Most of his early performances were solos, but he had a few memorable collaborations with Gabriel, including appearing with him at WOMAD and performing together with Gabriel and Suzanne Vega on the One World, One Voice compilation.

It’s the nanga you hear first on the album to open “Piny Runa Woko,” as Oryema plays a complex circular pattern that reveals itself to be in common time as his voice enters, singing in Acholi. Sometimes the greatest moments on these Real World recordings are where the musicians just get to be themselves, and this is definitely one of them as Oryema’s voice phrases in and out against the rhythm. He layers additional vocals over the repetitive song bemoaning the arrival of dawn after the first night spent with a new lover; the lowest vocals create a murmuring atmosphere of mystery like a dawn chorus. Some of those vocals are from an unexpected backup singer, ambient pioneer Brian Eno.

Oryema switches to guitar for “Land of Anaka,” and the arrangement as a whole is more Western but not more conventional. This is largely thanks to the hands on the keys; Eno contributes both melodies and textures from the Yamaha and is joined on backing vocals by Peter Gabriel. A high tin whistle by Richard Evans, whom we last heard on Passion, underscores the melancholy of the song, which mourns Oryema’s exile from his homeland: “We had hope/ We had dreams/ Dreams of a clear green land/ In place of the family home/ Dead sand, dead sand.” This song of exile is one of Oryema’s most acclaimed and it’s easy to see why.

“Piri Wango Iya” is another love song, this time played on the lukeme, a northern Ugandan “thumb piano” like the mbira of Zimbabwe. Oryema is mostly on his own here on the lukeme and bass, with a little percussion from engineer David Bottrill, accompanying his voice which seamlessly swings from a high falsetto to a low bass line. “Each time I think of you / My heart jumps into my throat…” It’s a gorgeous miniature of a piece.

“Ye Ye Ye” is a more traditional bluesy rocker, and here the band features David Rhodes on slide guitar, with Gabriel contributing “fake organ” on the synthesizer and David Bottrill adding bass and drums. It has the feel of an in-the-studio improvisation with whoever happened to be around the Real World Big Room at the time, but the lyric is serious, telling the legend of the Ugandan warrior Lagila and his death at the hands of Oyuru after a long time of terrorizing the villages. It’s followed by “Lacan Woto Kumu,” which returns to the sound-world of the nanga as it creates complex patterns under Oryema’s vocals and whistling. It’s a hypnotic end to the first side.

“Makambo” is entirely different, mostly driven by Oryema’s guitar with a heavy reverb applied, backed by Bottrill on bass and Eno on “vocal textures.” The liner notes don’t supply any lyrics, only saying, “This song relates the pain that people go through when left with no other choice but to leave their motherland.” Oryema’s vulnerable whistle seems to carry the pain all on its own.

Oryema returns to the lukeme for “Jok Omako Nyako,” the story of a girl possessed by an evil spirit as she walks home from the neighboring village; she is saved by a passerby who has a more powerful spirit that drives the evil one away. Though sung entirely in Acholi, Oryema’s voice carries the story, dipping into his lower range to convey the battle of the spirits. By contrast, “Solitude” is built around a 6/8 pattern on David Rhodes’ 12-string guitar alongside Oryema’s own, as he sings a song dedicated to his mother, a memorial to his assassinated father. “When we used to go to Anaka / Elephants would dance / We were young / We were young/ Erenayo is no more / No more / Mother don’t weep…”

It’s back to the lukeme for “Lubanga” as Oryema sings about his uncertainty about whether Lubanga, who blessed his tongue to learn new languages, is real or unreal. In pre-Christian Uganda, Lubanga was understood to be a spirit of disease and death, but the arriving Christian missionaries identified it with the creator God, which needless to say creates some ambiguity about the interpretation of the lyrics.

Oryema closes with “Exile,” accompanying himself on guitar and djembe and joined by Rhodes on electric guitar and Bottrill on bass, as he sings a prayer for peace and the end of tribalism: “Drop those guns … And if you really have the desire to fight / Pick up a hoe and fight with the soil.”

Oryema’s debut was embraced as both a new voice in “world music” and a powerful humanitarian, and human, statement in the face of exile. It’s an unusual record in the early Real World catalog, featuring almost no percussion and very minimal added instrumentation and mostly letting Oryema’s deep voice and rhythmic playing drive the sound forward. Oryema made two more records on Real World following the success of Exile and “Land of Anaka”; his 1993 Beat the Border was his biggest hit for the label, followed by 1996’s Night to Night. He moved labels to Sony International, releasing four more albums between 2000 and 2010, including Words, a collaboration with Peter’s daughter Melanie. He died of cancer in Lorient, a commune in Brittany, in 2018.

We’ll explore the Real World catalog a little more next week, with another record that dives deep into musical traditions from other parts of the world.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: When WOMAD came to the United States for the first time in 1994, Oryema joined Peter Gabriel in an interview and performance on the Today show. Here’s Matt Lauer interviewing them, followed by a performance of “The River” from Beat the Border:

BONUS BONUS: Oryema continued to perform “Land of Anaka” throughout his career; here’s a 2005 performance with Peter Gabriel on backing vocals from the Africa Calling festival: