Album of the Week, May 16, 2026
It’s a challenge to approach an album like So. Easily Peter Gabriel’s most popular album, arguably one of the most talked about and best albums of the 1980s, and it’s not like it’s obscure. But, like the songs themselves, the album is made of layers upon layers, and that’s where our tale begins.
In fact, let’s begin at the beginning. Following the 1982 release of Security and the subsequent tour, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Peter took some time off, save for the soundtrack to Alan Paton’s film Birdy. In fact, he was recording the whole time. The years 1983–1985 were surprisingly fertile given that there was no official album released. In fact, there’s a rich batch of soundtrack appearances from this period, as well as non-album studio tracks: “Walk Through the Fire” (from Against All Odds),1 the studio version of “I Go Swimming,” “Across the River” (a collaboration with Indian violinist L. Shankar and Stewart Copeland), his song “No More Apartheid” from the 1985 Sun City compilation, and of course “Out Out,” Peter’s contribution to the Gremlins soundtrack.2 Unfortunately, around this time Peter’s long-term UK label, Charisma, was being acquired by Virgin Records. Ultimately the acquisition settled out and Charisma/Virgin continued to release Peter’s albums in the UK while Geffen handled releases in the rest of the world, but in the dust of the acquisition some of the wind went out of the sails of a new album.
But his creative juices were still flowing. So in February of 1985 Peter retreated to the recording studio at Ashcombe House, where he had recorded since 1978, and began laying down tracks. He considered working with a number of producers for the album, including Bill Laswell (whom he had crossed paths with in the making of the Laurie Anderson collaboration “Excellent Birds”) and Nile Rodgers, but ultimately decided to stick with Daniel Lanois, his collaborator from Birdy. It would prove a fruitful choice; not only was Lanois an expert in producing the combination of organic and atmospheric sounds that Peter was striving to produce, but he was also surprisingly adept at forcing the famously digressive Peter to finish work. My favorite anecdote: at one point Lanois resorted to locking Peter inside the studio so that he would finish a vocal. Peter wrote the core tracks of the songs with Lanois and guitarist David Rhodes from sketches that he produced using the Prophet-5 polyphonic synthesizer or his Yamaha piano, along with a Linn drum machine. Using this method, Peter built songs up from melodic ideas with nonsense vocal syllables to fully fledged songs, having the trio improvise with his rough demos in their headphones, bouncing the trio recordings into the headphones to bring in the larger band, and so on.
The larger band was built around familiar collaborators—Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta—and French drummer Manu Katché (who would follow this session with Sting’s …Nothing Like the Sun). A host of others would make appearances on the album, most on one or two tracks: Chris Hughes, fresh off producing Tears for Fears’ Songs from the Big Chair; Copeland; Shankar; trumpeter Wayne Jackson from the Stax Records backing band the Bar-Keys; saxophonist Mark Rivera from Billy Joel’s band; pianist Richard Tee, whom we’ve previously seen playing with Hubert Laws and Ron Carter on CTI Records; and guest vocalists Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, and Youssou N’Dour. The last was a superstar in his native Senegal, but was yet to break out in the consciousness of the broader world; that was about to change.
“Red Rain” opens the album on a massive note, with an indelible riff on the hi-hat from Stewart Copeland and an echo of a keyboard line, then a massive chord through which Tony Levin’s indelible bass snakes. Peter’s apocalyptic lyrics sing of a dream of a rain that covers all those around, imagery that dates back to some of his earliest writings; in fact, the image is the one of the last remnants of the Mozo mythology that had previously informed “Down the Dolce Vita,” “Here Comes the Flood,” and “On the Air.” But Mozo aside, the song also features some deeply personal writing. His marriage to Jill Moore was falling apart—strained by his touring, she was unfaithful, and the resulting divorce sent Peter into a deep depression and to six years of therapy. It’s hard not to read lines like “I come to you, defenses down / with the trust of a child” and “Red rain is coming down all over me / I’m begging you” knowing this context without thinking of metaphors for accusations and retribution.
From the sublime to … “Sledgehammer,” easily Gabriel’s most-remembered song, thanks in no small measure to its innovative Claymation video and unsubtle but good-natured phallic imagery, as well as to the horn section, a first for a Gabriel album. Peter has explicitly called out the song as an homage to Stax-Volt soul singles, an early source of musical inspiration for him, to the point that he asked Wayne Jackson, who as a member of the Mar-Keys played behind Peter’s hero Otis Redding, to assemble the horns for the track, which included Rivera and trombonist Don Mikkelsen, who had played with Ann-Margret and in Louie Bellson’s band. There’s what sounds like a Hammond B-3 organ on the track, which is actually played on Peter’s Prophet-5 synthesizer, and a weird synthetic flute sound, which Peter plays on the E-mu Emulator II, a sampling synthesizer beloved by acts as diverse as Stevie Wonder, Belgian electronic band Front 242, Depeche Mode, and the Pet Shop Boys. The track is tremendous fun, thanks in no small part to its bouncy rhythm section courtesy Levin and Katché, who was literally getting on a bus to the airport when Peter encouraged him to stick around and help re-record the track from its original foundation, which had featured drummer Chester Thompson.
