Peter Gabriel, Us

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

Album of the Week, August 15, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to this week’s album here:

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

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

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

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

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Shahbaaz

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

Album of the Week, August 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to this week’s album here:

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

Roland Hayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geoffrey Oryema, Exile

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

Album of the Week, August 1, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to this week’s album here:

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

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

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Mustt Mustt

A legendary collaboration between the great singer and ambient artist Michael Brook that gave traditional qawwali music a new beat.

Album of the Week, July 26, 2026

We’ve heard several albums by the great Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, featuring the hallmarks of the qawwali tradition: accompanied by harmonium and tabla plus a chorus, extended introductions, vocal improvisation, performances stretching anywhere from eight minutes to half an hour. We’ve also heard him in modern contexts collaborating with Peter Gabriel and others. But we haven’t heard his traditional work directly adapted for a wider Western audience. That’s where producer Michael Brook came in.

We met Brook last week, as the producer on Youssou N’Dour’s Set. But the Canadian guitarist had been in the music industry for years previously, working as an engineer at Daniel and Bob Lanois’ Grant Avenue Studio, where he worked with musical polymath Brian Eno, composer Harold Budd, and U2 guitarist The Edge, among others. It was during this period that Brook invented a kind of infinite sustain device that allowed an electric guitar to hold a continuously sustained note.1 Brook had a background in ambient music through his collaborations with Eno, Budd and Lanois, and his ideas for this collaboration with Nusrat were twofold: bring some hallmarks of modern music to Nusrat’s sound, and explore what happened if you slowed down the pace and allowed Nusrat to just explore sound rather than perform with his customary vocal pyrotechnics. At both, Mustt Mustt succeeds admirably.

Brook brought a handful of Western musicians to the session, including bassist Darryl Johnson (Neville Brothers, Lanois, Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy), engineer David Bottrill (Peter Gabriel), and percussionist James Pinker (Dead Can Dance), but members of Nusrat’s party including Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan (harmonium) and Dildar Hussein (tabla) were there as well.

“Mustt Mustt (Lost in His Work)” is a song of praise to the Sufi saints (“Upon my breath and in my intoxication is the great Qalandar…my worship and upon my breath is the great name Ali”) that is westernized with the interplay of Johnson’s bass and Brook’s guitar over the tabla and harmonium. What emerges is a mix of devotion and groove. It’s still fully recognizable as qawwali; Nusrat sets up the chorus, improvises vocally with the harmonium, unleashes strings of sangam syllables. But there’s that fat bass line throughout, interplaying with the tabla and harmonium to create something completely new. It’s also more concise than a traditional qawwali performance, thanks to Brook’s careful editing (though the liner notes indicate that Brook and Nusrat had to compromise on some of the edits so as not to affect the meaning of the traditional syllables).

“Nothing Without You (Tery Bina)” starts with percussion first, then harmonium, again bringing rhythm to the traditional Qawwali forms. There’s more of Nusrat’s chorus here, and the tune is slower and more deliberate than it might be in a qawwali performance. Brook’s guitar is used to add small amounts of harmonic complexity while still keeping the song anchored in its traditional form.

“Tracery” is where the ambient starts, with Brook and Johnson laying a gentle foundation upon which Nusrat builds up sound in dialog with himself just as the guitar builds up patterns on patterns in a hypnotic swirl. The liner notes observe that the form is complex, building on one cycle that has nine beats and another with eleven. Here Nusrat embraces the challenge, issuing vocal runs across the patterns. It’s a gorgeous collage of sound as Nusrat finds ways to bring more and more expressive vocal sounds into the mix.

“The Game” begins with sustained guitar tones that yield to a Western rhythm courtesy of a drum machine pattern that Peter Gabriel contributed. Darryl Johnson lays down a bass line on the Moog and plays piano to build the melodic core of the backing track. Across all of this is Nusrat’s improvised vocal, combining runs of syllables with soaring vocal lines.

“Taa Deem” is built from the interchange between Nusrat and his party on vocals over the harmonium, then with a complex rhythmic backing with Dildar Hussein on tabla, Michael Brook on the surdu, and James Pinker and Darryl Johnson on djembe. Brook also contributes some low searing guitar lines and the whole thing becomes a dark explosion of melodic interchange.

Brook and Johnson create a synthesized soundscape to open “Sea of Vapours,” against which Nusrat vocalizes low in his range. There’s no percussion, just multiple layers of drone. By contrast, “Fault Lines” builds from a hypnotic low vocal introduction into a rhythmic back and forth between a multitracked Nusrat and members of the party thanks to James Pinker’s percussion. There’s a wonderful bit at the end where all the percussion falls away and it’s just a gentle hint of Nusrat’s voice. “Tana Dery Na” feels like a continuation of “Fault Lines” on a simpler percussion line and with a more prominent guitar part, and with only Nusrat’s voice over the top.

“Shadow” is just Nusrat and harmonium, an extended sangam improvisation. It serves as a sort of extended prelude to “Avenue,” a group live-in-studio jam with Brook’s guitar, Johnson on clay drums, Pinker on djembe joining the harmonium and tabla. The three percussionists lock in on a groove while Nusrat and Farrukh reinforce each other and the guitar adds ecstatic high notes. It fades out just as Nusrat finds a new vocal pattern to throw into the mix. Someday there’ll be an extended anniversary edition of this album that restores some of the longer bits from this session that were edited out; I’ll be first in line.

Unusually for 1990, the album ends with a remix track. “Mustt Mustt (Massive Attack Remix)” is a dub-style remix that suspends bits of the original track in reverb, heavy percussion and synthesized bass, courtesy of the legendary Bristol collective a year before they released their debut album.

No one had combined East and West in quite this way prior to the release of Mustt Mustt, and the use of tablas with western sounds became a pivotal moment for British music, opening doors for many more musicians to mix Asian inspiration with the dance floor. It also raised Nusrat’s profile even further and gave him a wider base of fans and admirers. We’ll talk about some of the folks he influenced in the future and hear more music from him. Next week, though, we’ll hear from another artist who got his first exposure to Western audiences through Gabriel’s Real World label.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s a more traditional rendition of “Mustt Mustt” from WOMAD Yokohama in 1992. This is how I heard the work when I saw Nusrat and party perform in Washington DC in 1996:

Footnotes

  1. Brook made three Infinite Guitars: one for himself and one each for Daniel Lanois and the Edge. You’ve heard the sound of the Infinite Guitar on U2’s The Joshua Tree, including on “With or Without You.” ↩︎

Youssou N’Dour, Set

His second major label album finds the Senegalese superstar making uncompromising mbalax dance music that moves feet globally.

Album of the Week, July 18, 2026

When is a hit not a hit? In the world of the music business, having an album that tops a Billboard chart may not be enough to save you from the axe. Such was the fate of Youssou N’Dour’s contract with Virgin Records following the release of his second album for the label. Set, which sounded a note of support and positivity for the Senegalese Set-Setal movement, hit number one on the world charts but failed to generate a single that matched the performance of The Lion’s “Shakin’ the Tree.” That’s the bad news.

The good news is that in almost every way, Set is a superior album to Youssou’s major label debut. While produced by world music musician Michael Brooks (about whom more later), the musicians on the recording were almost entirely Youssou’s band, the Super Étoile de Dakar. Returning from the first album were Habib Faye on bass and keyboards, Pape Oumar Ngom on guitar, and Assane Thiam on talking drum; the rest of the band included Mbaye Dieye Faye on the sabar, Ibou Cisse on keyboards and guitar, Galass Niang on drums, and Thierno Koite and Issa Cissokho on alto and tenor saxophone. Daniel Lanois produced one track, adding a slightly more commercial note, but otherwise the album plays like music written for the streets of Dakar.

“Set” starts things off with a bang, with the band delivering a guitar-led groove as Youssou sings about the desire for a clean slate, for the youth to be able to hope again. There’s a brief bridge in English: “Give me your hand, give me one chance to know what do you think for the future?” And there’s a tight horn section punctuating the final verses and the play-out. The whole thing is in and out in less than 3:50.

“Alboury” is similarly tightly wound, but with the horns leading the charge this time and with shifts in meter driving the music forward. Youssou retells the story of Alboury Ndiaye, Buurba of the Jolof kingdom who led a rebellion against the French colonial powers in Senegal in the late 19th century before dying in battle against them in 1901. The music pivots from one motif to another with lightning speed, before speeding up to an epic finish.

