Peter Gabriel, So

The bestselling 1986 album seamlessly melds art and pop and marks Peter’s transition to a top tier star.

Album of the Week, May 16, 2026

It’s a challenge to approach an album like So. Easily Peter Gabriel’s most popular album, arguably one of the most talked about and best albums of the 1980s, and it’s not like it’s obscure. But, like the songs themselves, the album is made of layers upon layers, and that’s where our tale begins.

In fact, let’s begin at the beginning. Following the 1982 release of Security and the subsequent tour, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Peter took some time off, save for the soundtrack to Alan Paton’s film Birdy. In fact, he was recording the whole time. The years 1983–1985 were surprisingly fertile given that there was no official album released. In fact, there’s a rich batch of soundtrack appearances from this period, as well as non-album studio tracks: “Walk Through the Fire” (from Against All Odds),1 the studio version of “I Go Swimming,” “Across the River” (a collaboration with Indian violinist L. Shankar and Stewart Copeland), his song “No More Apartheid” from the 1985 Sun City compilation, and of course “Out Out,” Peter’s contribution to the Gremlins soundtrack.2 Unfortunately, around this time Peter’s long-term UK label, Charisma, was being acquired by Virgin Records. Ultimately the acquisition settled out and Charisma/Virgin continued to release Peter’s albums in the UK while Geffen handled releases in the rest of the world, but in the dust of the acquisition some of the wind went out of the sails of a new album.

But his creative juices were still flowing. So in February of 1985 Peter retreated to the recording studio at Ashcombe House, where he had recorded since 1978, and began laying down tracks. He considered working with a number of producers for the album, including Bill Laswell (whom he had crossed paths with in the making of the Laurie Anderson collaboration “Excellent Birds”) and Nile Rodgers, but ultimately decided to stick with Daniel Lanois, his collaborator from Birdy. It would prove a fruitful choice; not only was Lanois an expert in producing the combination of organic and atmospheric sounds that Peter was striving to produce, but he was also surprisingly adept at forcing the famously digressive Peter to finish work. My favorite anecdote: at one point Lanois resorted to locking Peter inside the studio so that he would finish a vocal. Peter wrote the core tracks of the songs with Lanois and guitarist David Rhodes from sketches that he produced using the Prophet-5 polyphonic synthesizer or his Yamaha piano, along with a Linn drum machine. Using this method, Peter built songs up from melodic ideas with nonsense vocal syllables to fully fledged songs, having the trio improvise with his rough demos in their headphones, bouncing the trio recordings into the headphones to bring in the larger band, and so on.

The larger band was built around familiar collaborators—Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta—and French drummer Manu Katché (who would follow this session with Sting’s …Nothing Like the Sun). A host of others would make appearances on the album, most on one or two tracks: Chris Hughes, fresh off producing Tears for Fears’ Songs from the Big Chair; Copeland; Shankar; trumpeter Wayne Jackson from the Stax Records backing band the Bar-Keys; saxophonist Mark Rivera from Billy Joel’s band; pianist Richard Tee, whom we’ve previously seen playing with Hubert Laws and Ron Carter on CTI Records; and guest vocalists Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, and Youssou N’Dour. The last was a superstar in his native Senegal, but was yet to break out in the consciousness of the broader world; that was about to change.

“Red Rain” opens the album on a massive note, with an indelible riff on the hi-hat from Stewart Copeland and an echo of a keyboard line, then a massive chord through which Tony Levin’s indelible bass snakes. Peter’s apocalyptic lyrics sing of a dream of a rain that covers all those around, imagery that dates back to some of his earliest writings; in fact, the image is the one of the last remnants of the Mozo mythology that had previously informed “Down the Dolce Vita,” “Here Comes the Flood,” and “On the Air.” But Mozo aside, the song also features some deeply personal writing. His marriage to Jill Moore was falling apart—strained by his touring, she was unfaithful, and the resulting divorce sent Peter into a deep depression and to six years of therapy. It’s hard not to read lines like “I come to you, defenses down / with the trust of a child” and “Red rain is coming down all over me / I’m begging you” knowing this context without thinking of metaphors for accusations and retribution.

From the sublime to … “Sledgehammer,” easily Gabriel’s most-remembered song, thanks in no small measure to its innovative Claymation video and unsubtle but good-natured phallic imagery, as well as to the horn section, a first for a Gabriel album. Peter has explicitly called out the song as an homage to Stax-Volt soul singles, an early source of musical inspiration for him, to the point that he asked Wayne Jackson, who as a member of the Mar-Keys played behind Peter’s hero Otis Redding, to assemble the horns for the track, which included Rivera and trombonist Don Mikkelsen, who had played with Ann-Margret and in Louie Bellson’s band. There’s what sounds like a Hammond B-3 organ on the track, which is actually played on Peter’s Prophet-5 synthesizer, and a weird synthetic flute sound, which Peter plays on the E-mu Emulator II, a sampling synthesizer beloved by acts as diverse as Stevie Wonder, Belgian electronic band Front 242, Depeche Mode, and the Pet Shop Boys. The track is tremendous fun, thanks in no small part to its bouncy rhythm section courtesy Levin and Katché, who was literally getting on a bus to the airport when Peter encouraged him to stick around and help re-record the track from its original foundation, which had featured drummer Chester Thompson.

“Don’t Give Up” is another complete stylistic pivot, a hard-luck song constructed in response to Dorothea Lange photographs of starving farmers from the American Depression. It was built around a rhythmic part that Peter transferred from tuned drums to a Tony Levin bassline; Tony achieved a more muted sound by the expedient of placing a diaper that he had packed in his gig bag for his two-month-old child beneath the strings. The track is moving enough, but when the chorus comes and Kate Bush sings “Don’t give up, you still have … friends,” it enters spine-tingling territory. The song changes lives; both Elton John and the late Matthew Perry at different times credited the bridge’s lyric “Rest your head, you worry too much / It’s gonna be all right / When times get rough, you can fall back on us” with encouraging them in sobriety. And Richard Tee’s gospel piano on the second bridge similarly elevates the song to a different place. It was always conceived as a man-woman duet, though originally Peter had Dolly Parton in mind; now it’s hard to imagine the song without Kate’s contributions. This is particularly true with the video, which features Peter and Kate embracing each other and singing the song for the entire video as the sun rises and falls in the background. Though Peter asked Jill’s permission before embarking on the shoot, the video ultimately did not help their marriage.

“That Voice Again” has its origins in Peter’s efforts to write the soundtrack for Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, believe it or not. Originally the lyrics were written about judgment and Christ’s commandment “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” but over several rewrites it became about the inner judgmental voice that “either helps or defeats us.” It is also the very last Mozo song, with the judgmental voice somehow fitting into Peter’s alchemical narrative. Twelve-string guitar from Lanois (the first time that instrument appeared on a Gabriel album since “Solsbury Hill”) and an elaborate drum part from Katché fill out the arrangement.

“In Your Eyes” is a pure love ballad, a form that Peter rarely essayed prior to So. It has several key features in the arrangement: Richard Tee’s piano, a soaring pre-chorus (that “I reach out from the inside” segueing into the wordless vocal bridge always hits me right in the feels), and Youssou N’Dour. That a previously-unknown-to-Westerners Senegalese vocalist would be the secret weapon of this track would seem unusual, especially given the Who’s Who of backup singers also appearing on the track—which included Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr, The Call’s Michael Been, and doo-wop singer Ronnie Bright, who performed the bass vocals on the classic song “Mr. Bass Man.” But that’s only if you don’t reckon with Youssou’s voice; a soaring, resonant instrument with bright edges that spans multiple octaves with heldentenor intensity and is comfortable in Wolof, French and English. More than any other track on the album, the arrangement for “In Your Eyes” is fluid, and live versions and remixes play with the running order of the song; we’ll hear an example of that another time. As a listener who fell in love with the album in 1986, the song sits at Number 5 in the running order for me, but Peter originally intended it to end the album; the limitations of the vinyl format, which made reproducing the low bass tones in the inner grooves a challenge, switched it to start Side Two.

“Mercy Street” is another of the songs on the albums about which I have difficulty being objective. The song introduced me to the writings of Anne Sexton, whose poetry (particularly 45 Mercy Street and The Awful Rowing Toward God) inspired the song. The song is built around a track by Brazilian percussionist Djalma Corrêa, who provided surdo, congas and triangle in a traditional Brazilian forró rhythm. (A different set of track by Corrêa provided the basis for “Don’t Break This Rhythm”, which became the b-side to “Sledgehammer.”) The arrangement, though uncluttered on the album, was painstakingly constructed, with piano parts from Richard Tee added and then removed, a Fairlight CMI-based melody played by Peter by hand instead of sequenced for a more human feeling, and double-tracked vocals, with the lower octave achieved by having Peter stay up all night at the studio and doing a single take at 7am when he was at his most fatigued. All this is in support of a jewel of a song, with bits of Sexton’s poetry turned into a stream-of-consciousness lyric full of confessional details, anchored around the desperate search for home: “Dreaming of Mercy Street / Wear your inside out / Looking for mercy / In your daddy’s arms again.” The final coda lends finality to the searching and despair in the song as Peter turns to images from Sexton’s posthumous book: “Anne with her father is out in the boat / Riding the water, riding the waves / On the sea.” A slightly extended version of the track was used for the official video.

“Big Time” is the other “overtly commercial” track on the album. The horn section from “Sledgehammer” returns over a rhythm track that was notoriously difficult to record; Tony Levin’s bass part was achieved by having Tony finger the notes on the fretboard while Jerry Marotta hit the strings with his drumsticks to achieve a percussion effect, while Stewart Copeland’s ingenious hits and fills didn’t exactly line up with the drum machine, so engineer Kevin Killen sampled his track and created the percussion from the samples. Former Ikette P. P. Arnold led the backing singers, and Peter’s Prophet-5 faux-Hammond organ returned. Where the phallic imagery in “Sledgehammer” is playful, here it’s sardonic, as Peter dismantles the consumerist mentality of the 1980s and ties it to the drive to overcompensate, a point brought home by the closing lyric: “Look at my circumstance / And the bulge in my big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big.”

The transition into “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” is abrupt and icy. The song, reminiscent of “Lead a Normal Life,” is mostly constructed around Peter’s synthesizers, with David Rhodes’ guitar and L. Shankar’s violin contributing to the texture over a beat from Jerry Marotta; many of the sounds, including Peter’s vocals, were processed through the Fairlight for extra texture. Peter wrote the lyrics as an attempt to process the results of Stanley Milgram’s experiments in authoritarian behavior, in which 37 of 40 participants continued to administer higher and higher levels of electric shocks to unseen subjects when encouraged to do so by their peers. The repeated “We do what we’re told” lyric repeats like a mantra, expressing the impulse to conformity that drove the awful behavior of the participants. Some listeners found this song the only part of So to their tastes; however one felt, it’s undeniably a direct link to the themes and preoccupations of 1980’s Peter Gabriel 3 (Melt), and in fact the song originated in those sessions.

“This is the Picture (Excellent Birds),” which appears on modern LP versions of the album but not the original, is a re-think of Peter’s 1984 collaboration with Laurie Anderson from Mister Heartbreak, with the groove (including an added talking drum from Manu Katché) brought to the fore and some elements (like Laurie’s idiosyncratic synth line) removed. My poor mother could never get Peter’s word choice in the song; hearing it in my childhood home as I was listening, she asked me not to listen to it again as the line about “bitches of evil” made her uncomfortable. (This was, of course, a mondegreen for “I see pictures of people.”)

It’s hard to overstate how huge So was. Quintuple platinum album sales, Number One on the UK album chart and Number Two on the US, a number one Billboard Top 200 spot (“Sledgehammer”) and nine MTV Video Music Awards (also “Sledgehammer”), number one on Billboard’s Album Rock chart (“In Your Eyes”), top 10 singles in the UK (“Don’t Give Up”) and US (“Big Time”), and number 3 on the Mainstream Rock chart (“Red Rain”). It launched Youssou N’Dour to worldwide fame, further raised the profile of Kate Bush, and most of all completed the transformation of Peter Gabriel from a niche artist for fans of progressive and experimental rock, to a pop artist with serious artistic and experimental bona fides. Because of the album’s long gestation and long singles cycle, many interesting tracks were released alongside as b-sides; we’ll linger in this album’s shadow a bit next week to listen to some of those.

You can listen to this week’s album here, in the original 1986 track order but including “This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)” in its spot on the original CD running order. This is controversial. Ever since 2002, Peter has preferred a revised running order that puts “In Your Eyes” last on side two.

BONUS: Peter’s So sessions sprawled across many months and there were a few songs that were recorded that never made it to the album, or even as a b-side. When the 25th anniversary of the album was released as a box set in 2011, Peter polished up a few of these songs. “Courage” is pretty great! It was released as a 12″ 45 single in the box set, with “Sagrada” and an alternative mix of “Don’t Give Up” as b-sides.

BONUS BONUS: There are a lot of live performances of these songs; they essentially form the core of Peter’s touring repertoire for the rest of his career. But the ones featuring the original performers, such as this 1987 live version of “Don’t Give Up” with Kate Bush, are special. Even if it is an audio-only cleaned-up bootleg:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: “In Your Eyes” was made newly famous through its use in the John Cusack/Ione Skye movie Say Anything, in a scene that is engraved in the hearts of otherwise-cynical GenX kids everywhere:

BONUS X4: The version of “Mercy Street” that was performed in Peter’s 1987 concert in Athens, Greece has always pierced me to the heart, with Peter singing from curled and crouched positions to echo the anguish of the lyrics:

Footnotes

  1. I know that I probably just put the Phil Collins title song from that movie into your head. You’re welcome. ↩︎
  2. We’ll talk about some of Peter’s other soundtrack work another time. ↩︎

Exfiltration Radio: Summer Sun

An hour of sunny, dreamy happy music for late spring/summerish afternoons.

It’s spring here in New England which means that the days are finally warm enough for flowers to open and we can finally turn the heat off. Just in time for summer to come along in two weeks!

This set of Exfiltration Radio started when I found a song I had been looking for ever since I was living in Seattle that first summer of 2001 and listening to KEXP. There was a happy, sunny track that I kept hearing, perfect for the warm-but-not-hot, breezy summer days, but it literally took me over twenty years to track it down to a 2001 album by Swedish producers Koop, with guest vocals by Yukimi Nagano. There was also a burgeoning playlist of songs from that summer that I never committed to the blog or to Art of the Mix; unfortunately it was wiped out when I had to rebuild my iTunes library file one year, but a few of the tracks came from there.

And a few are definitely out of left field. I find OMD’s “Genetic Engineering” to be a happy, bouncy song; not all will agree. And The Blue Nile’s “Tomorrow Morning” appeared in the playlist yesterday, after listening to Peace at Last for the first time in many years.

  1. Youth – Langston Hughes (The Voice of Langston Hughes)
  2. I Feel – The Sundays (Blind)
  3. The Lifting – R.E.M. (Reveal)
  4. Dreams – The Cranberries (Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? (The Complete Sessions 1991-1993))
  5. Kiss Me – Sixpence None the Richer (Sixpence None the Richer (Deluxe Anniversary Edition))
  6. Summer Sun – Koop (Waltz for Koop)
  7. Genetic Engineering (312MM Version) – Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark (Dazzle Ships)
  8. Sweetness And Light – Lush (Ciao! 1989-1996)
  9. Alison – Slowdive (Souvlaki)
  10. Temptation [7″ Version] – New Order (Movement [Collector’s Edition])
  11. Lost Outside The Tunnel – Aztec Camera (1981 – Cassette)
  12. Today is the Day – Yo La Tengo (Summer Sun)
  13. The Big Sky – Kate Bush (Hounds of Love)
  14. Tomorrow Morning – The Blue Nile (Peace at Last (Deluxe Version))
  15. Um Canto De Afoxé Para O Bloco Do Ilê (Ilê Ayê) – Caetano Veloso (Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropical)

We have taken control as to bring you this special show and we will return it to you as soon as you are exfiltrated.

Exfiltration Radio: Monk’s Time

Exfiltration Radio returns with an hour of Thelonious Monk.

William P. Gottlieb: Thelonious Monk, Minton’s Playhouse, ca. 1947, courtesy Library of Congress

It’s time for a new Exfiltration Radio, and this time out we’re going deep into the wonderfully weird world of Thelonious Monk. This show is an hour of Monk compositions, played by a variety of his bands and also covered by other artists.

We open with a portion of a story Charles Lloyd tells about Monk in the late 1960s, here excerpted from the Billy Taylor radio show ca. 1999. That leads into Monk’s ensemble playing “Well, You Needn’t,” from Monk’s Music, which I wrote about a few years ago. Still fantastic for the sound of the ensemble, which included both Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane as well as Gigi Gryce, Art Blakey, Wilbur Ware, and Ray Copeland.

The earliest of the recordings on this set, “Bemsha Swing” dates from Monk’s first album for Prestige Records, 1954’s Thelonious Monk Trio, with Max Roach and Gary Mapp. It’s the earliest performance of this tune as well, and it’s interesting to see some of the places that Monk takes the melody, as well as to hear his joyous vocalizations as he plays. This is followed by a later live track, “Bye-Ya” from the 1963 Copenhagen live session recently issued as Mønk. This is Monk’s great swinging quartet with Charlie Rouse, John Ore and Frankie Dunlop. From “Bye-Ya” we go back to Monk’s Music for his “Ruby, My Dear,” here played with Ware, Blakey, and Hawkins, whose solo on this one is a thing of beauty.

The second half of the mix features notable performances of Monk’s music by other artists, starting with another run at “Bemsha Swing,” this time by Keith Jarrett’s great standards trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, on the live album The Cure. I love what Jarrett (as far as we know, at most a very distant relation!) does with Monk’s melody, turning the rhythm into a boogying, churning perpetual motion machine. The performance also features Jarrett’s own vocalizing, which is an acquired taste, so be forewarned.

Following this, there’s a spectacular take on Monk’s composition “Ask Me Now” by a group led by McCoy Tyner and featuring Joe Henderson on tenor, Ron Carter, and Al Foster on drums, live in performance from 1991. The extended solos by Henderson at the beginning and end of the track are worth the price of admission by themselves.

This is in turn followed by a take on “Blue Monk” with scat vocals by Kurt Elling and piano by Christian Sands. There are a number of essays of Monk’s tunes with lyrics out there, including another version of “Blue Monk” by the great Abbey Lincoln and a gorgeous “Round Midnight” by Samara Joy. But I like this version, part of a session laid down and released digitally in a single day, for the spontaneity and joy that the two players have with the work; as Elling says after one spectacular solo by Sands, “That’s the happiest that piano has been all day.” A brief tag of Monk’s “Epistrophy,” from a recently issued performance in Paris in 1966, brings the set to a close.

It’s hard to fit all the great things about a composer and performer like Monk in a single hour, so I focused on tunes that featured great playing by the entire ensemble. You can easily get lost in Monk’s world; this set provides a happy introduction.

Do not attempt to adjust your set…

  1. “Well, every night, Monk would drink the orange juice” – Charles Lloyd (Exfiltration Radio: the bumpers)
  2. Well, You Needn’t – Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Music)
  3. Bemsha Swing – Thelonious Monk Trio (The Thelonious Monk Trio (Rudy Van Gelder Remaster))
  4. Bye-Ya – Thelonious Monk (Mønk (Live, 1963))
  5. Ruby, My Dear – Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Music)
  6. Bemsha Swing – Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette (The Cure)
  7. Ask Me Now – McCoy Tyner (New York Reunion)
  8. Blue Monk – Kurt Elling, Christian Sands (Wildflowers Vol. 3)
  9. Epistrophy – Thelonious Monk (Live in Paris (1966))

Kate Bush, Hounds of Love

On taking control of an artistic career and creating an unparalleled work of genius.

Album of the Week, May 9, 2026

We come at last to Kate Bush, whom we’ve heard as a backing vocalist on Peter Gabriel 3, but whose own body of solo work was already substantial by this time. At age 27 she was already on her fifth album, and having had a reasonably high level of success with the first four was able to record it with considerable artistic freedom. What she produced has few peers in pop music history: a record with both hits and a conceptual suite, self-produced, that seamlessly blends new wave influences with progressive rock and traditional music sounds, and still manages to sound new today.

Kate Bush grew up in Kent, with both parents harboring amateur musical talents. She taught herself piano at age 11 and was writing songs in grammar school. In the early 1970s she recorded a demo tape which found its way into the hands of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour via a mutual friend. Gilmour sponsored a more professional demo recording; this led to Kate being signed to a recording contract with EMI at age 16. EMI, fearing Bush was too young, kept her on retainer for two years during which she studied interpretive dance with David Bowie’s dance instructor and finished her secondary education.

Her first album, The Kick Inside, was recorded when she was 19 years old and yielded a Number One UK single, “Wuthering Heights.”1 She set a Guinness World Record as the first woman artist to have written every track on a million-selling debut album. But she wanted more artistic control than she was able to exercise on The Kick Inside or her second album Lionheart. Starting with her third album, Never for Ever, she began co-producing her work, bringing a diversity of sounds to the songs and featuring heavy use of synthesizers for the first time, in particular the Fairlight CMI to which she had been introduced while working with Gabriel. This album and the follow-up, The Dreaming, were much more experimental, and the fourth album in particular was received with puzzlement. Undeterred, but noting the high price of studio time, she built her own private studio, allowing her to work at her own pace.

Much of the fifth album was written and performed by Kate on the Fairlight, the Linn drum machine, and piano, but there were a small host of other musicians present, including her longtime bass player and then-partner Del Palmer, bassist Eberhard Weber, percussionist Morris Pert (also on PG3), session guitarist Alan Murphy (Level 42, Mike and the Mechanics), bouzouki and bodhran player Dónal Lunny (Planxty, The Bothy Band), whistle and fiddle player John Sheahan (the Dubliners), Uillean piper Liam O’Flynn (Planxty), the Richard Hickox Singers, and her brother Paddy, who had played on all her prior albums, on balalaika, didgeridoo, violins, and vocals.

“Running Up That Hill” is by this point the best known song on the album, after its second life in Stranger Things. But it’s still a mesmerizing track, with the rhythmic drums (session player Steve Elliott and a healthy dose of Linn) underpinning Del Palmer’s bass and that synth vocal line playing the hook, all before Kate even sings her first lyric. But it is precisely the lyrics and Kate’s voice that are the heart of the song as she sings about the failure to communicate and the desperate wish for empathy: “If I only could, I’d make a deal with God/and I’d get him to swap our places.” Kate’s early albums had her vocals in her high soprano, which was mesmerizing but which could also be harsh depending on her choice of vowel production; here she embraces her lower register as a grounding and a dramatic accent (as on the famous “Yeah, yeah, yo” backing vocals, themselves an iconic hook).2

“Hounds of Love” is a more joyous song, somehow, as Kate sings about being afraid to fall in love over a woofing chorus: “I’ve always been a coward / And I don’t know what’s good for me / Oh here I go… Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake / And I’ll be / Two steps on the water.” The song is almost entirely Kate’s, with only the two drummers (Elliott and Charlie Morgan, who appeared on Wham!’s On the Edge of Heaven and Paul McCartney’s Flowers In the Dirt and who later played with Elton John for thirteen years—and a single cellist credited as joining her on the track. The melody is in a major key but relentlessly descends in thirds and fourths, giving a feeling of giddy instability. It’s a blast.

“The Big Sky” is another disorientingly happy song, with an edge on it, as Kate’s ragged vocal expresses her excitement at the clouds in the big sky while simultaneously accusing her past lover: “You never understood me/ You never really tried.” A chorus rises behind her as she proclaims, “This cloud/Says ‘Noah / Come on, build me an Ark / And if you’re coming, jump / ’Cause we’re leaving with the big sky.’” The ending chorus—“Rolling over like a great big cloud / Walking out in the big sky”—is as close to a gospel moment as Kate’s songs come, and her ecstatic melisma over it is one of her biggest highs.

“Mother Stands for Comfort” is the sole ballad on the album, but despite the title’s promise, not all is well: “Mother, hide the murderer… Mother hides the madman/ Mother will stay Mum.” Eberhard Weber’s jazz-inflected bass is the key to the track, along with Kate’s plaintive vocals and the periodic outbursts of breaking glass—a famous sample patch in the Fairlight which she had also used on her single “Babooshka.”

“Cloudbusting” seems to flow out of “Mother” naturally, but it’s an entirely different song, closer to “Running Up That Hill” in concept and writing. Indeed, the chorus “Every time it rains you’re here in my head/Like the Sun coming out” could be a continuation of the “Running Up That Hill” chorus, only here powered by a churning string section instead of the synthesizer. The song itself carries immense longing in the chorus, “I just know that something good is going to happen,” with only the chugging low strings hinting that there’s tragedy ahead. The song is based on the memoir of Peter Reich about his father Wilhelm’s experiments with attempting to tap “orgone energy” to create rain, but you don’t need to know that story3 to feel the hopeless sadness mixed with the sense that this time it just might work.

The seven songs on Side Two form a complete song cycle which is titled “The Ninth Wave” in the liner notes. “And Dream of Sheep” opens the cycle with Kate’s character in the water, kept afloat by a life vest, “Little light will guide them to me / My face is all lit up.” She tries to keep herself awake, to keep from drowning in the ocean, but she fails to keep her eyes open and enters a dream state, pulled under by her hallucinations.

We get those dreams in “Under Ice,” and they’re frozen; she skates over a frozen body of water, only to see “There’s something moving under/Under the ice… Something / Someone help them / It’s me…” With the realization that the narrator is watching herself drown she comes to herself, and the track hard cuts to “Waking the Witch,” where the narrator hallucinates voices telling her to wake up, alternating with an accusatory judge accusing her of witchcraft, fragmented voices spinning past in a vortex of sound, and even the sound of rescuers: “Can you not see that little light over there?” followed later by the sound of helicopters arriving and a voice yelling at her to “get out of the water.” There are layers upon layers in the sound; it replicates the disorientation of near-death convincingly.

She’s out of the water but not out of the woods. “Watching You Without Me” finds her at her house watching her lover but unable to interact with him; meanwhile he seems utterly unaware of anything that’s happened to her. The track is a ballad tempo, an ordinary major key loop that seems frozen in time, with only a prominent bass melody pushing at the edges to signal the narrator’s distress. There’s a section that appears to have been recorded backwards and played forward; the sound of seagulls drifts in, cutting through the hallucination, as “Jig Of Life” confronts the narrator with her future self, who insists that she bring herself back to life for the sake of her future and her children. As the emotional energy peaks, suddenly we’re in a jig, led by the violin and accompanied by the skirling of the Uillean pipes. Coming out of the jig, the narrator tries to unfragment her memory: “I put this moment here/I put this moment over here.” The song ends with Kate’s older brother John Carder Bush reciting a dramatic poem about her being one with the water.

The hallucinating victim seems in danger of losing all contact with life in “Hello Earth,” which seems to reprise the melodies of “And Dream of Sheep,” “Running Up That Hill” and “Cloudbusting” all at once. A men’s chorus anchored by deep bass voices (possibly pitch shifted) makes us wonder: has she died? The full chorus accuses her of being the “murderer” from “Waking the Witch” as Kate’s character asks “Why did I go?” The bass chorus returns again; is she being sung to rest? But there’s a beep as of a hospital machine, and through the whooshing sounds we hear a German voice: “Deeper, deeper… Somewhere there is a light.”

“The Morning Fog” returns to the “Hounds of Love” melody, this time tempered by gentle guitar melodies and played down a step, as the drowning victim gratefully regains her life: “Do you know/I love you better now/…I’ll kiss the ground/I’ll tell my mother/I’ll tell my father/I’ll tell my loved ones/I’ll tell my brothers/How much I love them.” At the end of the cycle, we’ve come full circle, only instead of seeking to bring empathy to her lover, she is filled with a desire to live and love in the present instead, changed by her near-death experience.

Hounds of Love is like that, a circular, endlessly self-referential album, full of depths and supporting many interpretations. (There are Kate fans who argue that “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning victim dies and is reborn, or that the drowning is symbolic of ego death and investigating the subconscious, or that Kate is the Ophelia to her own Hamlet).4 However you interpret it, the album is first rate, with a philosophically deep second side, a first side full of absolute killer songs, and an everything-goes approach to production. The album hit Number 1 in the UK in 1986, and when “Running Up That Hill” soundtracked an episode of the fourth season of Stranger Things in 2022, it rocketed up the UK charts, giving Kate her second career Number One and going all the way to Number Three in the US. There’s hope for the world still.

And speaking of Number Ones, we’re going to be talking about a few of them next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s Kate performing “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, with none other than David Gilmour backing her up:

BONUS BONUS: Here’s Kate performing “Hounds of Love” at the 1986 Brit Awards:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Here’s a 1985 interview with Kate on the BBC’s “Old Grey Whistle Test.” She talks about the building of her new studio and the making of the album.

BONUS X4: Kate didn’t tour behind this album; she famously played very few live shows, and most of the “live” performances I’ve linked to (except the Secret Policeman show) have her lip-syncing. But as a performer she was still electric even when lip-syncing. This appearance on Wogan from 1985 was the first time anyone had ever heard the music from the album, and the whole thing is completely electrifying.

Footnotes

  1. We’ve heard that song covered by Cécile McLorin Salvant. ↩︎
  2. There was a memorable karaoke outing in San Francisco while I was there for the RSA Security Conference one year, where a young man sang “Running Up That Hill” in the original key, and the entire bar sang along on the “yeah, yeah, yo”s, about five years before the song made its Stranger Things comeback. This song is wired into GenX’s brain. ↩︎
  3. Or that Willam S. Burroughs owned one of Reich’s orgone accumulator boxes, forerunner of the cloudbuster, but it’s a heck of a coincidence. ↩︎
  4. Gathered posts from rec.arts.gaffa, the Kate Bush USENET newsgroup. This is what discourse on the Internet really used to be like, in the days before memes and shitposting. ↩︎

Cocktail time: Cointreau-ing in Eden

Or, what to do with that quinquina in your liquor cabinet.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus just finished a run of John Adams’ “Harmonium” (alongside the Beethoven 9th Symphony), for the first time in thirty-five years. I wasn’t a member the only previous time the chorus performed Adams’ early masterwork (under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle, no less!), but there were nine choristers who did perform the piece back then with us this time.

“Harmonium” is a massive piece, one of the true masterworks of minimalism. But tagging it with that undersells the harmonic and melodic attractions of the piece. True, it does open with two hundred or so measures of chanted “no no no”s1 and other syllables of negation, demonstrating with the human voice the same approach to building with rhythm previously done with marimbas, keyboards, or other instruments in works by Philip Glass and Steve Reich. But then the text of Donne’s poem breaks through like a ray of light—“I never stooped so low”—and you’re in a completely different world. The work is full of surprises and earworms; I found myself saying “rowing, rowing, rowing” under my breath as I walked, in rhythm, down the sidewalk to my car after one rehearsal, and a number of us have half-jokingly agreed that we’ll work on a carol arrangement that uses the melody of the second movement, “Because I could not stop for Death,” to set “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and see if Keith Lockhart will do it for Holiday Pops.

But I digress. Back to “rowing”; as I tried to decide on a cocktail for this run, that rhythm and its ultimate culmination “rowing in Eden” kept going through my head, and so I decided the cocktail had to be “Cointreauing in Eden.” I rifled through some of my old cocktail lists for inspiration and found a jumping off point, the Ante Cocktail. It’s a classic, included by Harry Craddock in his seminal 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, but it calls for an apertif wine called Hercules.

How obscure is Hercules? Obscure enough that my source app starts the write-up with “Here’s what we know about Hercules…”, which perhaps explains enough to make me curious about this attempt to recreate it from a few years back. But the app helpfully suggested that I could substitute Byrrh, which I for some reason have in my inventory. Both Hercules and Byrrh are quinquinas, sweetened fortified apertif wines containing quinine (for bittering and presumably for health reasons) and spices; the family also contains Lillet and Dubonnet. Byrrh in particular is a French quinquina, made with red wine, mistelle (a mixture of ethanol and partially fermented grape juice), and quinine, that was originally sold as a health drink to avoid competition from neighboring apertif makers in the Pyrenees. Some day I’ll write about the intersection of cocktails and patent medicines… Anyway, the flavor is a tad sweet and deeply bitter in a pleasant way.

Cointreau is of course the legendary triple sec formulation produced in Saint-Barthélmy-d’Anjou. I suppose one could use other orange liqueurs, but I don’t recommend a substitution of Grand Marnier; I grabbed the wrong bottle by mistake last night to make this and the orange flavor was far too subdued. Regarding the apple brandy, you can substitute Calvados; I used Laird’s Old Apple Brandy, an aged 80 proof liqueur. Be careful with other substitutions; Laird’s Applejack contains neutral spirits and lacks the punch of real apple flavor.

As always, you can use the recipe card with Highball. Enjoy!

  1. There’s a story that, at the choir party following that 1991 performance, members of the choir gifted both founding TFC director John Oliver and Simon Rattle with the same gag gift: a pair of boxers with the words “NO NO NO NO NO” printed on them… and a different message printed in glow-in-the dark letters that could be read when the lights are out. This is one of many moments that I wish that JO had actually finished writing his memoirs. ↩︎

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party, Live at WOMAD 1985

A recently released archival recording documenting the moment when the great qawwali burst onto the world stage.

Album of the Week, May 2, 2026

A traditional religious singer from Pakistan who performed with a harmonium player, percussionists, and a group of singers that included two students, one of whom was his nephew, would seem an unlikely choice for a superstar. The rise of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, about whom Jeff Buckley once famously remarked “Nusrat, he’s my Elvis,” is the story of a musician who was already acknowledged to be the greatest artist in his field before most Western listeners ever heard of him. And that journey to worldwide fame began with a midnight concert 41 years ago this year, at Peter Gabriel’s 1985 WOMAD festival, on a bill that also featured New Order, the Pogues, Toots and the Maytals, and The Fall.

Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (“Ustad” means “master” or “craftsman” in Urdu, Persian and a host of other languages) was born in 1948 in western Pakistan. His family were practitioners of the art of qawwali, or Sufi devotional music, with their musical heritage going back at least 600 years. Nusrat’s father Fateh Ali Khan wanted Nusrat to follow a more reputable profession like engineering or medicine, but the young musician’s playing on the tabla earned praise from master qawwali artists and convinced his father to let his son follow in his footsteps. At age 16, following the death of his father, Nusrat became the lead singer of his father’s party alongside his uncle Mubarik Ali Khan; in 1971 his uncle died and he rose to leadership of the party at age 23.

A qawwali party is a band optimized for traveling performances. The instrumentation is light—tabla or other percussion instruments and a harmonium—and is primarily there to support the singers. In Nusrat’s party this included Mujarad Mubarik Ali Khan (son of Nusrat’s uncle), Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan (younger brother), two pupils, Kaukab Ali and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan (Nusrat’s nephew) and a five-voice chorus. This group of musicians crowded onto a stage on Mersea Island in Essex for an audience that at first sat politely, but by the end of the first song were on their feet, clapping and chanting along.

“Allah Hoo, Allah Hoo” begins with a several-minutes long instrumental solo with the harmonium and the tabla as the group settles in, then Nusrat intones the initial verse melody in something like a plainchant style, alternating with the other vocalists of the party in higher and higher vocal lines, and finally segueing into the chorus with its repeated exhortations of “Allah Hoo, Allah Hoo” after over six minutes of introductory material. From this point forward the party improvises over several main melodic lines: the “Allah Hoo” melody, the verse melody “Ye zamee’n jab na thi, ye jahaa’n jab na tha,” and a stretch of free improvisation in which each of the singers takes turns ascending and descending octaves, a practice called sargam. This section is particularly notable for the interchanges between Nusrat and his young nephew Rahat (now Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan), who was young enough in this record that his voice had not yet attained his adult range. The overall song is a hymn of praise: “O God, O God… When the earth was not, when this world was not / When the moon and the sun had not been created / When even the secret of Truth was hidden from all / There was nothing here / But still, You alone existed.” The overall performance runs for more than twenty minutes.

Nusrat introduces the next song for the festival audience after the instrumental introduction, saying “This is very famous tune—very famous tune ‘Shahbaaz Qalandar laalmeri pat rakhiyo bal’.” The tune, a hymn to the Sufi mystic “Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalendar” (literally “Prophet of God, Red-Robed, Falcon King, Sufi Saint”) who sought to bring peace between the Hindi and Muslim populations in Pakistan and who was regarded by the Hindi people as as an incarnation of God. He was also known as “Jhulelal,” and both the Shahbaaz and Jhulelal names recur in many of Nusrat’s songs of praise. The song itself features a strong melodic pattern that circles between the fifth and tenth tones of the scale. There are fewer sangam passages in this performance, but an extended instrumental break on harmonium and tabla brings cheers and whistles from the crowd. By the end the singers of the party are singing the chorus in overlapping waves, ultimately stopping only as one of the singers suffers an audible coughing fit.

“Biba Sada Dil Mor De” is the sole non-religious song on the album, a ghazal, or love song, that can be translated as “Darling, give me my heart back” or, in the liner notes to one of Nusrat’s later albums, “If you cannot remain before my eyes please give me back my heart.” For the most part the party repeats the refrain over and over again, but after about six minutes they start a series of vocal improvisations, ranging from high obbligato to highly rhythmic sangam utterances from Nusrat. The record ends in a fade out on the cheers of the crowd.