“Don’t Give Up” is another complete stylistic pivot, a hard-luck song constructed in response to Dorothea Lange photographs of starving farmers from the American Depression. It was built around a rhythmic part that Peter transferred from tuned drums to a Tony Levin bassline; Tony achieved a more muted sound by the expedient of placing a diaper that he had packed in his gig bag for his two-month-old child beneath the strings. The track is moving enough, but when the chorus comes and Kate Bush sings “Don’t give up, you still have … friends,” it enters spine-tingling territory. The song changes lives; both Elton John and the late Matthew Perry at different times credited the bridge’s lyric “Rest your head, you worry too much / It’s gonna be all right / When times get rough, you can fall back on us” with encouraging them in sobriety. And Richard Tee’s gospel piano on the second bridge similarly elevates the song to a different place. It was always conceived as a man-woman duet, though originally Peter had Dolly Parton in mind; now it’s hard to imagine the song without Kate’s contributions. This is particularly true with the video, which features Peter and Kate embracing each other and singing the song for the entire video as the sun rises and falls in the background. Though Peter asked Jill’s permission before embarking on the shoot, the video ultimately did not help their marriage.
“That Voice Again” has its origins in Peter’s efforts to write the soundtrack for Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, believe it or not. Originally the lyrics were written about judgment and Christ’s commandment “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” but over several rewrites it became about the inner judgmental voice that “either helps or defeats us.” It is also the very last Mozo song, with the judgmental voice somehow fitting into Peter’s alchemical narrative. Twelve-string guitar from Lanois (the first time that instrument appeared on a Gabriel album since “Solsbury Hill”) and an elaborate drum part from Katché fill out the arrangement.
“In Your Eyes” is a pure love ballad, a form that Peter rarely essayed prior to So. It has several key features in the arrangement: Richard Tee’s piano, a soaring pre-chorus (that “I reach out from the inside” segueing into the wordless vocal bridge always hits me right in the feels), and Youssou N’Dour. That a previously-unknown-to-Westerners Senegalese vocalist would be the secret weapon of this track would seem unusual, especially given the Who’s Who of backup singers also appearing on the track—which included Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr, The Call’s Michael Been, and doo-wop singer Ronnie Bright, who performed the bass vocals on the classic song “Mr. Bass Man.” But that’s only if you don’t reckon with Youssou’s voice; a soaring, resonant instrument with bright edges that spans multiple octaves with heldentenor intensity and is comfortable in Wolof, French and English. More than any other track on the album, the arrangement for “In Your Eyes” is fluid, and live versions and remixes play with the running order of the song; we’ll hear an example of that another time. As a listener who fell in love with the album in 1986, the song sits at Number 5 in the running order for me, but Peter originally intended it to end the album; the limitations of the vinyl format, which made reproducing the low bass tones in the inner grooves a challenge, switched it to start Side Two.
“Mercy Street” is another of the songs on the albums about which I have difficulty being objective. The song introduced me to the writings of Anne Sexton, whose poetry (particularly 45 Mercy Street and The Awful Rowing Toward God) inspired the song. The song is built around a track by Brazilian percussionist Djalma Corrêa, who provided surdo, congas and triangle in a traditional Brazilian forró rhythm. (A different set of track by Corrêa provided the basis for “Don’t Break This Rhythm”, which became the b-side to “Sledgehammer.”) The arrangement, though uncluttered on the album, was painstakingly constructed, with piano parts from Richard Tee added and then removed, a Fairlight CMI-based melody played by Peter by hand instead of sequenced for a more human feeling, and double-tracked vocals, with the lower octave achieved by having Peter stay up all night at the studio and doing a single take at 7am when he was at his most fatigued. All this is in support of a jewel of a song, with bits of Sexton’s poetry turned into a stream-of-consciousness lyric full of confessional details, anchored around the desperate search for home: “Dreaming of Mercy Street / Wear your inside out / Looking for mercy / In your daddy’s arms again.” The final coda lends finality to the searching and despair in the song as Peter turns to images from Sexton’s posthumous book: “Anne with her father is out in the boat / Riding the water, riding the waves / On the sea.” A slightly extended version of the track was used for the official video.