“Sabar” is a groove driven by guitar and talking drum as Youssou instructs the listener on how to dance the traditional sabar dance, which is accompanied by the sabar drum. It’s a cool little moment, a snack of a song, and you’d like to hear it go longer, but Youssou has other matters on his mind. “Toxiques” is clearly meant to be the single, with Daniel Lanois producing together with the UK DJ crew Coldcut. It’s a pointed political protest song: “Rich countries make toxic waste/Why should they send it to me?/Poor countries know toxic waste/ Why should they accept it?” There’s definitely a groove here, but one sees why the song wouldn’t get a lot of airplay in the European or American markets, unfortunately.

“Sinebar” is a joyous, brisk song warning the listener about the dangers of illicit substances. I don’t know if we can trust the tone of the translation but it seems intended as humorous: “The breeze from the sea/Makes me feel hot rather than cool/I cannot even enjoy/Being with my girlfriend/And I’ve been wearing the same clothes since Sunday/Au secours, SOS.” Again interesting to hear how the musicians play against the meters laid down by the percussionists, veering from a strict 4/4 to an extended meter-blurring introduction in the keyboards to a punchy horn part. Youssou’s wordless chorus in which he sings along with the horns is infectious, and this is one where I tend to sing along regardless of my lack of knowledge of Wolof.

“Medina” is a song of praise to the cradle of Islamic faith, over a gentle keyboard and percussion groove with a killer hook in the alto sax. It’s another short one, just over three minutes, and feels like a lead-in to the faster “Miyoko,” even though the latter song only runs about 20 seconds longer. The difference is in the punchy horn charts. The song is dedicated to the Japanese photographer Miyoko Akiyama, who documented Youssou’s tours of Japan and served as his business representative there. Those are her photos on the album cover and in the liner notes.

“Xale (Our Young People)” puts Youssou’s vocals over the Kreisler String Orchestra, in an arrangement by Habib Faye. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but the strings really dig into their parts, playing gnarly harmonies against the sinuous vocal melody. Youssou’s lyrics urge the young folks of Senegal to take control of their own destinies and start to contribute their own ideas for the improvement of their country.

“Fenene (Another Place)” is a straightforward love song (“If you really love me/Come away with me/To a place/Where we may be at peace”) set to a jubilant arrangement. Opening with a strummed guitar chord, a brisk talking drum pattern and Youssou’s amazing vocals, the body of the song is built up with the horn section and bass locking in together on a tight groove as Youssou sings the verses above. We get to observe one of his distinctive vocal talents in action on this song, as the phrasing for each line of the verse is completely different, seemingly decided in the moment. For me, this is the one arrangement on the album that feels like it gives the right amount of time to the song; nothing feels rushed and you’re left feeling somewhat breathless when the talking drum ends.

“Fakastalu (Watch Your Step)” is the closest to an American pop song on the album, what with the restrained backing synths and what is either an uncredited accordion or a very good accordion sound on the synth, as well as Youssou’s simpler singalong performance on the vocals. Were it not for the talking drum and the Wolof lyrics, we might be in an REM song, which might explain why I put this one on a mix tape back in the day (one whose anniversary is coming up; I sequenced it on July 28, 1992, preceding the song with “Simple Twist of Fate” and following it with “King of Birds”).

“Hey You!” continues the general vibe of “Fakastalu” with similar instrumentation, but in service of a relative rarity: a Youssou break-up song. There’s the anguished sounding bridge: “Hey you! Hey you you! Where is Ami? / She’s no longer my girlfriend / For all I know she has found / Someone else who makes her happy.” If you don’t speak Wolof it comes across mostly as a chill out tune, with only a little extra grit in Youssou’s vocals to surface the emotional subtext.

“One Day (Jaam),” by contrast, wears its emotional message of peace for the whole world, including peace between humans and animals, on its sleeve. The arrangement stacks a series of keyboards, from a slightly tinny sounding acoustic piano setting to a more convincing Hammond B3 soundalike to more 1980s synths, atop Habib Faye’s bass, insistent percussion, and horn blasts on the chorus. Youssou sings the “one day” part of the chorus in English atop a vibrant talking drum part, giving American listeners just enough of a hook to grab hold of and try to sing along with. The song comes to an end with a descending vocal line that ends with a cappella harmonies, showing off a casual virtuosity right to the finish.

As mentioned above, Youssou was dropped by Virgin Records after this album, but that was hardly the end of his career. He signed with Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule Musicworks label (an imprint of Columbia Records) and issued the great Eyes Open in 1992, followed by The Guide (Wommat) in 1994. The latter contained his greatest hit, the duet “7 Seconds” with Neneh Cherry, which hit Number One in the Europe, UK, Italy, France, Iceland, and other charts. In 2004 he released Egypt on Nonesuch Records, an album that honored and incorporated music from Mouride Sufism as a statement of solidarity with his religious background. The album was honored (he won his only Grammy award for it) and controversial: recorded in 1999, its release was delayed due to the September 11, 2001 attacks, and some Islamic listeners criticized the record for its perceived combination of Islamic and pop music. Youssou continued to record and even spent a year as Senegal’s Minister of Tourism. He’s now on his own label and showing no signs of slowing down.

We won’t hear another Youssou record, alas—aside from an unobtainable European vinyl release of The Guide, there haven’t been any subsequent album releases on vinyl. But next week we’ll hear another album that crossed over Islamic traditions and pop music, with startling results.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The CD version of Set featured a bonus track, “Ay Chono La”:

BONUS BONUS: A period music video for what seems to be an older version of “Alboury,” complete with soldiers on a train, an unsmiling Habib Faye, and a dance-off:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: There are a lot of longer versions of “Sabar” out there; this one, from a 1991 Earth Day performance in Tokyo, gives an idea of the dance and of some of the wildness left off the record. It’s a must-watch:

BONUS x4: Youssou is still out there performing. Here’s “Sinebar” from 2024. Youssou’s pipes are still impeccable even if his footwork is a little less fleet:

Revisiting the Museum of Glass and Bridge of Glass in Tacoma

Way back in 2003 and 2004, I wrote about a trip that we took with our friends Charlie and Carie to see the Museum of Glass and pointed to the pictures we took there. That trip started a chain of events that saw me enter an NPR phoneblogging competition and one of my photos published in The Guardian.

Most of that is offline now, but with a little careful archaeology I was able to pull some of the pieces back together and also get some updated photos from our trip yesterday. Here are some of the bits and pieces.

First, the photos from that day. I used to use Mac.com to serve my photo albums before switching to Flickr. Unfortunately you can’t access any of the Mac.com content any more; fortunately it’s all in the photo albums in my Photos app, to this day. So here’s the gallery of the photos that were there.

Second, there was the SENT online exhibit of “phonecam art,” which included both a curated portion and a participatory portion (which was run by NPR). On the blog, I announced that I sent some photos from my phonecam, including ones from above. Sadly, SENT no longer exists so you can’t reload the page to see my photos alongside those from Wil Wheaton and Warren Ellis, but you can get the drift by clicking on the link above which takes you to the Internet Archive. The physical exhibit went online July 10, 2004 in Los Angeles. And my photo was selected as a winner in the NPR contest; you can see the winning photos in the archive here, and the NPR episode of “Day to Day” where they discussed my photo is still online. (My photo gets discussed at 2:40.) There was even a spread on the contest in an AT&T magazine (again, rescued by the archives).

In the middle of all of this, the Guardian wrote their article. My photo was never in the online version but Newspapers.com now has the actual print article online; see below.

My photo in the print edition of The Guardian, January 8, 2004.

Last but not least, I retook some of the photos from that day when we visited the museum again last month. Amazing to me how the exhibit still has the same impact though the landscape around it has changed.

Laurie Anderson, Strange Angels

In which a performance artist leans into the musical side of her art and finds emotional resonance.

Album of the Week, July 11, 2026

Laurie Anderson might have started the 1980s as the definitive performance artist who also happened to sing, but her last album of the decade posited her as a singer who also happened to be a performance artist. Like Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, released just a week before Strange Angels, the album centered Laurie the person in an emotional space that she had never really occupied, showing her with fewer electronic tricks and more heartfelt songwriting in an album adorned by a stunningly intimate cover portrait.

That cover was taken by famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who near the beginning of his career had captured the great Patti Smith for her first album Horses. In the earlier photo he portrayed someone both confrontational and delicate in a way that played with gender conventions. Here, near the end of his life (Mapplethorpe died several months before the album’s release, of AIDS), he imbued Anderson, previously careful to present herself through a sort of hip androgyny, with a sort of uncanny beauty, presenting her in a way that was still undeniably artistic and avant-garde but somehow unavoidably feminine.