This performance was legendary but not broadly circulated until 2025, when improvements in digital technology made it possible to adjust the levels in a way that permitted the vocals to be appropriately prominent; on the original tapes the sound of the handclaps of the chorus dominated the sound. The release reopens an old question: would Nusrat have found his way to world prominence without the 1985 WOMAD appearance? We will never know, but this first experience led to many later collaborations with Peter Gabriel and a bigger platform for his solo works. We’ll listen to some of those later, but next week we’ll hear from a different Peter Gabriel collaborator on an album that was itself a breakthrough.

You can listen to this week’s album here, including a bonus performance of Nusrat’s famous “Haq Ali Ali”:

BONUS: The recording, amazing though it is, doesn’t fully convey what this band could do. This crowd video of “Shahbaaz Qalandar” shows it all: the polite listening, then the rhythm starts to grab them, then everyone is on their feet. That’s more or less exactly how it happened to me when I saw Nusrat in the mid-1990s in Washington, DC:

Peter Gabriel, Birdy

Peter Gabriel’s first soundtrack album leans heavily on his past while pointing to the future.

Album of the Week, April 25, 2026

Peter Gabriel has always been an arty performer. From his earliest days in Genesis he leveraged visual presentation to make a bigger impact (think the fox head on Foxtrot, or the flower costume). And we’ve seen how visuals continued to be important with his solo work all the way up through Peter Gabriel 4 and “Shock the Monkey.” So it comes as no surprise that he was attracted to the art of making movie soundtracks. (He’s said on his on website, “I’ve always loved film music and at age seventeen I had the choice to go to the London School of Film Technique or following a career as a musician, and it was quite a difficult decision for me. Ever since, I’ve always wanted to work more in film, not so much at the acting end of it, but more in the creating side.”) That he started doing film soundtracks should not surprise the listener, but how familiar it sounds just might.

Gabriel also notes that he’s “notoriously slow,” which is difficult to reconcile with the time pressures associated with scoring a film. The solution for Birdy was to reuse already-recorded tracks, as well as adding new numbers that he could develop on the Fairlight. For the latter, he got a little help from producer Daniel Lanois, a Canadian guitarist who had produced an album by Martha and the Muffins, played on albums by Raffi and Brian Eno, and had just (on Eno’s invitation) finished co-producing U2’s fourth album, The Unforgettable Fire.1 Lanois brought a depth and added layer of sound to Gabriel’s textures; the combination was potent.

This isn’t a movie blog so I’m not going to try to review the film itself, only to note that: it was based on the debut novel by then-fifty-year-old William Wharton, who also wrote the novel A Midnight Clear; starred Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage near the beginning of both their careers; and is a traumatic film to watch by yourself in a library viewing booth, as I did the first time I saw the film as a first-year student in Clemons Library at the University of Virginia in 1990 or 1991.

At any rate, “At Night” is an original full of low synth tones, clattering percussion, and a deep throbbing bass tone, with Gabriel’s Fairlight sounding woodwind-like tones over the top. It’s ominous but somehow stately, even as the last minute or so incorporates a version of one of the themes from “Wallflower” (from PG4) into the bridge.

“Floating Dogs” begins with a massive surge, oriented around a half-step downward bend of the pitch of the core synth sound. But it transitions into a sharply rhythmic jam built around Tony Levin and Larry Marotta that might, once upon a time, have provided a foundation track for a PG single. “Quiet and Alone” is driven primarily by a woodwind-like tone in the synth, loping along in waltz time.

One of the most obvious borrowings from Gabriel’s recent discography, “Close Up” isolates the opening piano track from “Family Snapshot” over a subtle background of synth tones; to my ears the track gains a great deal in power for its restraint. It fades out into the low oceanic tones of “Slow Water,” a hypnotic series of pivots between V and IV intervals. The side ends with “Dressing the Wound,” more or less isolated keyboards from Gabriel and Larry Fast to start but swelling into a wordless vocal melody that could have been destined for an album cut some day.2

Side two opens with “Birdy’s Flight,” a fanfare for low and flutelike synths that swells in volume and pivots to the massive synth and drums coda of “Not One of Us.” This track had an afterlife, appearing in multiple films in the A Better Tomorrow series by Hong Kong director John Woo. It’s followed by “Slow Marimbas,” marking the return of Morris Pert to Peter’s albums. The song sets the idiophones over a cumulonimbus of synths that eventually rise to blanket the track.

“The Heat” is probably the most direct lift in the album, comprising almost the entirety of the instrumental track of “The Rhythm of the Heat.” It’s probably the reason that I’ve always found the lyrics of the original song unsatisfactory; hearing the song without words you get all the hair-raising liturgy of the ceremonial abandon, without the explicit lampshading of “drawn into a circle that dances round the fire.” Dude, your music tells us what’s going on; the words are completely unnecessary.

Despite its name, “Sketch Pad with Trumpet and Voice” only uses Jon Hassell’s heavily treated trumpet as color, accompanying another Gabriel wordless vocal over a throbbing synthesized drone. The melody, though, is something else, descending from the seventh degree of the scale downward, it twists around, echoing Islamic song forms in a way that Peter would return to again in another soundtrack. He was clearly listening to some of his fellow performers at his WOMAD festivals.

“Under Lock and Key” has a major-key introduction with a flute-like synthesizer motif, followed by a rendition of the main theme of “Wallflower” (or the second theme of “At Night”) on the electric piano. The song ends before the “Hold on” chorus, fading into ominous synthesizer chords that swell into the instrumental coda from “San Jacinto,” here retitled “Powerhouse at the Foot of the Mountain.” The album ends in an awed suspension, leaving us in an unsettled state of contemplation.

The Birdy soundtrack is not one of Gabriel’s most well-known releases—in the 1980s, I only discovered it thanks to a friend dubbing a copy onto cassette for me. But it contained roots from his past—literally—and important seeds from his future. Both Daniel Lanois and engineer David Bottrill would go on to make more—and more well-known—albums with Gabriel, and that tinge of prayer music belied a significant influence that would play a much more prominent role in his upcoming releases. Specifically, the 1985 WOMAD featured, alongside acts like New Order, the Fall, and the Pogues, a performer from Pakistan who wowed the British audience with his vocal genius and the sounds of traditional Qawwali music. We’ll hear that 1985 live performance next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The full length film of Birdy isn’t available for free anywhere, so if you want to see it you’ll have to rent it from your favorite streaming provider. But this trailer does us the (dis)favor of undoing some of the jumble of the film’s narrative arc and telling the story of Birdy in something like chronological order. Plus: young Nicolas Cage.

Footnotes

  1. You don’t ever get to write a sentence like that one in these reviews; I could not resist. ↩︎
  2. Gabriel is known to have written many songs with nonsense syllables while working out his melodies; starting with Birdy these wordless vocalizations started to appear in some of his more ambient compositions. ↩︎

Michael Tilson Thomas

End of an era.

Michael Tilson Thomas, Tanglewood, August 2022

I was profoundly saddened to learn about the death, yesterday, of Michael Tilson Thomas. Just because something is inevitable and imminent doesn’t make it less of a shock when it comes.

I sang under Maestro MTT’s baton twice in my career, both times at Tanglewood: once in the summer of 2010 for performances of the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms and the Mozart Requiem, and once recently, in 2022, for the season-ending Beethoven 9 performance (preceded by a nervy chorus-only performance of Charles Ives’ “Psalm 90” under the baton of James Burton).

I feel privileged to have had these experiences, particularly the 2022 one, coming only a short time after his diagnosis of terminal cancer. To see him continuing not only to battle on but to make music the way it should be performed—that is to say, vitally, humorously, and above all humanely—was tremendously moving.

Also: no one prepared me for how garrulous, funny, and generally chatty he was as a a conductor. He told us stories about growing up with his vaudeville grandparents, the Thomaschevskys; he also told us about how he thought about Beethoven and the monumental 9th symphony. He showed us, rather than told us, how to be human and to face down the ultimately inevitability with grace.

New York Times: Michael Tilson Thomas, Celebrated American Conductor, Dies at 81.

NPR: Michael Tilson Thomas, renowned conductor and composer, dies at 81.

San Francisco Standard: SF Symphony legend Michael Tilson Thomas dies: ‘Like some great library being burned.’

Gramophone: A tribute to Michael Tilson Thomas, who has died at the age of 81.

Boston Symphony issued a statement on Instagram.

Laurie Anderson, Mister Heartbreak

Anderson’s second studio album expands her sonic palette, producing a hypnotic record full of the rich and the strange.

Album of the Week, April 18, 2026

Laurie Anderson had made an album that had a high-charting single. She had gone from performing conceptual art pieces on the street to a major-label contract, with an album that sold over 100,000 copies. Many artists would have rested on their laurels, or tried to pander to a broader audience. Instead, she took her art to somewhere rich and strange… and sold many more copies in the process.

It helped that she had a budget. Artistic choices allow you to make great songs. A budget lets you get a Synclavier II, a then-new digital synthesizer that supported multiple voices with a single keypress as well as digital sampling. It lets you hire a Who’s Who of guest musicians, including guitarist Adrian Belew (cf: Lodger-era David Bowie, Talking Heads, David Byrne, King Crimson), drummer Anton Fier (Golden Palominos), bassist Bill Laswell (Brian Eno, John Zorn, Sonny Sharrock, Material), Nile Rodgers (Chic, Diana Ross, Debbie Harry, Let’s Dance-era Bowie), and William S. Burroughs, as well as her collaborators Roma Baran and David Van Tieghem.

While on tour with her United States show in the spring of 1983 , she also met Peter Gabriel. Later artist Nam June Paik suggested that Gabriel and Anderson collaborate on a song and music video that could become part of a PBS special she was curating called Good Morning, Mr. Orwell; the song, recorded under time pressure in Anderson’s studio, became “Excellent Birds.”

“Sharkey’s Day” has almost all of that sound coming at you all at once; as my former Tanglewood Festival Chorus conductor James Burton would say, it “sounds expensive.” There are layers of Synclavier flutes, Adrian Belew guitar, Bill Laswell bass, Anton Fier drums, bata drums and shekere courtesy Cuban-American jazz percussionist Daniel Ponce, and Laurie’s violin all stirred up together, with a healthy dollop of female backing singers courtesy of the group November, consisting of Michelle Cobbs, Brenda Nelson, and none other than a pre-Sting Dolette McDonald. Anderson’s protagonist Sharkey wanders through this sonic landscape in a spoken-word reverie, alternately fascinated and frightened by both the natural world and the artifacts of modernity (“All night long I think of those little planes up there flying around/You can’t even see them, they’re specks!/And they’re full of tiny people going places/And Sharkey says, You know? I bet they could all land/On the head of a pin.” The wildness in the discoveries of Sharkey are reflected in the instrumentation, as Sharkey hypothesizes that all life “comes from some strange lagoon.” Laurie Anderson is no longer ironically commenting on the future being a place about 50 miles from here; she’s reveling in it.

If “Langue d’Amour” feels a bit more like the material from Big Science, that may be because it doesn’t feature the cast of thousands—it’s just Laurie and her Synclavier. It may also be because the track originated in the same place much of Big Science did, as part of her United States show, as a spoken word track called “Hothead.” Here, the work is transformed into something hypnotic—and erotic—thanks to the stumbling bass line and the vocal-like synthesizer chords, as well as the air of unreality added by the harmonies on Laurie’s voice (as well as Peter Gabriel’s subtle backing vocals). The story, about a restless Eve-like character who falls in love with a snake through his stories, ends with an extended section in French declaring: here is the language of love. Here is the language of my heart. And it is revealed to be a meditation on the power of language to upend everything—a theme Laurie would return to later.

“Gravity’s Angel,” named after Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,1 is a full band track with some of the space of Laurie’s solo work, telling the story of the end of a love affair (“You can see in the dark/But I’ve got one thing: I loved you better”). The hypnotic percussion, loping bass line, and the chorus vocal (again with Gabriel) all combine to produce a meditative space in which magic happens, as when “this ghost of your other lover walked in/And stood there. Made of thin air. Full of desire” and reveals the collapse of the relationship. At the end Laurie pulls the lyrical camera way back to the big picture, then zooms in tightly on the scene of the ending: “ Why these mountains? Why this sky? This long road? This empty room?” The entire work reveals itself in this compressed journey from the broad to the hyper-specific, but still leaves the listener in a fog of mystery.