“Big Time” is the other “overtly commercial” track on the album. The horn section from “Sledgehammer” returns over a rhythm track that was notoriously difficult to record; Tony Levin’s bass part was achieved by having Tony finger the notes on the fretboard while Jerry Marotta hit the strings with his drumsticks to achieve a percussion effect, while Stewart Copeland’s ingenious hits and fills didn’t exactly line up with the drum machine, so engineer Kevin Killen sampled his track and created the percussion from the samples. Former Ikette P. P. Arnold led the backing singers, and Peter’s Prophet-5 faux-Hammond organ returned. Where the phallic imagery in “Sledgehammer” is playful, here it’s sardonic, as Peter dismantles the consumerist mentality of the 1980s and ties it to the drive to overcompensate, a point brought home by the closing lyric: “Look at my circumstance / And the bulge in my big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big.”
The transition into “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” is abrupt and icy. The song, reminiscent of “Lead a Normal Life,” is mostly constructed around Peter’s synthesizers, with David Rhodes’ guitar and L. Shankar’s violin contributing to the texture over a beat from Jerry Marotta; many of the sounds, including Peter’s vocals, were processed through the Fairlight for extra texture. Peter wrote the lyrics as an attempt to process the results of Stanley Milgram’s experiments in authoritarian behavior, in which 37 of 40 participants continued to administer higher and higher levels of electric shocks to unseen subjects when encouraged to do so by their peers. The repeated “We do what we’re told” lyric repeats like a mantra, expressing the impulse to conformity that drove the awful behavior of the participants. Some listeners found this song the only part of So to their tastes; however one felt, it’s undeniably a direct link to the themes and preoccupations of 1980’s Peter Gabriel 3 (Melt), and in fact the song originated in those sessions.
“This is the Picture (Excellent Birds),” which appears on modern LP versions of the album but not the original, is a re-think of Peter’s 1984 collaboration with Laurie Anderson from Mister Heartbreak, with the groove (including an added talking drum from Manu Katché) brought to the fore and some elements (like Laurie’s idiosyncratic synth line) removed. My poor mother could never get Peter’s word choice in the song; hearing it in my childhood home as I was listening, she asked me not to listen to it again as the line about “bitches of evil” made her uncomfortable. (This was, of course, a mondegreen for “I see pictures of people.”)
It’s hard to overstate how huge So was. Quintuple platinum album sales, Number One on the UK album chart and Number Two on the US, a number one Billboard Top 200 spot (“Sledgehammer”) and nine MTV Video Music Awards (also “Sledgehammer”), number one on Billboard’s Album Rock chart (“In Your Eyes”), top 10 singles in the UK (“Don’t Give Up”) and US (“Big Time”), and number 3 on the Mainstream Rock chart (“Red Rain”). It launched Youssou N’Dour to worldwide fame, further raised the profile of Kate Bush, and most of all completed the transformation of Peter Gabriel from a niche artist for fans of progressive and experimental rock, to a pop artist with serious artistic and experimental bona fides. Because of the album’s long gestation and long singles cycle, many interesting tracks were released alongside as b-sides; we’ll linger in this album’s shadow a bit next week to listen to some of those.
You can listen to this week’s album here, in the original 1986 track order but including “This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)” in its spot on the original CD running order. This is controversial. Ever since 2002, Peter has preferred a revised running order that puts “In Your Eyes” last on side two.
BONUS: Peter’s So sessions sprawled across many months and there were a few songs that were recorded that never made it to the album, or even as a b-side. When the 25th anniversary of the album was released as a box set in 2011, Peter polished up a few of these songs. “Courage” is pretty great! It was released as a 12″ 45 single in the box set, with “Sagrada” and an alternative mix of “Don’t Give Up” as b-sides.
BONUS BONUS: There are a lot of live performances of these songs; they essentially form the core of Peter’s touring repertoire for the rest of his career. But the ones featuring the original performers, such as this 1987 live version of “Don’t Give Up” with Kate Bush, are special. Even if it is an audio-only cleaned-up bootleg:
BONUS BONUS BONUS: “In Your Eyes” was made newly famous through its use in the John Cusack/Ione Skye movie Say Anything, in a scene that is engraved in the hearts of otherwise-cynical GenX kids everywhere:
BONUS X4: The version of “Mercy Street” that was performed in Peter’s 1987 concert in Athens, Greece has always pierced me to the heart, with Peter singing from curled and crouched positions to echo the anguish of the lyrics:
Footnotes
- I know that I probably just put the Phil Collins title song from that movie into your head. You’re welcome. ↩︎
- We’ll talk about some of Peter’s other soundtrack work another time. ↩︎