The cover photo was a good metaphor for the music contained inside, as an artist who had previously relied on an electronic pitch-shifter to give her “The Voice of Authority” now leveraged a new voice, an unexpectedly clear and beautiful soprano. She has told a story about realizing that a song needed to be actually sung instead of talked, going to take voice lessons, and discovering that voice had been waiting for her the whole time. And while there are certainly familiar collaborators, including producer Roma Baran and percussionist David Van Tieghem, most of the musicians on the record are most familiar for having collaborated with someone else: the Golden Palominos’ Anton Fier; trumpeter Earl Gardner, trombonist Steve Turre, drum programmer Leon Pendarvis (Janice’s husband) and accordionist Tom “T-Bone” Wolk from the Saturday Night Live band; session drummer Steve Gadd (“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”); Tony Levin; guitarist Ray Phiri and bassist Bakithi Kumalo (Graceland); minimalist tape loop composer Scott Johnson; bassist Mark Dresser (Anthony Braxton); drummer Joey Baron and percussionist Cyro Baptista (John Zorn); and a host of well-known voices lending backing vocals including Meat Loaf, Bobby McFerrin, outsider artists The Roches, and Lisa Fischer (Rolling Stones, Luther Vandross).

“Strange Angels” begins as a classic Laurie Anderson lyric: “They say that heaven is like TV,/A perfect little world/That doesn’t really need you.” But it’s sung, not wryly spoken, and the combination of instruments that joins as she intones “here they come” – guitar, accordion, bass, crisp percussion – tells us we are in for a different sort of experience. I always loved the lyric that leads off the second verse: “Well it was one of those days / Larger than life / When your friends came to dinner /And they stayed they night/ And then they cleaned out the refrigerator / They ate everything in sight / And then they stayed up in the living room / And they cried all night.” Possibly I feel this way because the first time I heard the album was in the living room of a Mount Holyoke choir member, where I was crashing overnight on the floor while we were on tour. I don’t make friends easily but that night we stayed up until two, and would have cleaned out the refrigerator had there been one. (Some of these reviews are not impartial.) Perhaps, though, I like the tune so much because, as the chords swing from major to minor, the band creates an undercurrent of melancholy underneath the main story, and we understand that we’re looking backwards at a visitation from the angels that can never occur again.

“The Monkey’s Paw” is a different thing, a fable about not messing with Mother Nature in the form of a song. The setup—Laurie going to a retail establishment and requesting modifications—is not particularly novel, but the salesman pushing back on her warning of the unintended consequences is: “Please. There’s no guarantee. Cause nature’s got rules, and nature’s got laws, and if you cross her look out — it’s the monkey’s paw.” The musical track is light, thanks to Ray Phiri and Bakithi Kumalo, and the gorgeous falsetto vocalise of Bobby McFerrin.

“Coolsville” is a song built over an effect, a delayed reverb circuit providing a sort of call and response effect behind Laurie’s vocals. That’s the gimmick, and on the initial listen when she intones “Coolsville” into this thing it can be overwhelming. But the song itself, with its longing for perfection that doesn’t exist, is somehow deeply moving nevertheless.

That brings us to “Ramon,” which for me is the emotional center of the album. Opening with a deceptive drum pattern that always makes me think the beat is dislocated by half a measure, Laurie is back to clouds of angels: “Last night I saw a host of angels, and they were all singing different songs/And they sounded like a lot of lawnmowers/Mowing down my lawn/And up above kerjillions of stars spangled all over the sky…” But the visitation of angels leaves us and there’s a man fallen on his back in the snow. Laurie’s verse centers this man in the broader cosmos: “some people walk on water/some people walk on broken glass/some just walk round and round in their dreams/some just keep falling down.” There’s something deeply human, almost a humanist form of Christian ethics, in these lyrics: regardless of which kind of person you’re dealing with, when you see a man who’s broken, pick him up and carry him! To put this into context, this was coming at the end of an eight year period where the culture had encouraged a kind of spiritual self-centeredness, amid the rise of televangelism and the rapid removal of societal support for the homeless, as well as at the end of a period where the Reagan administration’s refusal to do anything about the AIDS crisis had meant the loss of tens of thousands of people, with the population of artists in New York with whom Anderson collaborated (including Mapplethorpe) hit especially hard. So for me, hearing these lyrics against this context, it came as a sort of moral call to arms. For Anderson, this isn’t an explicitly Christian moment, more a humanist one, since we are all in this together: “We don’t know where we come from/We don’t know what we are.”

The first side closes out with “Babydoll,” which is for me one of the songs on the album that would have done better as spoken word. The concept, about a brain that stops functioning on behalf of its owner because it wants to have fun, is pretty good, and the music is rich, but they somehow don’t seem to reinforce each other. Still the song is worth it for its extremely 1989 moment, in which the brain says, “Take me to your leader/And I say: do you mean … George?”

“Beautiful Red Dress” flips the tropes of women’s roles (shrill, decorative, emotionally unstable, dependence) on their heads, starting from the first chorus: “I’ve got a beautiful red dress/And you’d look really good/Standing beside it…” Lenny Pickett gets to play some spectacular 1980s saxophone all over the track, and there’s a great moment in which Laurie quiets the track down with the observation, “You know, for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago, that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it’ll be the year 3,888 before we make — a buck.”

“The Day the Devil” flips the script on blaming external forces for your problems, with the devil being blamed for knowing you inside out before sneering, “Don’t come banging your Bibles/Cause you’ve been laughing all the way to the bank.” It’s not, to my hearing, entirely coherent, but the gospel chorus covers a multitude of sins in this song for me: “Give me back my innocence… ‘Cause when I get on up to heaven Lord/You can have it all back.”

The other emotional center for me comes next. “The Dream Before” is an unvarnished story of dashed hopes and unhappy outcomes. Hansel says, “I’ve wasted my life on our stupid legend/When my one and only love was the wicked witch.” The second half of the brief functions as sort of an ultimate Zen koan, with Anderson and Bobby McFerrin laying down some high-grade philosophy: “History is an angel being blown backwards into the future… and the angel wants to go back and fix things, to repair the things that have been broken, but there is a storm blowing from Paradise … and this storm, this storm, is called Progress.” Really listening to this as an about-to-graduate college student did something to the wiring of my brain. (I centered this song on a mix tape in 1993.)

“My Eyes” is somehow the perfect blend of Laurie’s tart observations and her new musical fluency, all the more so because there’s no pat moral or punchline. She confronts the enormous night, the kerjillions of stars, the “ocean, so deep, so old,” and simply exists in it: “Everything’s shaking in strange delight.” The track is underpinned by that spectacular one-two combo of Bakithi Khumalo’s fretless bass and Ray Phiri’s guitar.

The album ends with a valediction for the departed in “Hiawatha,” as Laurie invokes the spirits of Elvis, JFK, and Marilyn Monroe to welcome newly departed souls: “Well, starlight, starbright, we’re going to hang some new stars in the sky tonight.” The combination of Scott Johnson’s guitar and the understated backing vocals of the Roches turns the overall effect into a simultaneous groove and valediction.

Laurie’s experiment with leaning more fully into the musical side of her art was well received by the critics, with Robert Christgau giving the album an A. After the album it took a while for her to find her next voice, but find it she did after about five years, and we’ll hear that sound another time. Next week, though, we’ll swerve back over into what was being called “world music” to hear the next album from one of Peter Gabriel’s other collaborators.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s Laurie performing “Strange Angels” live in San Remo in 2001, during an award ceremony in which she was awarded the Premio Tenco for songwriting:

BONUS BONUS: “Strange Angels” soundtracks a moving moment in the William Hurt/Elizabeth Perkins 1991 film The Doctor, in which the characters, playing cancer patients, embrace a moment of grace:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Laurie originally didn’t pursue the traditional music video route to promote the album, instead opting to produce a series of short videos, called “Personal Service Announcements,” in which she did her version of stand-up comedy. A few of these have surfaced over the years, including these:

Declarations

For me, the American Bicentennial celebrations in 1776 came and went without leaving much of an impact. I was not yet four years old, so am unsure of what I do remember, though certain impressions (crowds, heat, loud sounds) persist. I do remember the atmosphere of the year: lots of red, white, and blue kitsch. A resurgence in Holly Hobbyized “Colonial” fashion. Wrought iron plaques on garage doors and the siding of split level ranches, indicating the inhabitants’ connection to the Colonial era.

What I remember happened five years later, during the celebration of the Yorktown Bicentennial, celebrating the final battle of the Revolutionary War and the surrender by General Cornwallis to the American forces. We visited during that four day period when the crowds of adults weren’t there, as part of a crowd of schoolchildren bussed in on massive field trips. In early October in Tidewater it was still hot; the grass of the field was scratchy; and the event struck the right balance between celebration and sober reflection—the latter mostly at how big the battlefield was and how far we had to walk.