“Kokoku” had also originated in United States, but is here given a sparse reading on the Synclavier with Fier and Laswell providing the rhythm section, accented by Japanese (and Korean) backing vocalists and a solo on the kayagum (performed by Sang Won Park). Coming after “Gravity’s Angel,” it reads as a song of loss and regret: “They say the dead will rise again/ And here they come now, strange animals out of the Ice Age/ And they stare at you, dumbfounded, like big mistakes. And we say:/ Keep cool. Maybe if we pretend this never happened, they’ll all just go away.” The spoken English words alternate with brief poems in Japanese, which Laurie translates in the liner notes: “Mountain with clouds. A cry. My voice. Home of the brave. I’m here now. And lost.” Laurie’s echoing of “home of the brave” from “Mister Heartbreak” suggests another common thread through the songs, as her narrator’s loneliness and alienation is grounded in American soil (despite the dislocating Japanese affectations of the song.)

“Excellent Birds” comes as a gear-shift, Anderson and Gabriel accompanied only by Nile Rodgers’ guitar, Bill Laswell’s bass, and Gabriel’s Linn drum machine. Both sing and play Synclavier as they tour a strange landscape full of “excellent birds… excellent snow… excellent words,” finding motion and activity in looking out onto an empty landscape, surrounded with pictures of people who seem poised to some unspoken action. But the heart of the song is in the groove, not the words, and in that Synclavier bass line made of a sampled voice that seems to provide the wordless root of everything that happens.

“Blue Lagoon,” by contrast, is an opera in a song, driven by the relentless Synclavier in a stumbling waltz pattern underscored by that sampled-voice bass. But Adrian Belew’s guitar and Bill Laswell’s bass, as well as more Synclavier, build additional layers on top of the ground until we are taken away by Laurie’s gentle spoken voice to a strange desert island. At first it seems like a vacation, but little clues (“Days I remember cities… Days, I dive by the wreck”) suggest a more sinister imprisonment. As the wordless cries of the guitar rise up, there’s an extended quotation from The Tempest (“Full fathom five thy father lies…”) that ends with “Call me Ishmael,” invoking both shipwreck and death. Anderson says, “Always used to wonder who I’d bring to a desert island,” but as the sounds of bamboo and steel drum (played by Van Tieghem) rise, she ends accepting her loneliness: “If you ever get this letter, thinking of you.” The piece is hypnotic, mesmerizing, utterly distinctive.

The album closes with “Sharkey’s Night,” which revisits the chorus and bass line of “Sharkey’s Day” with a darker, more cynical Sharkey read by William Burroughs: “Hey, kemosabe, long time no see! … You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.” We are left with Sharkey’s assertion that he is “deep in the heart of darkest America, home of the brave… Listen to my heart beat,” as Laurie pulls back the focus a final time to show the loneliness mixed with determined forward motion at the heart of the world.

Remarkably, the album cracked the top 200, rising to number 60 in the US. Anderson continued to evolve the songs in her live performances, eventually creating a full show out of her exploration of the alienation and joy of living in the technology-rich present. We’ll visit that another time. Next week, we’ll see another film project in which Gabriel found himself involved following the completion of Security, one whose soundtrack may sound both familiar and strange.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Anderson produced videos for several of the songs on Mister Heartbreak. The video for “Sharkey’s Day” combines animation, green screen dancing, and a generally phantasmagoric artistic statement into a blender:

BONUS BONUS: Here’s the music video for “Excellent Birds,” also produced by Laurie over a green screen. Interestingly it seems to use the version of the song that Peter later released on his 1986 album (about which more later):

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Anderson would revisit much of the music for Mister Heartbreak live, making a concert movie called Home of the Brave after the lyric in “Sharkey’s Day.” Here’s that live concert version:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS: While on tour behind Mister Heartbreak, Laurie was booked on Late Night with David Letterman, where, rather than performing one of the numbers from her album, she opted to do “Walk the Dog” (!). Here’s that little piece of television history:

Footnotes

  1. Laurie famously asked permission from Pynchon to compose an opera based on Gravity’s Rainbow. To her surprise, the reclusive novelist wrote back with his agreement, with one stipulation: that it be scored for solo banjo. She has said, “Some people have the nicest way of saying no.” ↩︎

Peter Gabriel, Plays Live

Gabriel gives a definitive send-off to the sound and songs of his first four albums in his first live record.

Album of the Week, April 11, 2026

Live albums serve a different purpose for a rock artist than for a jazz musician. In jazz you’re documenting the spontaneous magic that happened on a particular night, in a particular venue. With rock you sometimes get that, but more often it’s about getting the sound of a certain era, about all the different ways an artist takes music that originated in a studio into a live performance. And sometimes it’s about summing up an era of an artist’s work, getting all the hits performed in front of a screaming crowd as a souvenir of a particular moment.

This last category is definitely where Plays Live falls, but there are elements of the other motivations as well. In particular, some early songs are revisited and updated, while others faithfully recreate their studio sound. Some of that “faithful” sound might be due to touch-ups; the notes on one of the dust sleeves say, “Although this album was compiled from four concerts in the mid-west of the United States, some additional recording took place not a thousand miles away from the home of the artiste. The generic term of this process is ‘cheating’.” Whatever the means, the album presents music from four concerts in November and December 1982 that show how Gabriel transformed the music from his first four albums into a coherent stage performance, with the stalwart help of Tony Levin, David Rhodes, Jerry Marotta, and Larry Fast.

“The Rhythm of the Heat” is remarkably faithful to the album original, with Larry Fast and Peter playing the same loops and synths used to construct the studio track. Only at the end does the performance deviate from the original, and that’s only because Jerry Marotta only has four limbs; while his drum performance is appropriately climactic, it doesn’t have the apocalyptic frenzy of the polyrhythms played by Ekome on the original track. “I Have the Touch” is slightly looser, with a combination of drums and synth percussion backing up Peter as he swaggers through the song. Peter’s outro has some vocal improvisations that carry the imprint of Motown, pointing ahead to a change of direction in future albums.

“Not One of Us” is another faithful recreation, with Tony Levin’s bass lines prominently front and center and Jerry Marotta’s drums leading into the massive breakdown at the end of the song. A quiet “Family Snapshot” has the epic arc of the original, greeted with respectful applause to close out the first side.

“D.I.Y.” is the first song of the set to have a substantial revision, with synths standing in for Robert Fripp’s guitar but carrying the same rhythmic intensity. “The Family and the Fishing Net” faithfully recreates the spooky quality of the voodoo and wedding rituals from the original, with some extra synth lines adding slightly polyrhythmic accents at the beginning and a massive choral outro with the band singing backing vocals behind. (This is a good time to shout out appreciation for the collective voices of Levin, Rhodes, Marotta and Fast, who create a great backing sound behind Peter.)

“Intruder” is great live here, with Marotta’s drums ably filling in for Phil Collins’ legendary gated reverb and Fast’s synths somewhat less ably replacing the marimbas in the instrumental. But that’s a note-perfect whistle at the end, over some sort of idiophone, presumably played by Marotta, and a massive finale with Peter taking the final line up an octave to great effect.

“I Go Swimming” is a gift of sorts, the only song here not to have previously appeared on a PG album. It’s a fun tune led off by a locked-in groove by Tony Levin, soon joined by the rest of the band as they play in the chromatic intro. Peter’s vocal on the chorus gives a bit of an Al Green feel, which abruptly switches into a more traditional Gabriel verse in 6/8. The song was apparently a leftover from the 1980 PG3 session that became a live staple, and a great break in the set.

Both “San Jacinto” and “Solsbury Hill” hew closely to their recorded versions, albeit with keys replacing the jubilant twelve-string guitar in the latter plus an extended joyous vocal coda. (Okay, not hewn quite as closely as all that.) “No Self Control” gets the most dramatic retooling of all the back catalog numbers, with a moody synth-driven groove replacing the marimba and dueling guitars of the original. Played about 20% slower than the original, it carries less manic intensity than resignation and despair. “I Don’t Remember” maintains the disco-funk brilliance of its predecessor thanks to Tony Levin’s deft playing and a wordless vocal bridge in the extended outro that raises the hackles on the back of the neck.

“Shock the Monkey” is a jittery wonder here, all funky high notes above a relentless, mechanical dance rhythm. It’s also arguably the farewell to an early Gabriel practice—the use of face paint to portray different characters in live performance (and videos). The blue make-up on the album cover (and the insert above) is a simplified version of the elaborate ritual monkey make-up used in the video; photographer Armando Gallo recalls it was actually taken during “Lay Your Hands On Me,” a track omitted from the original LP.

“Humdrum” is a pleasant surprise in the running order, a throwback all the way to PG1. The song offers the opportunity to hear how Peter’s vocals evolved during this first six-year stretch of solo performance. His low notes are richer, his high notes with a bit of sandy grit around the edges but with assurance as he takes rhythmic liberties with the line. The vocals are also mixed much further forward than in Bob Ezrin’s original, allowing the lyrics to be more clearly understood; this might be the definitive version as a result. “On the Air” is a last intense workout, with the band lending it more polish than the dry Fripp-produced original and somehow also carrying a greater intensity throughout. The audience is in it all the way, shouting their response to Peter’s sung “on the air” in the chorus. The band gets a great workout in the outro, with an instrumental workout before Peter sings the final chorus as a great shout.

The album ends, as did so many of his concerts, with “Biko.” Stripped of its opening and closing South African hymns, it plays as a more direct protest anthem, with the crowd’s singing along audible under the third verse and the extended outro. The album ends with a long fade-out as Peter calls “Good night!” and the crowd chants “Peter, Peter, Peter” in response.

Plays Live is unique in Peter’s discography for serving as a perfect punctuation mark at the end of his first four-album run. With five tunes each from the third and fourth albums and the hits from the first two, you could be forgiven for never checking back to listen to the originals. (I would strongly recommend making time for 3 and 4, both of which stand as massive accomplishments.)

In a way it was also a farewell to this portion of his career, as what came after would prove a powerful transformation for his sound and his fortunes. But before we get there, he had one last project, albeit a slightly obscure one, that revisited the sound from this period in a more unexpectedly direct way. And before that, we have one of the collaborations that began to shape his new direction; we’ll hear that next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: While “Lay Your Hands on Me,” with Peter pictured singing while crowd-surfing on the back cover, was part of the set for these concerts, it was never issued on a version of Plays Live. That makes this 1983 video from Gabriel’s performance in Copenhagen all the more interesting, if frustrating for its low resolution and high levels of background chatter at the beginning:

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 4 (Security)

Embracing both musical sounds from around the globe and modern technology produces a pioneering album that is still compelling and strange today.

Album of the Week, April 3, 2026

Two important things happened to Peter Gabriel in the lead up to his fourth self-titled album, which, thankfully for those of us who write or talk about music, his new label Geffen talked him into giving an actual title, Security, in the United States. The first was that the sampling synthesizer, the Fairlight CMI, that he had first encountered in 1979 became more powerful and able to manage up to 64 kilobytes worth of samples in memory. The second was a series of encounters with musicians from outside the UK that led to something that changed his career, and the careers of countless others, forever.

The Fairlight CMI had been invented by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, from an earlier invention by Tony Furse. Struggling to get an instrument that was easier to control than the all-analogue Moog synths which were then the kings of the market, Vogel and Ryrie hit on two important ideas: to use a microprocessor—a digital chip, rather than analog—to control the device; and—a discovery by Vogel while studying the harmonic waveforms of acoustic instrument sounds)—to use samples (short recordings of real instruments) as part of the sonic palette of the instrument. Vogel brought a first-generation Fairlight CMI to Gabriel’s home while he was working on Peter Gabriel 3, and he was smitten, using the sampling feature to record real world sounds—though he used glass breaking and other percussion, rather than piano or strings. Gabriel was so impressed that he and his then-brother-in-law Stephen Paine formed a company to sell the instrument in the UK. It sold like hotcakes, with Kate Bush, John Paul Jones, Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons, Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright, and Thomas Dolby among the early purchasers.1 By 1982, the Series II was released, giving higher-frequency samples. Gabriel famously showed the use of this feature on the BBC’s The South Bank Show in a special on the making of PG4.

The other thread would seem to be the complete opposite pole. Following the release of PG3 and based on Gabriel’s burgeoning interest in African music and politics following the release of “Biko,” he launched the first World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival in 1980. Artistically2 a huge success, it brought performers from India, Burundi, Cameroon and Nigeria together with pop and world music luminaries from the UK.