I feel the same about the Declaration of Independence that was announced on July 4. We all remember the engrossed copy, but the one we remember is an 1820s facsimile of an original that was then already fading, now almost completely illegible. But the versions the country first saw were like the ones in the photo above: printed hastily by John Dunlap in Philadelphia and distributed throughout the 13 colonies, who then went on to print their own versions to spread the news far and wide. (Albert Small collected these and other copies of the Declaration; the photo above is from the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.) Our country’s birth was announced by mass media and by word of mouth, and we remember the fancy souvenirs rather than the original announcement.

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, September 12, 1821

We seek consolation in these moments from the past, and also inspiration. Last year I quoted Jefferson’s letters: “The flames kindled on the Fourth of July…” and “The spirit of 1776 is not dead.” This year I think of another quote (coincidentally also used in the Testament of Freedom): “I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance.” Of a potential eclipse of reason in Europe, he also wrote, “even should the clouds of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science & liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them.” Here’s hoping it goes both ways.

Kate Bush, The Sensual World

Kate reaches a deeper emotional resonance on the sequel to Hounds of Love, with help from an unlikely cast of collaborators.

Album of the Week, July 4, 2026

Though Kate Bush wasn’t touring (she legendarily eschewed live performances aside from the occasional TV appearance from the conclusion of her 1979 “Tour of Life” for the next 35 years), she was keeping busy following the one-two hit of Hounds of Love and her appearance on Peter Gabriel’s So. She released her first greatest hits collection, The Whole Story, in 1986, featuring a re-recorded version of “Wuthering Heights” and a new single, “Experiment IV.” Though she was quiet in her official releases, she recorded the original version of “This Woman’s Work” for the 1988 John Hughes romantic comedy She’s Having a Baby while in the studio, off and on, working on her next album. It was finally released on October 16, 1989, having gestated in studio session stretching from September 1987 to July 1989.

In addition to some of her stalwart musicians like Del Palmer, her brother Paddy Bush, Alan Murphy (who died three days after the album’s release), bassist Eberhard Weber, and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmore, there were some notable additional musicians who lent the album a unique color. These included Uilleann pipes from Irish musician Davy Spillane (Moving Hearts), bassist Mick Karn (Japan), orchestral arrangements from Michael Kamen, the Balanescu Quartet performing string quartet arrangements by Michael Nyman, and most of all the Bulgarian vocal ensemble Trio Bulgarka.

We begin with the title track, which is a song that almost didn’t happen. “The Sensual World” was originally Kate’s take on Molly Bloom’s famous interior monologue from James Joyce’s Ulysses, and actually set text from the novel, until the estate complained and she was forced to write new words to the track. (In 2011 on her album Director’s Cut, on which she re-recorded many of the tracks from this album and her follow-up, she was able with permission from the estate to present the original version of the track, now titled “Flower of the Mountain.”) The song itself leans into its title, with Bush using both her broadening lower range and a breathily erotic tone over a rich sonic tapestry that includes church bells, fiddle, bouzouki, whips(!), and Spillane’s brilliant Uilleann pipes. Through it all she presents a vision of a heroine experiencing the sensations of being in the physical world for the first time, stepping off the page to experience sensations and, especially, pleasure. The setting is typically brilliant for Kate; this character, formerly trapped in the two dimensional world of the book, expresses herself almost entirely on a single tone throughout the verse, only varying in pitch when rising to an earthy blues note on the repeated blue note of “ooh, yes” and in the chorus. It’s a bewitching, nearly hypnotic effect. I’ve been known to listen to it on repeat from time to time.

“Love and Anger” is another magnificent Kate uptempo song, with high energy courtesy the tight rhythm section of Stuart Elliott on drums and John Giblin on bass, a soulful piano line, backing vocals from the Trio Bulgarka (a Bulgarian folk group who had performed on the pivotal 1970s albums Les Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Volume Two and on Balkana: the Music of Bulgaria) and a wicked guitar line from Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.1 It’s all in service of a movingly mature lyric about a relationship on the rocks due to the inability of the participants to communicate about where their emotional millstones lie. The track also features one of my all-time favorite hummed parts in any song. Again, Track 2 on Kate albums is where she puts the bangers.

“The Fog,” by contrast, is a return to the world of The Ninth Wave, in which the narrator fears dissolution and loss of identity as she contemplates stepping away from her family (Kate’s father Dr. Robert Bush speaks on this track) into the water, which seems life threatening but is only waist deep. In the song, there is a deep ambivalence about the water: is it the unknown? Is it the deep and somehow threatening love of another, one who threatens to disappear, to slip into the fog? The lyrics are vulnerable and beautiful, and are given an exquisite string instrumental with enfant terrible violinist Nigel Kennedy and a taut guitar solo from Alan Murphy.

“Reaching Out” is a tenderly maternal ballad, with added emotional heft from the choral accompaniment by the Trio Bulgarka and strings arranged by composer Michael Nyman and performed by the Balanescu Quartet. (In my symphonic performance experience, we call that “luxury casting.”) Kate’s vocals on the soaring chorus are magnificent, though the verses are a bit wooly —“See how the child reaches out instinctively/to feel how fire will feel” invokes a different reaction in me than what she presumably intended.

“Heads We’re Dancing” is something entirely different. Driven by a propulsive synth line, and a shaggy dog story about a woman in 1939 who is asked by a stranger to dance, and who realizes in the morning that she was dancing with Adolf Hitler. The whole thing is a brilliant excuse for more Alan Murphy, some brilliant bass from Japan’s Mick Karn, and one of the all-time great “doo doo doo” choruses. Indeed, with each song on the first side, Kate seems to lean further into a sexily minimalist groove. (The darkly chromatic string parts, by the way, are arranged by Michael Kamen, who was by now almost a decade into his film-score career.)

Opening Side 2, “Deeper Understanding” tells the story of a narrator who disappears further and further into a rapport with a computer, until they forget to eat or sleep. Supposedly inspired by a documentary about Stephen Hawking, it’s been noted that there may be an autobiographical element here as well, as the Fairlight CMI also loads programs and has a button marked “Execute,” and Kate spent many months in front of it producing the album… Trio Bulgarka put flesh and blood on the digital heartbeat of the track with a hair-raising solo line and a resonant chorale at the end.

“Between a Man and a Woman” returns to the theme of a difficult relationship, with a twist: here Bush’s narrator warns the listener not to intervene in the “pendulum swing/between a man and a woman.” The track feels to have grown from the same roots as “Heads We’re Dancing”, as though there was one long jam session that birthed them both. By contrast, “Never Be Mine” is something new, driven by Eberhard Weber’s slinky bass and a vision of the narrator confronting the smoke from the burning stubble in a cornfield and stating “This is where I want to be,” as she burns off the last bits of her connection to an ex-lover so that she can plant the seeds of something new. Trio Bulgarka provide a moment out of time here as well, singing in ringing harmony to the departing lover as Davy Spillane provides a sympathetic tone in the pipes.

Trio Bulgarka get their ultimate shot at brilliance, going full out on “Rocket’s Tail” as the narrator calls the listener’s wistful desire to be a rocket in space “the saddest thing I’d ever seen,” then herself seizes the moment and flies into space. Bush, the Bulgarians, Stuart Elliott, John Giblin and David Gilmour are all going full out, seizing the electric moment, and then contentedly burning out into silence. It’s breathtaking.

Into the sudden silence steps “This Woman’s Work,” performed by Bush accompanying herself on piano with Michael Kamen’s orchestral arrangement. The lyric is Bush’s most deeply heartwrenching, as she sings from the point of view of a man forced to watch his wife fight for her life in childbirth as he confronts his regrets for things left unsaid and undone. It’s an astonishing, bravura performance, all the more amazing for its made-to-order origins in “She’s Having a Baby.”

I think there’s something about the records that come out when you’re in high school that have a special glow about them. While objectively Hounds of Love is an album of high brilliance, somehow it’s the emotional center of The Sensual World that keeps drawing me back; even if I only found it at the very end of my senior year, it’s still dug deep into that primal memory. And who is to say that the high concept of Hounds of Love is really superior to the personal depths of The Sensual World? It’s ultimately a triumph either way, an album that laughs, sobs, and takes steps out into a multidimensional landscape of heart and mind.

Kate wasn’t ready to burn out like a rocket just yet, and we’ll hear more from her. But first we’ll hear from another Peter Gabriel collaborator’s 1989 release and its own unexpectedly emotional moments.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Following the release of The Sensual World, Kate gave a rare long-form interview that was aired as The Sensual World of Kate Bush:

BONUS BONUS: An even rarer live performance by Kate from this late period, this version of “This Woman’s Work” from the Wogan television program is moving:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: While there are fewer covers of the songs from this album than of some of Kate’s other songs, the version of “Love and Anger” by Nada Surf on their covers album If I Had a Hi-Fi gets me every time. Though the audio is imperfect, this live cover from the Bowery Ballroom in 2010 is somehow even better than their studio version:

Footnotes

  1. One of several session appearances in 1989 for Gilmour; the others were Warren Zevon’s Transverse City and “We Got Married” on Paul McCartney’s great Flowers in the Dirt. ↩︎

Various, Passion – Sources

A musical journey around the world with the collaborators and inspirations for the sounds of Peter Gabriel’s groundbreaking soundtrack.

Album of the Week, June 27, 2026

In the late 1980s, there was an upwelling of interest in world music. We had Paul Simon working with South African musicians on Graceland, Sting incorporating Latin sounds on …Nothing Like the Sun, Talking Heads incorporating Brazilian rhythms and sounds on Naked (followed by an even more direct partnership by frontman David Byrne on his first solo album, Rei Momo), and of course Peter Gabriel working with the likes of Youssou N’Dour and others on So and Passion. For some onlookers it started to have the whiff of exploitation; I distinctly remember a 1990 article in one of the college papers I wrote for that called out the musicians above as “carpetbaggers,” stealing world sounds for pop.

But as we’ve seen, for Peter Gabriel at least the connection to world rhythms and sounds went back further—as far back as 1982, at least, where on the strength of his song “Biko” he started the WOMAD festival to bring these artists to the public, and featured musicians like the Ekome Dance Company, L. Shankar, Manu Katché, and of course Youssou and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He also, notably, launched Passion as the first record on his Real World label and gave many of these musicians record deals that allowed them to get their music in front of Western audiences. And he put out a label sampler, of a sort, in the form of Passion – Sources, a compilation album that gave space for both the musicians who had collaborated live in the studio on the making of Passion, and for some of the archival tracks that served as the foundation for the sonic explorations on the soundtrack.

We’ve written extensively about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “Shamas-Ud-Doha Bader-Ud-Doja,” from his first Real World album Shahen-Shah; it opens this compilation in edited form, running just a touch over five minutes and fading out in the middle reprise of the verse. It leads into “Call to Prayer,” by Baaba Maal. Like Youssou N’Dour, Maal, who appeared on the Passion track “Of These, Hope (Reprise),” is an incredible vocalist from Senegal; unlike N’Dour, he is a griot, deeply steeped in the traditions of the Pulaar people, who were among the earliest African peoples to embrace Islam. Here he performs a traditional call to prayer as improvised over accompaniment from Lakshminarayana (L.) Shankar and a low drone; the work appeared in the movie The Last Temptation of Christ during its depiction of the Last Supper.

Shankar performs the next track, “Sankarabaranam Pancha Nadai Pallavi,” with his group the Epidemics, consisting of Zakir Hussain on tabla, Viku Vinayakram on ghatam, and British composer and musician Caroline Morgan on tanbura. Here, as in most of his 1980s work, Shankar plays the double violin, also known as the LSD (L. Shankar Double Violin), an electric string instrument of his own design that covers a wide chromatic range. The music here is a traditional southern Indian Carnatic raga.

Turkish master of the ney flute Kudsi Erguner performs the track “Ulvi,” a brief solo work in the Mevlevi Sufi tradition. If you suspect, based on the brief excerpt here, that a longer selection of ney music would be both hypnotic and slightly soporific, you would be correct, at least judging from the excellent German CD of his work I found in college. But this track is delightful and mysterious to listen to, and about as understated an expression of Sufi spirituality as Nusrat’s qawwali is extroverted.

Master Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy multitracks the tabla, dufi, doholla, and tambourine on “Fallahi,” alongside the mazhar tambourine played by Joseph Alexander, building a tight polyrhythmic pattern that is both dance-worthy and trance-inducing. This is followed by two excerpts from earlier compilations, a “Sabahiya” or traditional morning nuptial serenade from an anthology, The Folk Music of Egypt, produced by Tiberiu Alexandra and credited to “Banga (Tanta-Suaag),” and a dervishlike “Tejbeit” by unknown Egyptian musicians, taken from an Ocora Records compilation with overdubbed percussion by Hossam Ramzy and tin whistle by Richard Evans. Here you can feel the slightly frantic atmosphere of the bar in which the original was recorded.

“Prelude in Tchahargah,” recorded by Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh on the kementché with tabla accompaniment, is a traditional Persian piece that displays some of the underlying affinities between Persian and Indian music. There’s very much a hybrid of dance and spiritual focus here, particularly in the unaccompanied improvisation that ends the work.

“Wedding Song” is a location recording of unknown Moroccan musicians from the set of the film, with percussion added by Ramzy and Manu Katché, that soundtracks the film’s recreation of the Wedding at Cana. It’s appropriately celebratory and hypnotic, with a repeated ten-bar call and response phrase.

“Magdalene’s House” gives us a listen to a musician whose work did not appear on Passion but did appear on the soundtrack of the movie. Abdul Aziz El-Sayed plays unaccompanied kanoun, a large zither-like instrument that allows the player to sound microtones. Here he plays flourishes and rapid runs in octaves along a modal scale, mostly sticking to a recognizable western mode but here and there throwing in some unusual tones for emphasis. The effect is spellbinding; one regrets the track’s short length, as it seems to end just as he finds a theme that could have made a magnificent Bach fugue.

An all-percussion track from the Guinean drum and dance troupe Fatala, “Yoky,” follows. Led by Yacouba (Bruno) Camara on congas and the gongoma drum (made from saw blades attached to a calabash gourd), the ensemble adds a pair of djembes and more gongoma for a hypnotic polyrhythm. Sadly, the ensemble only seems to have recorded one full album, a self-titled release in 1988.

“Ya Sah” is a trancelike number from Moroccan ensemble Nass El Ghiwane, which uses a Western banjo to produce an unusually disorienting cross-cultural effect — just as you think you’re in a foreign place entirely, suddenly the ring of the banjo places the sound squarely in an Appalachian string band tradition. Another number that doesn’t appear in Passion but does appear in the soundtrack, Gabriel says that its sound, which appears in a brothel scene in the movie, was one of the influences on his and Scorcese’s decision about the sound world of the movie.

Les Musiciens du Nil, who appeared on the Passion album in the track “Wall of Breath,” here play a more traditional Egyptian sound on “Al Nahla Al’Ali,” which features percussion and microtonal melodies in a rondo-like dance form that gradually accelerates into a crescendo then slows to a coda, leading to the slow “Song of Complaint” which is played on the Armenian doudouk by Antranik Askarian and Khatchadour Khatchaturian. Askarian appeared on the original recording on the Ocora Records label that was sampled for the opening track of Passion, “The Feeling Begins.” Without the massive drum hit, the traditional Armenian tune is a meditative reverie that completes the transition to another sound world.

As a “thank you” to the musicians whose work was incorporated into the Passion soundtrack, Passion – Sources can be read as a magnificent gesture. That it also functions as a sort of sampler for the mission of Gabriel’s new Real World label, opening ears to new sounds and new artists, is an intended second mission. As a seventeen-year-old listener newly moving beyond the relatively constrained sound worlds of my upbringing, it was revelatory. We’ll continue to explore the sounds of the world through the lens of Real World in the future. But over the next few weeks we’ll check in on some of Peter’s other collaborators as they make music through the end of the 1980s.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s a live performance, with vocals, from Les Musiciens du Nil which gives you an idea of the traditional instrumentation used.

BONUS BONUS: Here’s a 1983 broadcast of Nass El Ghiwane in concert in Paris, playing for a very enthusiastic dancing crowd.

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Baaba Maal has had a long and fruitful career. Here’s his band from an astonishing 2024 performance that combines traditional and modern instrumentation to bring the crowd into a rhythmic trance:

BONUS x4: Kudsi Erguner has also had a long and vital career. Here’s a performance from 2013 that showcases the hypnotic power of the ney flute:

Youssou N’Dour, The Lion

The Senegalese superstar’s major label debut blends a deep groove with modern technology and that incredible voice into a compelling, if uneven, listen.

Album of the Week, June 20, 2026

We’ve met Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour in the context of his work with Peter Gabriel; he might still be best known for his incandescent vocal on “In Your Eyes,” and we’ve heard his contributions to Peter’s all-star project Passion. But even before this global success Youssou was, by any measure, a star. It just took the world a while to catch up with him.

Youssou was born in 1958 in the Senegalese capital city of Dakar. He was already performing at age 12, and made many appearances with the Star Band, the house band of the most popular nightclub in Dakar at the time, the Miami Club. A number of bands eventually spun off the Star Band, including Orchestra Baobab and Étoile de Dakar; Youssou was a breakout star in the latter. The band fused traditional Senegalese music with Latin dance music, jazz and soul influences to form the mbalax style, which rapidly became the leading musical form in Senegal, Mauritania and Gambia due to its spread via inexpensive, accessible cassettes.

Étoile de Dakar was short lived due to tensions inside the group and split in two in 1981; Youssou’s half, Super Étoile de Dakar, featured guitarist Jimi Mbaye, bassist Habib Faye, and talking drum (tama) player Assane Thiam. The band recorded eight albums on local labels from 1982 to 1988. You can find a few of them on streaming services; Immigrés and Nelson Mandela are especially worth a listen. But following the release of So in 1986, and the ensuing world tour, it was clear that Youssou had the makings of international stardom. He signed to Virgin Records, which was now distributing Peter Gabriel’s records in the UK, and brought the members of Super Étoile de Dakar along into the studio as his backing band.

“The Lion (Gaïende)” starts us off with a bang. The band is tight as Youssou sings a song about the bravery of his people, in Wolof, that the liner notes translate in part as “We have always been a brave people/We have never contemplated defeat/It is our character to be ambitious… You are our Lions / Hey! Hey! Win! Win! / You must! / We want you to win.” Youssou is in fine voice here, moving quickly through the verse into an insistent chorus, in which he sings a second line that soars over the band. The bridge is noteworthy for some brilliantly fast keyboard work, which turns out to have been contributed by Kenny Kirkland. The lead track seems to fulfill all the promise of this debut, with sizzle and style that sacrifices none of the energy of the earlier Super Étoile recordings but adds a broader soundstage.

“Shakin’ the Tree” gives the people what they want—another Youssou/Peter Gabriel collaboration. This one is better thought of as Peter Gabriel’s band with Peter and Youssou trading lead vocals; of the players in Youssou’s band, only Habib Faye appears, joining Manu Katché, David Rhodes, and a horn section (Phil Todd, Guy Barker, John Barclay, Pete Beachill) made up of British jazz musicians. It helps that the song is a pretty strong Peter Gabriel composition, more optimistic—almost sunny—than the material on either of his two preceding albums. It also helps that it has two strong male voices singing about the strength of women, which you wouldn’t think would be groundbreaking but in 1989 was fairly revolutionary. And those horns! I remember reading a music mag article about Passion in which it talked about Peter sweating the stereo phase of the horns, trying to get the imaging just right in the mix, and you can definitely hear it here. About the only thing worth kvetching about is the vocal on the first verse, where, for the only time on record, Youssou sounds a little tentative as he sings the English lyrics. That may be why Peter chose to re-record the lead vocals with a higher melody when he put the song on his first greatest hits compilation a year later.

“Kocc Barma” is a more traditional mbalax number, featuring more of the Super Étoile sound including a non-British horn section and alternating sections of call-and-response and funky chorus. You can really hear the contributions of Habib Faye on bass and Assane Thiam on talking drum here; together they build an irresistible groove. This song was the headliner of one of Youssou’s last Super Étoile cassette releases, and it gives us a great high-definition picture of how mbalax could play on the world stage.

“Bamako” is more synth- and guitar-forward—that’s David Sancious on acoustic guitar, and African producer George Acogny’s keyboards and production. The percussion is forward in the mix but is largely relegated to straight-ahead timekeeping, with few of the talking drum flourishes from “Kocc Barma” until the very end. Instead we get stabs of strings and washes of heavily reverbed Youssou vocals, with backing vocals from Dolette McDonald. Not a bad thing at all.

“The Truth” builds atop a slap bass foundation with a strong Youssou chorus. Another inspirational lyric, the song begins (in translation) “There is a reason for everything that happens/Everything that moves has a soul.” About the only thing to complain about are the swathes of very 1980s keyboards, but then again, by 1989, synths are inevitable. Still, one wonders what this would sound like with the horn section.

Side two opens with “Old Tucson,” a puzzling song that features Youssou singing in English about three museums: the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves) on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal; the Air and Space Museum, and Old Tucson, a kind of Disneyfied view of the old West where cowboys walk the streets. The groove is strong under the story, but it’s not clear where this shaggy dog story is going to end up. Is the point to marvel at the fruit that sprang from the poisoned beginnings, or just a travelogue? Whatever it is, Youssou will never forget, as he assures us in the final chorus. (This is another one that ended up on the Super Étoile Kocc Barma cassette.)

“Macoy” answers the question: what would it sound like if we had gotten more Youssou on Peter Gabriel’s Passion? The track is built around loops and samples sequenced on the Fairlight and features improvised vocals from Youssou and from his sister Aby N’Dour, along with backing vocals from the Chorale Martyrs de’Ougande. The translated lyrics in the liner notes don’t illuminate so much as deepen the mystery: who is Macoy from Sine? Why should there be shame in her going to her husband’s house? Why must she go after midnight?

“My Daughter (Sama Doom)” builds a groove out of a three-measure phrase and marimba samples on the Fairlight, but here it feels more organic thanks to the capable drumming of Manu Katché, who adds a little straight-ahead drive to the groove laid down by Faye and Thiam. Another soaring chorus adds emotional heft to this song of advice from Youssou to his daughter.

“Bés” closes out the album with another wash of synthesizers. It’s tempting to blame the major-label producers for the preponderance of synthesizers here, but the 1987 version on the Kocc Barma cassette has even more synth sound, albeit on less expensive hardware. It also has a stronger percussive drive than this version; though the album version features Thiam and Katché, it’s David Sancious’s keyboards that carry the overall sound. The lyric here is an inspirational message: “You should help those with less than you/Because our powers are not all the same.” He calls out a series of Senegalese politicians and innovators, charging them with a plea for generosity.

Coming on the heels of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Shahen-Shah, The Lion can be frustrating for the intrusion of synths, for the way that songs like “Old Tucson” and “Macoy” pose questions with no satisfying answers. At the same time, the album has some flat-out bangers, to say nothing of furthering the truly wonderful collaboration between Youssou and Peter Gabriel. And even better albums lay ahead; we’ll hear one of those in a few weeks. Next week we’ll hear more from some of the musicians who contributed to the success of Gabriel’s Passion.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s a live performance of “Macoy” from Tokyo:

BONUS BONUS: Youssou was playing some of this material in the sets on the So tour where he opened for Peter Gabriel, including the legendary 1987 Athens performance. It’s a treat to watch the band perform “Kocc Barma” in high definition, even if this version omits the brass section:

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Shahen-Shah

Nusrat’s first Western album is an ideal representation of the sacred and secular art of qawwali singing.

Album of the Week, June 13, 2026

When it came time for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to record his first album for Peter Gabriel’s nascent Real World Records, he could have Westernized his sound—after all, he had just spent time in the studio with Gabriel on the Passion project. Instead, he and his party produced an album that was as accurate a representation of qawwali tradition that had ever been released, opening the door for Westerners to discover the tradition.

Nusrat was not new to being recorded; prior to 1989 and this session he had already released some twenty-eight albums, a few for EMI but most for small local labels, or for the French world music label Ocora. But listeners noted that “studio-recorded Nusrat [could] often feel rushed, as if the party was singing qawwali for the sake of the recording rather than for the sake of religious praise.” No such limitation existed here; this was full-throttle qawwali, with the group providing authentic examples of devotional songs as well as ghazals (romantic songs).

Part of the secret of the recording was the timing. The original Real World recordings were not limited by the running times of vinyl; by 1989 most releases were CD-first, and a project containing six tracks each stretching more than ten minutes was no longer out of the question. Unfortunately this led to some choices when releasing these recordings on vinyl, mostly at the time for the European market which continued to demand vinyl releases through the early 1990s. Today’s record is the 2017 reissue of the 1989 European vinyl release, and it omits two tracks, “Meri Ankhon Ko Bakhshe Hain Aansoo” and “Kali Kali Zulfon Ke Phande Nah Dalo.” The latter is probably my favorite Nusrat track of all time, so I was irked to find it omitted from this release; we’re going to talk about it in the bonus tracks.

“Shamas-Ud-Doha, Badar-Ud-Doja” opens with the instrumentalists: harmonium playing the melody of the hymn in praise to Mohammed, hand claps. Then Nusrat leads the party in a gathering tone, wordlessly outlining the tonic, the third and the fourth in an introductory vocalese before singing a rhythmic verse that loosely follows the main tune, followed by everyone entering on the chorus. Nusrat lets us know how it’s going to go when, at the end of the second chorus repetition, he easily rips a vocal improvisation an octave up. At the end of the fourth chorus, he lays down a series of 32nd-note runs. The other singers in the party contribute too; one of them adds a run around the fifth, another at the octave, and there are numerous places where Nusrat improvises in the middle range while one of the other singers provides a high obbligato above. (This record features vocals from Nusrat’s cousin Mujahid Mubarak Ali Khan and his brother Farrukh, as well as his pupil Kaukab Ali, as well as other singers in a chorus; the youngest pupil heard on Live at WOMAD 1985, Rahat, is not heard here.) About halfway through, Nusrat engages in some stepwise sangam improvisation and some rhythmic improvised vocal syllables, which are closely followed by the tabla and harmonium. The closing series of runs where Nusrat rips a series of 32nd-note patterns up the scale are simply awe inspiring.

“Allah, Mohammed, Char, Yaar” is a devotional chant to God, the Prophet, and the “four friends”—four Sufi saints whose graves are the site of pilgrimages and qawwali sessions. It’s also gnarly as hell. The melody syncopates from the second note and recovers the non-syncopated beat with three eighth notes, and those off-beats in the middle have me leaning forward into the beat all the way. It’s in the raga marwa, something like the Locrian western mode, meaning that it sits unstably between a major and minor feeling, and also meaning that the qawwal singer can explore both tonalities in the solo, a fact of which Nusrat takes full advantage. There is less for the party to do in this song, aside from some high obbligato late in the song; mostly they groove on the chant. And there’s a lot to groove on; Nusrat’s sense of the beat is impeccable, and he’ll seemingly fly off at random only to have an improvisation circle right back to the tonic at the start of the chant again, over and over again.

“Nit Khair Mansan Sohnia Main Teri” is a Punjabi love song: “My beloved, I have only one prayer, that you may live happily…Since I fell in love with you, I have forgotten about the whole world; I wish only to die at your feet.” You can hear a little more of the traditional raga sound in this one, as Nusrat and the party sing the introduction and then get to the chorus. Here you can hear the roles of the other singers in the party, as one specializes in singing descending wordless lines in a thin clear voice from the octave while another, with a stronger voice, provides more of a high tenor line above the proceedings. Nusrat’s incredibly resonant and vibrato-rich instrument essays rhythmic running lines throughout. This one is trancelike, perhaps because of the raga foundation combined with the relentless major key feeling.

Another love song, in this case a ghazal in Urdu, “Kehna Ghalat Ghalat To Chhupana Sahi Sahi” is a song of complaint about a lover who says one thing and does another. Even here Nusrat steps into moments of ecstatic crescendo; rather than sounding angry or exasperated this too is a moment to celebrate the musical world of qawwali. The extended series of solos on the syllable dil (heart) are a magnificent punctuation of the overall arc of the song. At the end of the song, we get the only decelerando in the whole album as the party slows to the final repetitions of the love song.

With his first album for Real World, it was clear why Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan had chosen this title: “Shahen-shah” means brightest star, and this was clearly a performance of a leading light in the qawwali tradition. The record opened the door for Western listeners to immerse themselves in an entirely new cultural sound world. Some, like Jeff Buckley, were awestruck by Nusrat’s vocal ability and sought to learn from him. Some heard exotic sounds and sought ways to bring them into Western music; we’ll hear examples of that later. And some took it as a cue to explore more varieties of non-European music. We’ll hear from another great musician who opened some of these same doors next time.

You can listen to the full version of this week’s album, including the tracks that didn’t make the LP version, here:

BONUS: Let’s talk about “Kali Kali Zulfon Ke Phande Nah Dalo.” I have always liked the track a lot; it appears on a mix I made just out of college and was likely one of the tracks I played the afternoon I met my wife (though it was Tuvan throat singing that was blasting from my stereo when I actually opened the door and met her). The tune of this Urdu love song is stated in the harmonium, which gets its own elaborate improvisation until Nusrat and the party join with sustained gathering tones. When Nusrat starts the chorus, we get an initial statement, a repetition tagged with an octave high emphatic tone, a third with a high obbligato, a fourth with Nusrat ripping a descending vocal line from the third above the octave. Then the party alternates singing the chorus statement with more obbligato from the other singers and elaborate improvisations from Nusrat. Starting about three minutes in he starts to essay some call-and-response verses. I learned a lot as a college just sitting and listening to all the ways he interrupted the flow of the chorus with solos, how his vocal lines reinforced or altered the tonality, and especially how he played with the meter of the lines. The stretch from around 5:45 to 6:20 is a masterclass in how to fluidly slip in and out of metrical alignment with the groove, particularly the triple sets of triplets which shift out of and into phase flawlessly. I can still put it on and listen to it all these years later, and discover something I’ve never heard before.

BONUS BONUS: Here’s “Nit Khair Mansan Sohnia Main Teri” live from the 1988 WOMAD festival, about the time that Nusrat was headed into the newly constructed Real World studio to record this album.

Blogaversary 25

On 25 years of writing publicly on the Internet.

This blog, circa 2007.

Happy Blogaversary to me! 2001 seems like a long time ago. I had tired of just reading about blogging and decided to try out some of the tools, some months before. But that summer I got into a habit of posting regularly, starting June 11, 2001. Partly inspired by the new ways of thinking I was learning in my classes on product design and business strategy at MIT, partly reflecting the changes in my life at the time, and partly looking to connect during what was a pretty lonely summer, the blog took off and started to be a real thing.

Over the last year I’ve mostly just written. Lots of music writing, a few cocktails and other posts. I haven’t updated the design of the blog in years; it’s interesting to look back at the one truly hand-rolled theme I ever made, which was buggy but had its own charm. I’m not going to go back to wrestling with CSS any time soon, but I miss certain things about the look and feel (mostly the small caps).

I also miss having the time to write more. Things don’t seem to be slowing down much as I age. But I suppose that’s better than the alternative. And really, no matter how much has changed, there are some important things that are true: I love music and writing, I love cooking and food, I love being here on this earth. All those are good things, and I look forward to continuing to write about them and share my thoughts with you for many years to come.

I’ll leave with another plug for a happy musical interlude that I published last month; I find I’m liking it more and more as the summer goes on. (You can listen to all my recent playlists on my Soundcloud.)

Peter Gabriel, Passion

A landmark collaboration with a seemingly inexhaustible parade of master musicians creates one of the strongest offerings in Gabriel’s catalog.

Album of the Week, June 6, 2026

Peter Gabriel spent the months following So touring the world; the concert film Live in Athens gives a good idea of what that experience was like. But he was still writing music, and the next thing that came from him was a one-two punch: a soundtrack album to the most controversial film of the late 1980s, and a brand new record label to release it. And Peter being Peter, he released the album in June 1989, almost a full nine months after the theatrical release of the film that inspired it.

The energy that today animates reactionary groups like the Promise Keepers and Christian Nationalist groups was alive and well in the 1980s, in the form of groups like the Moral Majority, TV evangelist fans, and other similar gatherings of extremists. They weren’t happy with Martin Scorsese’s film (though few formed an opinion informed by actually having seen it), which dared to imagine that Jesus might have been human enough to have been tempted by the possibility of family life into abandoning his mission; the idea that Jesus might have in particular entertained sexual thoughts was particularly threatening.1 Some of those who felt so threatened lost the plot badly enough that they firebombed cinemas and made death threats against Scorsese. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Gabriel seems to have escaped the threats, possibly because his album came out so much later than the movie’s release and the height of the controversy. Though a version of the music appears in the film, he kept working on it, trying to find the right sounds and textures, through March of 1989. And, thanks to his ongoing work with WOMAD and his previous collaborations, he had the right musicians to work with, many of whom would go on to release albums of their own on his new label, Real World Records. The list was long and included Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy; Indian violinist L. Shankar; Senegalese vocalists Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour; Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Senegalese drummer Doudou N’Daiye Rose; percussionists and string players Massamba Diop, Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh, and Fatala; Turkish ney flute master Kudsi Erguner; Brazilian percussionist Djalma Corrêa; Americans Jon Hassell, David Sancious, Billy Cobham, Nathan East and Manny Elias; and Peter’s long-term collaborators David Rhodes and David Bottrill.

All that said, the most notable music performance on the first track is a sample. “The Feeling Begins” opens with a traditional Armenian melody played on doudouks by Vatche Housepian and Antranik Askarian, from a collection of traditional Armenian music released on Ocora Records years before. The doudouk melody forms the backbone of the arrangement, but the massive percussion attack from Manny Elias with Hossam Ramzy is also fairly magnificent and provides our first clue that we’re in for a genre-bending ride throughout the album. As the doudouk melody comes to an end, the drums roar in a crescendo, using the same trick that Peter so memorably deployed in “The Rhythm of the Heat.”