Gabriel continued to meet with new African musicians, some of whom appeared on his next album. They joined a cast of by-now familiar faces: Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta, David Rhodes, Larry Fast, Morris Pert (here on percussion and Ethiopian pipes)—and also Peter Hammill, who had played at the first WOMAD, and David Lord, who co-produced the album with Gabriel. For this recording they were at Ashcombe House, a 19th century manor in Somerset that had a barn that Gabriel converted to a recording studio, while he rented the main house as a domicile.

The first track, “The Rhythm of the Heat,” combines the synthesizer, sampling, and world music threads of Gabriel’s interests into a single whole. Starting with a sampled loop on the Fairlight, Gabriel utters a cry that seems to swoop from somewhere in a resonant acoustic right up next to the listener, as a giant tone sounds on the tonic against a syncopated beat in the drums. Gabriel sings about losing oneself in rhythm (“the rhythm has my soul”), as neat a summation of the ethos he was exploring in his songwriting from PG3 on as one could hope for. It’s mostly successful here; the rhythms in the main song are careful (“the rhy-thm of the heat”) and feel a little too controlled. But on the last reprise, as he sings “smash the radio… smash the watch… smash the cameras… the rhythm is around me, the rhythm has control/the rhythm is inside me/the rhythm has my soul,” suddenly the heavens break open and an avalanche of drums, courtesy the Ekome Dance Company from Ghana, carry the track away in a massive, reverberating, polyrhythmic frenzy. If Gabriel was looking for transcendence in rhythm, he surely found it.

“San Jacinto” is a different feeling, a careful dance-like pattern in synthesizers that contrasts with the story sung by the narrator, a Native American man feeling despair at the loss of his culture to modernity. Some listeners interpret the lyrics as the narration of a young man coming of age in a ritual involving a rattlesnake bite; I’ve always heard it as the narration of an older man taking his last journey to the mountaintop, where he faces the decision to live or die. The coda (“We will walk on the land/We will breathe of the air/We will drink from the stream/We will live, hold the line”) seems a declaration of revitalized intent in the face of this despair, and is tonally distinct from the rest of the song, almost a hymn to itself.

“I Have the Touch” is one of two more pop-leaning songs on the album, but it doesn’t ease up the thematic intensity; here Gabriel seems to revisit the theme of the outsider that he first explored in the nightmarish “Intruder” on PG3, only this time, instead of maliciously breaking and entering, the narrator is in the street and filled with a yearning for human contact. “I move with the movement and/I have the touch… Only, only/wanting contact/with you”: he finds some respite in the crowd, the “pushing of the people,” but knows that he cannot be happy without true human contact.

The dark reverse of this longing for contact, perhaps the ultimate “be careful what you wish for” song, comes with the last track on the first side. “The Family and the Fishing Net,” which sings of marriage as a dark ceremony that enmeshes the participants through strange rituals, seems to warn of too much of a good thing. In a college poetry seminar I brought the lyrics, with their super-specificity and descriptive language, as an example of pop music as good poetry. I’m not so sure now; the whole thing seems rather over-egged. But “moist as grass, ripe and heavy as the night” is not a good way to describe a bride to be. And the attempted intersection of Christian imagery and voodoo in the last stanza “In the darkness, as the cake is/Cut and passed around/In little pieces/The body, the body and the flesh” doesn’t land for me. Then again, it did for the unmarried me at 18, still anxious about the future, which is maybe all it was supposed to do.

Speaking of anxiety: has there ever been a stranger Top 40 hit than “Shock the Monkey”? With the music track drawing inspiration from Motown and progressive rock in equal measure, there’s a relentless beat driving Peter’s plea to an unknown lover not to “shock the monkey”—that is, not to arouse the creature of jealousy that sits in the core of relationships. But you don’t need to have the psychological background to appreciate the song; it’s a banger, even if it sits uncomfortably high in the vocal range for singalongs. (As the University of Virginia Hullabahoos discovered when they covered it on their first album, years ago.)

In a sort of through-line with “I Have the Touch,” “Lay Your Hands on Me” is a song about finding healing in opening up and being vulnerable to connection with another human. The opening, with skittering percussion and an ominous spoken narrative (that veers into silliness—“fat men play with their garden hoses… sausage speared by the cocktail satellite”), masks a real portrait of alienation, as the narrator seeks to escape the crowds and find solace in being alone, whether out of introversion or fear, or both. But the chorus—“It’s only common sense/There are no accidents round here/I am willing (Lay your hands on me)/I am ready (Lay your hands on me)/I believe (Lay your hands on me)”—roars back into an embrace, literally, of the healing power of touch. Gabriel would ultimately end live performances of the song by standing at the edge of the stage and falling backward into the crowd, trusting them to buoy him up. (I recall reading an interview in the 1980s when one of the band wryly remarked, “We all did it; the problem was, no one wanted to catch the drummer.”) Gabriel has been open over the years about the power of therapy to help heal emotional wounds, and you can hear it starting here—and in true PG fashion it arrives as a massive anthem that delivers an emotional punch with each repetition. And that bass line!

“Wallflower” is in similarly hymnic territory, but with a different subject. Sketches of the melody originated during the recording of PG3, but the lyrics didn’t come together until Peter viewed television programs sponsored by Amnesty International about political prisoners in Eastern Europe and Latin America, particularly the plight of Lech Wałęsa and of dissidents who were imprisoned in mental hospitals. In this way the lyrics feel like a merging of the lyrical concerns of “Lead a Normal Life” and “Biko” and give the former tune an additional layer of universal meaning.

There’s nothing but good times in the closer, “Kiss of Life”—at least in the massive rhythms that spur one to dance in imitation of the “big woman” who dances on the tables at the Easter feast for the fishermen, welcoming each one. And then there’s a turn: in the bridge, we learn that “there’s a body in the sand” which the big woman resuscitates: “With heat from her skin and fire from her breath/She blows hard, she blows deep/In the mouth of death.” Did the narrator have a near death experience? Whatever the narrative truth, there is an inexorable dual meaning in the final chorus of “Kiss of life/kiss of life,” with life and death dancing together—however awkwardly, with alternating 3/4 and 4/4 meter in the opening and outro.

In embracing both modern technology and non-European rhythms, Gabriel found a more consistently adventurous sound that enabled him to span between art rock and pop, and landed him an unlikely top-40 hit—all while staying true to his distinctive artistic vision. It came at a cost: the album was recorded and mixed in sessions spanning from early 1981 through the summer of 1982, with hints of the songs only peeking through in a 1982 WOMAD festival performance in which he premiered seven of the eight tunes. That 1982 performance has recently been released, and is worth a listen in its own right, as the musicians dig into tunes that would seem to be designed only for studio performance and miraculously transform them into riveting live bangers.

Peter’s future albums would gestate even longer, as touring and his growing perfectionism stretched the time between albums further and further. Fortunately for us, his collaborators were also releasing spectacular music in their own right in between these infrequent records, and we’ll hear from one of those next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s what might be the first live performance of “The Rhythm of the Heat,” from the 1982 WOMAD festival complete with the original rhythm section:

BONUS BONUS: “Shock the Monkey” is the most coverable of all the songs on the album, so it takes a lot for a new cover of it to surprise me. This one by Local H with both band members sharing a gorilla costume achieves the goal.

BONUS BONUS BONUS: A sort of cover? Here’s Peter Gabriel with Sting performing “Shock the Monkey” live in 2016:

Footnotes

  1. Horn would famously help to popularize one of the key samples from the Fairlight’s built-in set, an orchestral “hit” called ORCH5, in his work with both Yes and Art of Noise. ↩︎
  2. It might have been an artistic success, but it was a financial flop; faced with substantial debt, Gabriel reunited with Genesis for a single show, which put the festival, and his own finances, back on an even keel. ↩︎

Laurie Anderson, Big Science

The conceptual artist’s first major label album is an unliikely, and highly listenable, artifact from an ambiguous future.

Album of the Week, March 28, 2026

Performance artists do art pieces and get grants. They might release recordings of their work on small labels. They don’t, typically, have singles that hit the top of the charts, and they certainly don’t dedicate those singles to a dead French composer. But then, Laurie Anderson has never been typical.

The story of Big Science starts before You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With. Laurie had recorded the song and released it as a single in the UK in 1980 on the small label One Ten Records, in a limited edition of 1000 copies. That’s when BBC DJ John Peel changed the trajectory of her career. Putting it in frequent rotation on his show on BBC Radio One, his championing of the song led a British distributor to request 80,000 copies of the single. Laurie signed a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Records and the single went all the way to Number Two in the UK. On the strength of the single, Warner Bros. signed Laurie to an eight-album deal.

The album was released in April 1982. Produced by Roma Baran, who also played keyboards, accordion and percussion, and featuring installation artist Perry Hoberman on reeds, experimental composer Peter Gordon on clarinet and tenor sax, Bill Obrecht on alto sax, and composer David Van Tieghem on drums, marimba and percussion, the album featured a variety of performances drawn from a long-form show that she would eventually perform and record as United States Live I – IV. The material is much more melodic than the numbers on You’re the One I Want to Share My Money With, but still far from traditional song structures; built on loops, repetition, and open-ended chords, the pieces on Big Science feel like alerts from the future.

“From the Air” starts with a blast of keyboards and saxophones against the drums as Laurie Anderson narrates the increasingly unhinged thoughts of an in-flight announcement: “Your Captain says put your head on your knees. Your Captain says put your head in your hands. Captain says, put your hands on your head. Put your hands on your hips! Heh heh. This is your Captain, and we are going down. We are all going down together. And I said Uh-oh. This is going to be some day.” The repetition and music slowly ratchets up in intensity, and the syncopated drum pattern the sense of uncertainty, until the final verse: “Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby. This is the time, and this is the record of the time.” Anderson’s words here (and elsewhere on Big Science) take on an uncomfortable resonance in the shadow of the September 11th attacks, but even without that massive hole in history lending its gravity, the intersection between order and chaos, the apparent power of the captain that is revealed to be illusion, pulls us in.

If “From the Air” has a sense of claustrophobia, “Big Science” and its synthesized lonely howl bring us to a wide empty space, with echoing handclaps and open fifths adding to the sense of anticipatory emptiness. We hear Laurie’s actual singing voice, a pure soprano in contrast to her normally lower pitched speaking voice, which gives an apocalyptic vision of the future: “I said, Hey pal, how do I get to town? And he said, well, just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, and take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center. And keep going til you get to the place where they’re thinking of putting in the new drive-in bank.… And I said, ‘This must be the place.’” The future here is anticipatory but also hostile: “And long cars and long lines and great big signs/And they all say: Hallelujah. Yodellayheehoo. Every man for himself.” Laurie was listening to the same wavelength as William Gibson, who had written “The Gernsback Continuum” a year before about hallucinatory invasions of alternate future universes from 1930s pulp paperbacks: “The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal…” But here rather than hallucinatory bleed-through the future is just full of totemic emptiness.

“Sweaters” has all the edge of Laurie’s more confrontational early work, here amped up to eleven by Van Tieghem’s stumbling drum work and Rufus Harley’s screaming bagpipes, playing against Laurie’s nonverbal vocalizations and her drone-like violin, all against a series of aleatory declarations of ended love: “I no longer love the color of your eyes/I no longer love the color of your sweaters.”

“Walking and Falling” is a quieter experimental reading against a looped background, a meditation leading into a straightforward reading of a poem ending with the question: “What is behind that curtain?” Then we get the keyboards and marimba of “Born, Never Asked,” in a new reading that is compositionally identical to the version on You’re the Guy… but with much better sound. A voiceover announces “You were born, and so you’re free. So happy birthday,” providing a non-answer to the question of what lies behind the curtain: it’s up to you, apparently, even if that self determination ultimately leads to the desolation of “Big Science.”

Side two opens with the album’s most enduring work. “O Superman (For Massenet)” is so titled because of Laurie’s cockeyed translation of the Massenet aria (from the opera El Cid) “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père”: “O Superman, o judge, o mom and dad.” The music is simple: built on a loop of Anderson’s voice on a single note, the vocal melody destabilizes, going from a major key (with the single note on the third) to a minor key with the repeated note on the tonic. Effects on Anderson’s voice make the sung lines sound at once like a Greek chorus and a robot. Even more than “From the Air,” the stark arrangement and openness of the voices fill the listener with a sense of growing unease, ultimately growing to a real feeling of dread: “Hello? This is your mother. Are you there? Are you coming home? —Well you don’t know me/But I know you/And I have a message/To give to you:/Here come the planes.” Anderson has stated that she wrote the song in the aftermath of the failed rescue of the Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, and the tragic deaths of eight American servicemen, and it continues the message of dependence and violence: “So hold me mom/In your long arms… In your automatic arms/Your petrochemical arms/In your electronic arms.” Other motifs weave their way through the song, culminating in a crescendo of minor-key chord progressions that echo the melody of “From the Air,” rise like the tide to a crashing climax, and fall away, leaving only the “ah-ah-ah.” Listening to it, you understand what would drive John Peel to play the song over and over, and Warner Bros. to sign her.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, “Example #22” announces itself in German as “examples of paranormal voices on tape” (Beispeile paranormaler Tonbandstimmen), interspersed with ringing phones, saxophones, reeds, and an accordion, accompanying what must surely be Laurie’s brattiest vocal. It’s great fun and completely impenetrable.

By contrast, “Let X = X / It Tango” closes out the record with quotably wry wit. “Let X = X” is practically a quotable aphorism in every line: “And I said, O boy. Right. Again. … You know. It could be you. It’s a sky-blue sky. Satellites are out tonight. … You know, I could write a book. And this book would be thick enough to stun an ox. ‘Cause I can see the future, and it’s a place about 70 miles east of here. Where it’s lighter.” The handclaps and marimba tie the arrangement back to “Born, Never Asked,” only in a much lighter vein; they continue through “It Tango,” a stopping and starting argument in search of an antecedent. She closes with a declaration of utterly failed communication: “Your eyes. It’s a day’s work just looking into them.”

Laurie’s first album immediately established her as a witty, thoughtful, highly listenable artist. And a bankable one: it sold 150,000 copies in its first year of release, smaller sales than a typical rock album but not by much (compare to 100,000 copies of Peter Gabriel (1977) in the UK). Her voice would continue to develop over the next few years, and we’ll check in on her again soon, but first we’ll see what kept Peter busy since the 1980 self-titled album.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The b-side of “O Superman” was “Walk the Dog,” an exercise in odd narrative that leans into a trope from her shows, the “difficult listening hour,” with barking dogs, a voice shifted high in pitch to the edge of squeak, strummed violin strings, and a bashed drum kit:

BONUS BONUS: Laurie Anderson did a Tiny Desk Concert from home back in 2021, joined by Roma Baran and cellist Robin Kodheli, performing “Let X=X” and “O Superman”:

Anderson/Giorno/Burroughs, You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With

A dip into the wild world of performance art and avant-garde writing from the dawn of the New Wave.

Album of the Week, March 21, 2026

The name of this segment of my album reviews was originally going to be “art rock.” But while that term has been used to apply to Peter Gabriel’s work, it’s impossibly undefinable, and didn’t really cover the work of one of his collaborators whose story we’ll begin to discuss today. Though Laurie Anderson is undeniably an artist, the “rock” part is an ill-fitting label, and none of her recordings illustrates the challenge as much as today’s recording, a compilation of spoken word, performance art, and poetry that pairs her with two other challenging artists over a year before the release of her debut album.

Laurie Anderson was born in Chicago and grew up in the Illinois suburbs studying art and playing in the Chicago Youth Symphony. She drew comics, made sculpture, and did performance art: her first public performance was a symphony for automobile horns, and one of her best-known pieces from the 1970s, “Duets on Ice,” involved her playing violin against a recording of herself while wearing ice skates that had been frozen into blocks of ice—the performance ended when the ice melted enough to free her skates.1 Also in the 1970s she connected with New York poet and performance artist John Giorno, on whose Giorno Poetry Systems label she released some of her earliest recordings (including some for his groundbreaking “Dial-A-Poem” system).2

Increasingly Anderson was drawn to recorded art, though she never abandoned her more visual instincts, and in 1981 she released two important records. One, a single called “O Superman,” was released in October on a small label and had an unusually strong reception (which we’ll discuss another time). The second was a side (er, a side-plus) of this double album on Giorno Poetry Systems, with which Anderson appeared alongside two even more avant-garde poets: Giorno himself, and William S. Burroughs.

The latter had outlived his early tumultuous years—gay, addicted to opiates, accidental murderer—and had built a solid, if solidly weird, literary reputation as the author of works like The Naked Lunch, a science fiction trilogy (The Soft Machine,3 The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express) and a great many short stories. He also made a number of recordings on a variety of small labels that featured his distinctive reading of his own works, based on the live readings that he was now giving on the lecture circuit. It was in this vein4 that Burroughs appeared on this recording. All three artists had appeared together in a series of readings and performances dubbed “The Red Night Tour.”

Laurie Anderson’s segment of the album is the most straightforward, and that’s saying something. While parts of the performance were recognizably connected to other things happening in music in the early 1980s (“Doctor Miller” is practically a Kraftwerk song, if you subtract the increasingly anxious PA voiceovers calling for the doctor), others are distinctively and uniquely Laurie’s voice, even (“It Was Up in the Mountains”) when the words are spoken by someone else. If I’m honest, “Closed Circuit” is more interesting than listenable, notable primarily for featuring Laurie’s use of vocal effects to create a deeper timbre for her speaking voice—a trick that she would perfect elsewhere, but here is marred by the lengthy lyric that feels more like a shaggy dog story. The end of Side 1 closes with an eerie instrumental played on a Farfisa, a marimba, handclaps, and Laurie’s brilliant violin; “Born, Never Asked” would appear again.

Side 2 is given over to two John Giorno poems, “I Don’t Need It, I Don’t Want It, and You Cheated Me Out of It” and “Completely Attached to Delusion.” Like Laurie Anderson, he plays with vocal effects, but his use of tape delay and pre-recorded alternate readings of the work is by turns disorienting, exhilarating and overwhelming. But it is a committed and fully out there reading, and there’s a direct line to be traced from his work to poetry slams.

Burroughs gets the next side, giving a series of readings from his novels, including the first appearance of his horrifically funny Dr. Benway (“Dr. Benway, ship’s doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel… ‘Perhaps the appendix is already out, doctor?’ The nurse said, appearing dubiously over his shoulder. ‘I saw a little scar.’”) But listening to the material one after another, one draws the following conclusions: that half the joy in listening to Burroughs comes from the sheer naughtiness of it and the joy he takes in elongating the sneering tones of protagonist and antagonist alike; that beneath that sneer lurks a pointed and deadly serious battle against inhumanity, stupidity and senseless violence; and that the non sequiturs introduced by Burroughs’ “cut up” method of literally cutting and pasting his writing together into new alearic combinations can sometimes be the only defense against a nonsensical and fragmenting world.

The most unusual feature of the album is its tracklist. Each of the performers takes up a side from 1 to 3, but the fourth side is something else again, featuring three independent grooves about five minutes each. Which one you get depends on where you drop the needle. Laurie’s contribution is a montage featuring two electronic percussion numbers (“For Electronic Dogs” and “Drums”) sandwiching an earnest young man reading a short bit over some cheery library music. “Structuralist Filmmaking” is one of Laurie’s most dryly funny bits; I wonder how much of its narrative was inspired by Burroughs’ cut-up method.

Taken together, the two hours of You’re the Guy I Want To Share My Money With are by turns funny, bracing, moving, and occasionally maddening. The connection from Laurie Anderson’s experimental synthesizers and samples to Peter Gabriel’s increasingly rhythmic art-pop sensibility is hard to see at this stage. But in next week’s album, we’ll see the bridge begin to be built, and it starts with that other 1981 Laurie Anderson release.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Giorno was one of a group of artists in Burroughs’ orbit when he returned to New York City in the 1970s, and later lived in the windowless apartment (dubbed “The Bunker”) where Burroughs lived and wrote and shot pistols for target practice (!). Here he gives a tour through the Bunker, which was restored to the way it was when Burroughs lived there after the latter’s death:

Footnotes

  1. For those for whom this sort of stuff is fascinating, her 1994 book Stories from the Nerve Bible offers a great look at all the wonderful weirdness of her performance art days. ↩︎
  2. Somewhat to my amazement, not only is Giorno Poetry Systems still online, but so is the web version of Dial-A-Poem. ↩︎
  3. The Soft Machine later lent its name to an English progressive-rock group that included about twenty musicians among its membership in its lifetime, including Rick Wakeman (later of Yes), Andy Summers of the Police, and Peter Gabriel’s occasional saxophonist Dick Morrissey. ↩︎
  4. Pun intended. ↩︎

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 3 (1980)

In this 1980 recording, a massive drum sound and sharpened songwriting lead to the discovery of a new voice.

Album of the Week, March 14, 2026

It’s the drums that hit you first. The booming sound, enormous and then cut off, of the opening snare on the first track of Peter Gabriel’s 1980 album (also called Peter Gabriel), might be the most iconic of all 1980s percussion sounds, and it immediately arrests your attention—as does the crackling sound of fingernails on guitar strings that follows. You begin to understand why Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records (who had distributed Peter’s first two albums in the States), asked upon hearing the album, “Has Peter been in a mental hospital?” But that rhythm-centered sound and the lyrical unease were the key to unlocking Peter Gabriel’s most successful period of songwriting, and it’s all here in the first few seconds.

Peter was continuing to look for new sounds, and he found them here, starting with the idea that he would write “rhythm first.” Keyboard player Larry Fast had introduced him to the PAiA Programmable Drum Set, which allowed Peter to build his own rhythms so that he could write his songs around them during the songwriting process.

Part of the magic of the album was the cast of musicians. In addition to Collins, the core band of Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta and Larry Fast were all back, joined by David Rhodes, recently of Random Hold. Robert Fripp was out of the producer’s chair but still contributed hot solos on three of the tracks; also in the guest guitarist chair were Dave Gregory of XTC and Paul Weller of The Jam. Jazz artist Dick Morrissey brought saxophone to a number of the tracks. John Giblin, who had joined the British jazz-fusion band Brand X alongside Collins, played a fair amount of electric bass on the album. And appearing on two tracks with guest vocals was Kate Bush (who we briefly met at the end of our discussion of Peter Gabriel 1); at age 21 she had two albums under her belt (including a Number One hit in the UK), and was working on her third.

All together the musicians produced a recording that, while met with puzzlement by Atlantic Records (who distributed Peter’s music in the US and ultimately passed on the release, causing him to switch to Mercury Records), stands as one of his most original and enduring. Let’s dive in.

“Intruder” (with Collins on drums) brings forward all the unique aspects of Gabriel’s songwriting that defined this album: the heavy rhythmic focus, the paranoia and alienation, and the painstaking focus on aural textures. Opening with that immense gated reverb sound in the drums, Gabriel’s narrator confesses to disturbing crimes: “I know something about/Opening windows and doors… Slipping the clippers/Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires.” There’s a new sense of artistic confidence in Peter’s voice; the lyrics are terse, the chords stabbing, and that thunderous drum sound all combine to terrifying effect, culminating in the final verse: “I like to feel the suspense/When I’m certain you know I am there.” Also noteworthy is the percussion part in the midst of the song; Peter has said that he was hugely influenced by Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and its marimba textures, and the sound of the marimba would feature at several other key points in the album (here played by composer Morris Pert, who had also spent some time in Brand X). The whistled melody at the end is the chilling cherry on top.

“No Self Control” opens with a guitar hook that is panned hard in the stereo mix, alternating between the left and right channels, courtesy Robert Fripp. But the main story of the song is the textures behind the verse: Pert’s marimba, wordless choruses of backing vocals from Kate Bush, an unassuming piano part, and then going into the chorus a massive build up in Phil Collins’ gated snare that sounds like the apocalypse arriving. The lyrics reference compulsive behavior (“Got to get so food, I’m so hungry all the time… Got to get some sleep, I’m so nervous in the night/And I don’t know how to stop”), but the real story may be the connecting thread of implied violence in a relationship, picking up where the last verse of “Intruder” left off: “You know I hate to hurt you, I hate to see your pain/But I don’t know how to stop, I don’t know how to stop.” The song is a superb miniature where all the parts work together

We get a breather from the intensity thanks to the jazz interlude of “Start,” which combines synthesizer and sampling keyboards with a grade-A rock saxophone solo from Dick Morrissey. It builds up to a hard cut into “I Don’t Remember,” powered by Jerry Marotta’s thudding backbeat and a killer guitar sound from Dick Gregory, alongside Tony Levin’s Chapman Stick and a falsetto vocal intro that seems equally influenced by disco and Middle Eastern chant. More alienation here, with verses that could be read both as immigration to a strange land and to interpersonal communications breakdowns: “Strange is your language and I have no decoder/Why don’t you make your intention clear/With eyes to the sun and your mouth to the soda/Saying, ‘Tell me the truth, you’ve got nothing to fear.’”