One thing I discovered as a teenager listening to this album (I bought it the first summer I ever lived for myself, during a monthlong science Governor’s School experience at Virginia Tech, so I listened to it a lot) was that I was less engaged by the tracks that featured fewer live instruments. “Gethsemane” is one of those tracks, constructed by Gabriel from samples of flute and voices. But it’s appropriately ominous and ghostly, and does the job of foreshadowing that it’s meant to do.

It’s followed by one of the more spectacular sequences on the album. “Of These, Hope” opens with a fanfare of sorts on the arghul, an ancient reed instrument that here contributes a swirl of crowd noise over an insistent talking drum courtesy of Massamba Diop. Peter has said of So that the groove was the thing that made that album so special; “Of These, Hope” is a classical composition with groove. It also has strong textural interest thanks to the arghul, and from the combination of drone, flute whistle, talking drum, guitar and synths. This leads into “Lazarus Raised” without break via an anticipatory shiver of synths as another doudouk sample — this time an uncredited Kurdish player from a UNESCO collection — gives us a mysterious melody signifying the expression of power leading to the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Peter’s flute whistle leads us into “Of These, Hope (Reprise),” which plays like a further elaboration of the melody. It misses the shock and awe of the arghul chorus from the first repetition, but gains a different sort of shock and awe thanks to the presence of Baaba Maal, a Senegalese vocalist whose speciality was the traditional music of the Pulaar-speaking peoples of the Futa Tooro region of Senegal.

“In Doubt” is another synth-forward groove, given depth by the uncanny sound of the kementché, an Iranian bowed string instrument here played by Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh. Peter doesn’t let this groove build for very long before a bigger one takes over , a massive percussion onslaught from Doudou N’Daiye Rose and Fatala signals the arrival of “A Different Drum.” I can almost hear Peter telling Geffen Records, “This is the single.” Between the strong rhythmic intensity, the insistently repetitive melodic theme, the wordless chorus, and above all the presence of the spectacular voice of Youssou N’Dour, this is one of the most accessible and memorable tracks on the album. It has the feeling of one of Peter’s songs-in-progress that never received a proper lyric, but the feeling is there, a stirringly heroic track.

What did get life as an independent single, somewhat surprisingly, is the next track,“Zaar.” A complex track built around a slowed- and pitched-down drum sample, the band, here featuring Hossam Ramzy on percussion, Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh‘s kementché, wordless vocals, and an intense series of interjections from L. Shankar’s violin, constructs a striking mood piece whose free interchange of musical ideas and sounds seems to sum up the whole project. “Zaar” was the track Peter chose to represent this project on his first greatest hits album, which would be released two years later, and it feels like a universe of its own.

“Troubled” is built around a mean groove built out of layered drums and percussion, all played by the great Billy Cobham. After we heard him on Champions and on a whole slew of CTI albums, Cobham joined John McLaughlin’s legendary jazz-world-fusion project Mahavishnu Orchestra, and it’s that polyrhythmic intensity that he brings here over a backing of snarling synths and a wordless vocals chorus loop. “Open” breathes more freely, a duet between Peter on the Prophet and Akai S900 and vocals, and L. Shankar’s violin and vocals. It suspends time and, with the echoes of ragas in Shankar’s improvisation, lends an unexpected emotional resonance to the simple melody Concluding the trio of pieces, “Before Night Falls” is a three-way collaboration between Hossam Ramzy, Shankar, and the great Turkish Sufi ney flute legend Kudsi Erguner, with added depth courtesy of one of engineer David Bottrill’s legendary drones. The plaintive melody and fade-out lend the feeling of a sunset over the gates of a desert city.

We leave groove behind for more traditional composition with “With This Love,” a haunting melody played by Robin Canter on the cor Anglais. The melody is gorgeous but the layers of synths detract somewhat from the emotional power of the work. The theme bookends a trio of pieces dealing with the actual crucifixion of Christ, starting with “Sandstorm,” in which Hossam Ramzy, Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh, Manu Katché and Shankar build an atmospheric groove over a location recording of Moroccan percussion and vocals. The synths add a blurriness to the overall effect, so when the Moroccan musicians cut through it’s startling and intense.

“Stigmata” is a joint improvisation by Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh, Shankar and Gabriel. The instrumental texture is deep and mysterious, but ultimately the tension ebbs away into the fade-out before “Passion.” The redoubtable Shankar, Jon Hassel, and Peter’s Fairlight are the supporting players here for the astonishing vocal improvisations of Youssou N’Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, here signifying the suffering of Christ on the cross. Here there is no ebbing of intensity; Nusrat masterfully builds suspense through his sangam improvisation, as Youssou’s interjections cut through to intensify the emotional impact. A devastatingly pure high melody from choirboy Julian Wilkins2 punctuates the rising emotional tide. At the end, everything cuts away but Youssou’s cries and Djalma Corrêa’s percussion.

The choral reprise of “With This Love” is introduced by the cor Anglais melody, but Gabriel wisely leaves the Wells Cathedral Boys Choir (recorded by Richard Evans) totally unaccompanied as they perform a heartwrenching four-part arrangement of the melody. The acoustic of the performance space can be heard—there’s an audible footfall or noise at one point that sounds a bit as though someone has stepped onto an echoing stone floor in one of the transepts and been hastily waved away—adding to the overall timeless resonance of the moment. It’s one of the most stunningly beautiful musical expressions on an album full of remarkable sounds. It’s also one of the most fraught; originally intended to accompany the scene where a devil in the form of a little girl tells Christ that he doesn’t have to suffer, removes the nails from his body, and leads him off the cross, it was nixed from the final film. Scorsese pointed out that the use of a Christian religious signifier like a boys’ choir would further underscore the blasphemy of the moment and pour fuel on the outrage that was already mounting even before the film was released.

“Wall of Breath” leads us into uncertain territory as Christ is tempted to abandon his destiny, with Kudsi Erguner, Shankar, and the Musicians du Nil building an atmosphere based around a shifting tonality. “The Promise of Shadows” takes us to a dark place with Billy Cobham’s drums and a rising chorus contributing to the feeling that something isn’t right. Despite the title, “Disturbed” seems to lead us into a brighter moment, as Shankar’s violin introduces an intense percussion groove built up from Hossam Ramzy’s tabla, African percussion from Fatala, and looped percussion from Mustafa Abdel Aziz and Said Mohammad Aly. Peter’s Prophet and Fairlight provide a simple melodic line to anchor the groove as the percussion fades out.

“It Is Accomplished” is signaled by a fanfare on the arghul followed by an uncanny shimmer of a vocal yell (uncredited on the album, the original location recording has surfaced which is amazing to listen to on its own. You can hear it in one of my Exfiltration Radio mixes). A triumphant melody built around a simple descending four-note pattern gains depth from Billy Cobham’s drumming, David Rhodes’ guitar, and David Sancious’s Hammond organ as the music celebrates Christ overcoming his last temptation and fulfilling his mission. “Bread and Wine” builds a new melody from the echoes of the old, creating something new in remembrance courtesy of a tin whistle performance by Richard Evans.

I cannot overstate the role this album played in furthering my personal musical development and encouraging me to listen to the world with open ears. And Passion marks a significant moment in Peter’s career, as a culmination of his work with WOMAD during the 1980s and a seamless blending of his explorations of synth textures with collaborative compositions from some of the finest non-Western musicians of the moment. It earned a Grammy Award for Best New Age Album3, and helped to further popularize “world music” as a genre in its own right.

It also helped create a vehicle to fuel the demand; as the first release on Gabriel’s new Real World label, it included advertisements for a series of individual recordings from many of the musicians on the record, plus more of Gabriel’s WOMAD collaborators. Real World is still going strong and has reissued many of those pivotal early recordings, some appearing on vinyl for the first time; we’ll check in on those, among other things, starting next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: This 2021 performance by the Francesco Albano Open Ensemble of the Passion score is impressive. With all the layers in the original recording, it’s hard to imagine someone pulling off one of the songs live; to do the entire thing in a single concert is kind of mind-blowing.

BONUS BONUS: Speaking of live performances, Peter performed “Of These, Hope” live at the 1988 WOMAD Festival in St. Austell, with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Youssou N’Dour. Sadly there’s no video but the audio in this bootleg clip isn’t half bad:

Footnotes

  1. It’s a good thing he didn’t imagine himself dancing. ↩︎
  2. Wilkins is now the conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Youth Chorus. ↩︎
  3. Proof positive that this was something new, as the album bears as much resemblance to “New Age” music as it does to Metal Machine Music. ↩︎