“Family Snapshot” puts us in the mind of an assassin with a twist. There’s a quiet introduction on the keyboard as the narrator surveys the crowded street awaiting the arrival of his target, and anticipating becoming part of the story: “Today is different/Today is not the same/Today I make the action/Take snapshot into the light… I’m shooting into the light.” The band takes off with excitement as the action deepens: “The governor’s car is not far behind/He’s not the one I’ve got in mind/‘Cause there he is, the man of the hour/Standing in the limousine.” It’s at this point that the song takes a twist as the narrator makes it clear his action has nothing to do with his feelings about his target, but about being abandoned and anonymous. By shooting his victim, he reclaims some part of his own narrative, even through infamy. And then the final twist: “All turned quiet, I’ve been here before/A lonely boy hiding behind the front door… Come back mum and dad/You’re growing apart, know that I’m growing up sad.” Gabriel would later write honest songs about the pain in his relationship with his father; here for the first time he explores that dynamic of interpersonal relationships leading to tragic outcomes in one five-minute epic. It’s deeply moving and instantly memorable. Small wonder that when Gabriel’s nascent Internet fan club asked members to write in their favorites for his 2001 WOMAD performance in Redmond, Washington, that this song made the cut.

“And Through the Wire” stays focused on relationships, this time through the lens of communication and introduced by the crunch of Paul Weller’s guitar lead. Though it has the sharper focus and songwriting characteristic of this higher level of Gabriel’s artistry, its combination of 7/4 and triple meter is a reminder of his progressive rock roots. But with that insane guitar and Marotta’s drumming, you hardly notice the rhythmic complexity. It’s a breath following “Family Snapshot” and an effective closer for a stunning Side 1.

Side 2 doesn’t let up, either. Peter counts in the intro and “Games Without Frontiers” kicks off with a vaguely disco-feeling drum machine, heightened by the combination of David Rhodes’ lead guitar, Marotta’s percussion and, most of all, Kate Bush’s high backing vocals as she sings “jeux sans frontières.” The lyrics are playful with an undercurrent of menace as “Hans plays with Lotte/Lotte plays with Jane” yields to “Adolf builds a bonfire/Enrico plays with it.” But it’s all somehow danceable and weirdly singable, and it yielded his first top 10 UK hit.

“Not One of Us” starts with Peter’s ululating vocals and a Robert Fripp guitar solo that sounds like shredded glass. John Giblin’s bass is a lead character in the song as Peter sings about racism, first telling the immigrant “A foreign body and a foreign mind/Never welcome in the land of the blind,” then telling the racist “All shades of opinion feed an open mind/but your values are twisted.” Between the two verses, the chorus—“You may look like we do, talk like we do/But you know how it is/You’re not one of us”—inverts its meaning. In the coda, the last minute-plus of the song becomes a monster driven by a massive four-note hook in the guitar and bass and Jerry Marotta’s frenetic, polyrhythmic drumming. It’s among the most intense music Peter had ever created to that point, and he would return to it later in the 1980s.

After the climax, “Lead a Normal Life” seems to offer a respite in the cool tones of Morris Pert’s marimba. But the marimba pattern refuses to settle in tonality, playing on an open fifth indefinitely, and the synth lead is similarly unsettled, wandering past but never landing on the tonic. A distorted cry accompanies the bridge but then we return to the music of confinement, which repeats three times and then suddenly drops into tonality. But what initially sounds like a refuge reveals itself to be even more of a trap: “It’s nice here with a view of the trees/Eating with a spoon, they don’t give you knives/‘Spect you watch those trees blowing in the breeze/We want to see you lead a normal life.” And the menacing music of what is now revealed to be an institution returns, with a reprise of the distorted cry, with guitar distortion that subliminally builds in the background into a constant weeping. It’s masterful and deeply discomforting.

The final track, “Biko,” prompted Ahmet Ertegun’s other unfortunate comment about the album: “What do people in America care about this guy in South Africa?” Peter had been deeply moved by the story of the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in the custody of the South African police in 1977, and wrote the final song of the album as a eulogy. It opens with an excerpt of “Ngomhla sibuyayo” and segues into a massive two-tone drumbeat on the Brazilian Surdo drum (played by Collins), with an emphatic David Rhodes guitar drone above which Peter sings about Biko’s death: “September ’77, Port Elizabeth weather fine/It was business as usual in Police Room 619.” He sings in Xhosa “Yila moja” (Come Spirit), invoking the continued presence of Biko’s cause even as he sings “The man is dead” over the sounds of bagpipes. In the last verse he warns, “You can blow out a candle/But you can’t blow out a fire/Once the flames begin to catch/The wind will blow it higher… And the eyes of the world are watching now.” This first Western protest song against the inhumanity of the South African apartheid system would have been sufficiently noteworthy; its incredible anthemic quality and singability made it a totem of a new movement.

Gabriel found his voice on this third self-titled album, and found a connection to the broader outside world. “Biko” in particular led to performances with Amnesty International later in his career, but it would also bring him into contact with a world full of musicians who would radically shape his music even as he brought them to wider attention. We’ll explore some of those connections in a few weeks. But next week we’ll listen to the work of a future Gabriel collaborator who brought a different kind of artistic sensibility to the unlikely world of pop music.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Peter had found German audiences receptive on his late-1970s tours, apparently, because he did a version of Peter Gabriel (1980) in German, with him singing translated lyrics over the original backing tracks from the album. Here’s “Keine Selbskontrolle”:

BONUS BONUS: “Biko” became an enduring part of Peter’s musical legacy and has been played many, many times live. Here’s an early one from the very first WOMAD festival in 1982 (about which, more later…):

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Peter’s 2010–2013 project of cover songs yielded a bunch of fascinating Peter Gabriel cover versions of some great songs (Scratch My Back), and some reciprocal covers. In exchange for Peter’s cover of the Talking Heads song “Listening Wind,” David Byrne recorded this fascinating take on “I Don’t Remember” which led off the compilation And I’ll Scratch Yours:

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 2 (1978)

The second PG album finds him experimenting, with sometimes thrilling and sometimes uneven results.

Album of the Week, March 7, 2026

Looking back at Peter Gabriel’s career, some of the consistent themes are perfectionism and painstaking deliberation. We’re talking about a performer who went from 2002 (Up) until 2023 (I/O) — 21 years between releases of original music. (There was other music of merit in that period, but that’s a different story.) So it comes as a surprise to realize that Peter Gabriel’s second album was released only 15 months after his first. Almost all of that is due to his choice of producer for the second album: Robert Fripp.

Fripp was starting to transition in his career from sideman (most notably for David Bowie on “Heroes”) and leader of the intermittently active King Crimson to producer, on the strength of his ingenious guitar work and technological inventiveness (the unique “Frippertronics” system, the first live looping solution for performers, is the best known example). Peter was looking for a specific sound texture, and brought musicians to the record who could provide it, like the redoubtable Tony Levin, drummer Jerry Marotta, and synth player Larry Fast, all of whom would appear in more PG albums. He also admired Fripp’s more improvisational and brisk working methods; he’s said about the album, “Robert Fripp was very keen to try speeding up my recording process, as many people have been since and failed, but he got closest to it.”

Unusually, the album is the second to be titled Peter Gabriel; Gabriel felt this allowed more attention to be paid to the album artwork by design house Hipgnosis (who also shot the “rainy windshield” on Peter Gabriel (1977)). I’ve also read that he thought of it almost like a magazine or periodical—“here’s the latest Peter Gabriel.” Looking at the entire discography, it’s clear he was never much of a fan of album titles, as we’ll see.

“On the Air” starts in a very different sonic landscape from where PG1 left off. Bright synthesizer lines lead to muscular guitar and bass, backed up by the massive drums of Jerry Marotta. The song is a straightforwardly driving 4/4 until the chorus, which drops into 6/8 for a few bars. And the vocals, while rough—you can hear the strain in his high notes, and his sometimes sandy tenor sounds thin and scratchy—are exciting, especially as he soars up the lines of “on the air” in the chorus. Lyrically, the subject—Gabriel’s Mozo character building a radio transmitter so that he can project his psychic energy out to the world—is obscure but the writing is taut: “Built in the belly of junk by the river my cabin stands/Made from the trash, I dug off the heap with my own fair hands/Every night I’m back at the shack and I’m sure no one else is there/I’m putting the aerial up so I can go out on the air.”

“D.I.Y.,” driven by a throbbing Tony Levin line on the Chapman Stick, is even more tautly wound. Gabriel says he was listening to punk and new wave at this time, and this song shows the influence even though it’s in 5/4 and has a complex chord change in the pre-chorus. It’s another song dealing with the aftermath of his time in Genesis: “You’re still looking for the resurrection/Come up to me with your ‘What did you say?’/And I’ll tell you, straight in the eye.” It’s short and pointed and a great song.

“Mother of Violence” is the only song in Peter’s work with a writing credit by his then-wife Jill. It’s a quiet tune with unusual instrumentation—pedal steel, acoustic piano—and a vocal that sounds a bit like late-1970s Phil Collins and ends with vocalese. It’s all in service of a lyric about difficult family relationships that is one of the more fraught bits of writing on the album.

“A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World” is an odd bit of a song, with a vocal that sounds a bit like a scratch take and a slightly proggy reggae feel, and a lyric that is reminiscent of some of the odder corners of Paul Simon, particularly in the dialog with the old man in the second verse. But it also has some of the better vocal harmonies on the album in the chorus, so that’s something in its favor at least. It’s followed with the frustratingly opaque “White Shadow,” which marries an instrumental track that could have been at home on late-1970s Genesis, circa …And Then There Were Three…. The first verse starts promisingly enough—“Ten coaches roll into the dust/Chrome windows turned to rust”—but then we’re rhyming “spirit died” with “Kentucky Fried.” Fripp’s guitar solo at the end is a thing of beauty, though, in duet with Tony Levin’s increasingly virtuosic bass, and there are hints of a synthesizer sound played by Peter that would become an increasingly familiar backdrop in his other albums.

“Indigo” is a piano-driven ballad with recorder and pedal steel, a story of an elderly man coming to terms with his impending death. The track seems to have a bunch of different ideas that never quite cohere, but the vocal is one of the finer on the album technically, with properly prepared high notes and controlled dynamics adding to the emotional affect. That’s a contrast with “Animal Magic,” which has one of the rougher vocals on the album and a lyric about proving manhood by becoming a soldier, and an anonymous guitar solo that sounds a bit like generic ’70s rock.

“Exposure,” though, is one of the key sonic pieces on the album. Driven by a mean locked in groove from Levin and Marotta, the main event here is the Frippertronics and Peter’s repeated chants of “exposure… space is what I need…” It’s the groove, though, that feels the most like a Peter Gabriel song, and we’ll hear it again in many other contexts.

“Flotsam and Jetsam” is a song of lament for a failed relationship. It’s competently written but ultimately forgettable, thanks in part to indifferent vocal recording featuring one of the few instances of an echo or reverb on the album which only serves to underscore the brevity of the song. Peter seems rather in a hurry to get on to “Perspective,” which feels a bit like a downtown 1970s New York number complete with saxophone on the chorus and a repeated “I need perspective” on the verses. Gabriel sings from the perspective of an industrial businessman to his former lover, who may or may not be the earth (“Oh Gaia, if that’s your name/Treat you like dirt, but I don’t want to blame…”)

That leads us to “Home Sweet Home,” which frustratingly sums up all the off characteristics of this second album. The songwriting feels a bit like Peter’s version of Randy Newman (last heard on “Waiting for the Big One”), the pedal steel seems like we’re in a country song, and we have another one of the indifferently recorded scratch vocals. And it’s about a man whose wife commits suicide, killing his child at the same time; despairing, he gambled with the insurance check and won big, buying a country home far away from his eleventh floor walk-up. The last verse features one of Peter’s most challenging-to-listen-to vocals, as his high vocal obbligato provides an impression of the man’s wordless sobs. It feels dark in an exploitive way. We will get much more earned dark passages in future albums, but here it feels like he’s trying on someone else’s pain.

Ultimately 1978’s Peter Gabriel is a frustratingly uneven album. There are some great songs—both “On the Air” and “D.I.Y.” are in the canon of his greatest songs, and “Exposure” is affecting, but many of the others suffer from the rapid approach to recording and writing. He took more time on the next record, and it showed. We’ll listen to that one next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Fripp connected a series of albums that he produced in the late 1970s, including Peter Gabriel, Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs, and his own debut solo album Exposure, as a loose trilogy. He re-recorded “Exposure” for the latter album, and it’s … really something, thanks to vocals by Terre Roche of the Roches:

BONUS BONUS: The band for this tour, with Sid McGinnis in for Fripp, was a tight machine. Here’s a German performance of “On the Air” from 1978 that shows Peter had been watching punk acts: