Tag: daniellanois

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.

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:

Peter Gabriel, Big Time

Peter’s singles provide a good excuse to linger in the world of “So” a little longer.

Album of the Week, May 23, 2026

The album cycle for Peter Gabriel’s So went on for quite a while. The first single, “Sledgehammer,” hit the streets on April 14, 1986, about a month before the album was released. There followed “In Your Eyes” in August, “Don’t Give Up” in October, “Big Time” in March 1987 and “Red Rain” in June.1 That’s a lot of releases, and by extension a lot of opportunities for B-sides.

I love B-sides.2 They’re a glimpse of what else was happening when the album was recorded (or, sometimes, some other album, as we’ll see today). Sometimes they illustrate where else a song could go. And sometimes they’re just dance mixes. And the great thing about there being huge markets for pop music in both the US and the UK is that sometimes you got completely different B-sides!

If the above discursion and the picture have led you to think that I’m using these facts to just talk about a bunch of Peter Gabriel rarities, you would be correct. I’m going to pull from three different releases of “Big Time”: the 12″ US single, the 7″ UK release, and the CD maxi-single, which is the one that I first owned back in the day. (Shhh.)

The 12″ opens with “Big Time (dance mix),” which is what it says on the tin. It’s mixed by Tom Lord-Alge, a recording engineer who had previously crossed paths with Peter on “No More Apartheid” on the Sun City compilation, and who had also engineered or mixed for the Force MDs, Jeff Beck, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, David Johansen, Sly Fox, Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life, OMD’s “If You Leave,” and Billy Crystal’s “You Look Marvelous.” This cavalcade of 1980s sounds perhaps explains the low-end drum machine and handclaps that get spliced onto the beginning of the track. I do love the way that he pulls out and isolates Tony Levin (and Jerry Marotta)’s bass line at the beginning though, as well as letting us hear the nasty (in a good way) David Rhodes guitar riff without vocals over it. The verses are largely untouched—a little extra echo here, an extra-80s guitar in the texture there—but the chorus gets a spacey reinforcement on the backing vocals that’s almost dublike. This is kicked into high gear after the second verse, where it’s just backing vocals, drum machine, and Peter going “huh!” for about 30 seconds. As dance mixes go it’s relatively harmless but also fairly unimaginative.

“In Your Eyes (special mix)” is an entirely different story. Produced by Bill Laswell and mixed by Jason Corsaro, the mix shuffles the key bits of the original recording, but also adds an entirely new opening featuring Peter singing over a low synth note, chiming thirds and fourths, and a hi-hat heartbeat: “Accepting all I’ve done and said / I want to stand and stare again / Til there’s nothing left out / All that remains there in your eyes.” The intro is punctuated by a brilliant vocal run by Youssou N’Dour, then the brilliant Ronnie Bright bass vocal. Youssou sings a bit in Wolof: “Sa bet chi lamp, chi tangaay, sa bet maangi ci biir,” meaning “Your eyes are lit, your eyes are bright, it’s in your eyes.” And then, when we think we’re going to get the verse, there’s instead an extended meditation with talking drums and synths, with more incredible Wolof vocals from Youssou and some vocalese from Peter. The chorus finally joins with even more Youssou vocals atop it. There’s an extended reverbful talking drum break, reminding us that Laswell has always been the king of dub. Somehow the complete absence of the verse pulls me into a trance listening to this mix—or maybe that’s just Youssou. This is a masterful mix and still holds up incredibly well, which is why it featured on one of my playlists years later. The twelve-inch single finishes with the album version of “We Do What We’re Told.”

The UK 7″ single, on the other hand, has a single B-side, “Curtains.” The composition here is reminiscent of Peter’s work on Birdy, but with more space around the edges. There’s an extended bit that is just a heartbeat of a talking drum with a tiny whoosh of a cymbal brush, and a panoply of synth textures giving the effect of opening doors, echoing caverns, distant bells, all leading to Peter’s vocals: “Oh, draw the blinds / we can shut out the night.” This is the most erotically direct of his love songs to this point, but even here love is filled with ambiguity and tinged with regret: “And there are lions on our curtains / They lick their wounds / They lick their doubt.” It’s a stunning miniature of a song, and I can only imagine what might have gone through the heads of the casual buyers of the single in 1987 when they flipped it over and listened to it.

“Curtains” also appears on the Big Time CD maxi-single, alongside the album version of “No Self Control.” It’s rounded out by “Across the River,” which was used as a mood-setting opener for the original 1982 WOMAD festival and which was recorded in the studio for the WOMAD benefit Music and Rhythm. It begins as an improvisation by Shankar and Peter, joined by David Rhodes, and then a thundering drum part from Stewart Copeland enters. I’ve always been captivated by the combinations of sounds, particularly the low notes from Shankar’s instrument (not a traditional Western violin), and have long wondered what a full album of collective improvisation from a group like this might have sounded like.

The relatively long period of time between Security and So, combined with Peter’s collaborations in WOMAD and with others, combined to make the experience of following the various offshoots from the album a rich musical journey. We’re going to continue following some of those connections for … well, for a while. Next week we’ll pick back up with one of those collaborators and listen to a unique live album.

BONUS: Peter brought “Across the River” back for his “Secret World Live” tour in the 1990s, with Shankar:

BONUS BONUS: A version of “Curtains” with extended vocals appears in the video game Myst IV, though I’m unsure if these were newly recorded or just an alternate take. Here’s a playthrough video showing the song in context:

Footnotes

  1. Making this the only Peter Gabriel album with a singles-to-non-singles ratio of greater than 2 to 1, regardless of whether you count the LP track listing with eight tracks or the CD with nine. ↩︎
  2. I don’t know if I have to spell this out after four years of writing about vinyl records, but just in case: songs played on the radio used to come on 7″ vinyl records that were played at a faster speed (45RPM rather than 33 1/3). The faster playback speed meant the grooves could be cut deeper for better dynamic range. The records had two sides: the A-side, aka the actual single, and the B-side, which was usually whatever the artist or the label felt like putting on there. ↩︎

Peter Gabriel, So

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

Album of the Week, May 16, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

Peter Gabriel, Birdy

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

Album of the Week, April 25, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to this week’s album here:

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

Footnotes

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

Old mix: the bang and the clatter (as an angel runs to ground) (summer 1993)

In the summer of 1993, I was on top of the world. Having finished a great Glee Club season and gotten a literary magazine off the ground, I had just gotten a room on the Lawn and was staying in Charlottesville for the summer as an undergraduate assistant in a physics lab. I had just started listening to the funkier side of James Brown and was starting to discover blues, hip-hop and world music. Plus, I now had wheels, in the form of an incredibly fun but unreliable 1977 MGB.

This mixtape, accordingly, was shaped by all these factors, perhaps not least of all by the last. Most of the selections on this mix were chosen because they sounded great in the MGB with the top down. That was certainly true of “Ocean Size,” the opening track. After ignoring Jane’s Addiction for many years, I finally got into them about two years after they had broken up. This was a version of Los Angeles rock I could get behind—something like heavy metal for art students. And the lead-in to Hubert Sumlin’s slashing guitar on the great “Killing Floor” remains a potent link from the first song to the second. I had first picked up the Chess blues sound from a phenomenal box set of Willie Dixon recordings, and then this 1965 Chess anthology of Howlin’ Wolf’s work, which had just been reissued on CD. (It’s with no shame that I note that my first exposure to the title of this track was in William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic,” where he borrows the phrase and puts it to an entirely different purpose.)

On the strength of Peter Gabriel’s early Real World compilation Passion Sources, I started to branch out and find other artists on the label. The African artists on the label, such as Geoffrey Oryema and Ayub Ogada. Oryema’s “Piri Wango Iya” is a great introduction to the Ugandan’s sound, featuring only his voice and the traditional Ugandan lukeme (a gourd with plucked resonating metal strips).

I was still working my way through Suzanne Vega’s phenomenal 99.9 Fº, and “Blood Makes Noise” was just the sort of twitchy dance that I could get behind. Likewise PJ Harvey’s “Sheela-Na-Gig,” which even then struck me as a striking reversal of traditional gender politics, with Harvey’s narrator confidently offering herself sexually to a man who flatly rejects her as an exhibitionist and is terrified of being dirtied by her. We hadn’t explicitly covered Freud’s take on what would now be called the Madonna-whore complex when I read him in my first year, but it was a pretty clear illustration.

Then follows, for some reason, “Englishman in New York,” a track which I love by itself but which doesn’t flow very well here. Then “North Dakota.” I never had listened to much country music, but a friend who came to visit that summer left me with an aching heart, and a mixtape featuring this phenomenal Lyle Lovett song. “If you love me, say I love you” sounds like the loneliest thing ever, and it resonates at the heart of this tape once you peel back everything else.

I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to acknowledge or linger in my feelings, but I was more than capable of irony, and PJ Harvey was always there to help, as was the gently mocking narrator of Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus.” Self-mockery always made me feel better, so it was a good transition from there into “What Goes On” and “Numb,” which may have been the first U2 song that made me laugh. Ditto the over-the-top apocalyptic Western of Nick Cave’s track from Until the End of the World, another third-year frequent rotation CD that I was still digesting.

The end of this summer, when I was starting to put this mix together, was a rough one physically, and I was starting to feel ragged and tired around the edges. When I came home at the end of the summer for a few weeks before school started, I realized why — I had contracted mononucleosis, probably as a consequence of the close living quarters in the student apartment that was my home for the summer. (While I was dating someone that summer, we only spent a few days together as she was off doing her own things, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the “kissing disease” the fun way.) “Run That Body Down” accordingly became my theme song. It’s a good thing I didn’t know then how rundown a body could actually get…

More feelings avoidance, more loud rock! I still love “Ain’t No Right,” though not as much as I love the downtempo shift that follows it. I listened to For the Beauty of Wynona for the first time with a good friend and neighbor who had good taste in music and confused my feelings (a common theme of my college years). And Lanois’ country-infused guitar had a natural connection, at least in my mind, to the freaked-out electric blues that Miles and his band pulled from thin air on “Honky Tonk.”

My immature late teenage feelings (okay, I was actually 20) loved getting lost in Elvis Costello’s Brodsky Quartet collaboration, and on no track was this more true than on “Who Do You Think You Are?,” a paean for those with a more active imagination than love life. And again, any time I felt actual feelings getting close to the surface, it was time for a shift of gears. I have always loved “Le Bien, Le Mal” ever since borrowing Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 (and the first Digable Planets album) from a neighbor in that crowded college apartment (thanks, Patrick!), but the name of the transition technique between the Elvis Costello track and this is called “discontinuity.” Once I found that groove, though, it was a logical connection to James Brown, whose “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine” had soundtracked a memorable party a few months prior in an apartment full of physics students, quality porter and stout, and someone’s incredible record collection (including, oddly, Speak No Evil).

I didn’t always know how to end mix tapes then, so there’s no real through line for the last few tracks. But “En Mana Kuoyo” is a fine closer, a brightly percolating groove from Kenya that transported me to another place. I hope it does the same for you.

Full track listing below:

  1. Ocean Size – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
  2. Killing Floor – Howlin’ Wolf (The Real Folk Blues)
  3. Piri Wango Iya – Geoffrey Oryema (Exile)
  4. Blood Makes Noise – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
  5. Sheela-Na-Gig – PJ Harvey (Dry)
  6. Englishman in New York – Sting (Nothing Like The Sun)
  7. North Dakota – Lyle Lovett (Joshua Judges Ruth)
  8. Rub ‘Til It Bleeds – PJ Harvey (Rid Of Me)
  9. Language Is A Virus – Laurie Anderson (Home Of The Brave)
  10. What Goes On (Closet Mix) – The Velvet Underground (Peel Slowly and See)
  11. Numb – U2 (Zooropa)
  12. (I’ll Love You) Till The End Of The World – Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds (Until The End Of The World)
  13. Run That Body Down – Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
  14. Ain’t No Right – Jane’s Addiction (Ritual De Lo Habitual)
  15. Still Learning How To Crawl – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
  16. Honky Tonk – Miles Davis (Get Up With It)
  17. Who Do You Think You Are? – Elvis Costello And The Brodsky Quartet (The Juliet Letters)
  18. Le Bien, Le Mal – Guru Featuring Mc Solaar (Jazzmatazz Volume 1)
  19. Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine – James Brown (Funk Power 1970: Brand New Thang)
  20. I’ve Been Tired – The Pixies (Come On Pilgrim)
  21. Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
  22. Stay (Faraway, So Close!) – U2 (Faraway So Close)
  23. Every Time I Go Around Here – Frank Black (Frank Black)
  24. En Mana Kuoyo – Ayub Ogada (En Mana Kuoyo)

You can listen to (most of) the mix on Apple Music:

Old mix: We have no heads

Sometimes my early mixes are what might charitably be described as “all over the place.” (Heck, sometimes my late mixes are too.) This one, which was assembled sometime around May of 1993, definitely fits that description.

There comes a time in every young music head’s life when they discover Tom Waits. For me, that was clearly happening right about the time this mix was made. It was fortuitous that Apollo 18 by They Might Be Giants had come out about six months previously, as the frenetic energy of the opening track plays nicely with “Goin’ Out West.” (Side note: because I bought a lot of my CDs through music clubs at this stage in my life, I was almost always late to the party when a new album was released. If I recall correctly, it could be a few months before a new release was available in the mail order catalog. —And yes, mail order catalog, because this was right before the Internet began to eat that business model.)

Between those two tracks is “Frelon Brun,” from Filles de Kilimanjaro. I had just picked up this CD, having fallen in love with the title track, which appeared on Miles’ The Columbia Years anthology (another box set I snagged at a discount). “Frelon Brun” is probably the most rock-oriented of the performances on that album; for one, it’s the only track that is under 6 minutes long. It’s funky and powerful and fun. On this album it punctuates the ferocious energy of the tracks on either side.

Side 2 opens with Ayub Ogada’s “Obiero,” a track that appears in slightly different forms on both his own En Mana Kuoyo and Peter Gabriel’s Plus from Us anthology; it’s the latter that appears here (and coincidentally helps to date the mix, since Plus from Us was released on May 16, 1993). That’s followed by “Rain” by An Emotional Fish, which was on the Spew 2 promotional compilation (which I’ve since lost), alongside King Missile’s dryly hilarious “Detachable Penis” (which also appears on this mixtape). And then comes “Traditional Irish Folk Song,” from Denis Leary’s comedy album No Cure for Cancer. Like I said, charitably described as all over the place.

This mixtape also memorializes the beginning of my interest in PJ Harvey, having picked up Dry based on word of mouth from the crew in the basement of Peabody Hall, i.e. the publications staffs of the Declaration and The Yellow Journal. I was still digesting the Talking Heads, having picked up the Sand in the Vaseline compilation earlier that year. And, having bought Neneh Cherry’s great Homebrew on a whim earlier that spring, I discovered the seductive pleasures of “Peace in Mind” by blasting the album out my Monroe Hill window one Sunday afternoon as we played an impromptu volleyball game.

  1. Dig My Grave – They Might Be Giants (Apollo 18)
  2. Frelon Brun (Brown Hornet) – Miles Davis (Filles De Kilimanjaro)
  3. Goin’ Out West – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
  4. Ten Percenter – Frank Black (Frank Black)
  5. The Unbreakable Chain – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
  6. Cain & Abel – Branford Marsalis Trio (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born)
  7. I Want To Live – Talking Heads (Sand In The Vaseline Popular Favorites 1976-1992)
  8. Plants And Rags – PJ Harvey (Dry)
  9. Summertime Rolls – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
  10. Don’t Worry About the Government – Talking Heads (Talking Heads: 77)
  11. Heavy Cloud No Rain – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
  12. Trout – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
  13. Obiero – Ayub Ogada (Plus From Us)
  14. Butterflies – Toad the Wet Sprocket (Fear)
  15. Traditional Irish Folk Song – Denis Leary (No Cure For Cancer)
  16. Rain – An Emotional Fish (Junk Puppets)
  17. I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That – Talking Heads (Talking Heads: 77)
  18. Who Are You – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
  19. Pets – Porno For Pyros (Porno for Pyros)
  20. Detachable Penis – King Missile (Happy Hour)
  21. Brackish Boy – Frank Black (Frank Black)
  22. Happy And Bleeding – PJ Harvey (Dry)
  23. I Don’t Wanna Grow Up – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
  24. Peace In Mind – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
  25. Epilogue (Nothing ‘Bout Me) – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)

You can listen to (most of) the mix via Apple Music here:

Old mix: An angel being blown backwards into the future

Prodded by yesterday’s post about Pieces of Africa and the mixes it inspired, I was inspired to post about a few of them. These were mix tapes—made well before the advent of Rip.Mix.Burn—and they reflected whatever was going through my brain at the time.

This mix was made early in the summer of 1993. I had just finished my third year at the University of Virginia and was interning in a physics lab, and slowly coming to the painful conclusion that I would not be going on to graduate study in my field. But it was sunny, and I was reasonably happy! So this was made to play in my car with the top down.

Like so many of the mixes I made (and still make), this was a way for me to digest all the CDs I had bought and listened to, whether from Plan 9 or in the BMG music club, which sold classical and other CDs at a substantial discount if you didn’t mind the occasionally blurry reproductions of album art and liner notes they suspiciously sported…

But summer of 1993 was still a pretty good time. Frank Black had just changed his name and released his first solo album; Sting’s latest showed he still had songwriting chops. I had met a singer from a woman’s chorus on a Glee Club tour who moved me deeply, to the tune of a Suzanne Vega song. Peter Gabriel’s Real World was still introducing me to new voices like Sheila Chandra. My friends in the New Dominions had just recorded their first CD, for which I did the jacket and disc design, working around a brilliant illustration by Deepak Raghu. I had heard Tori Amos for the first time in concert at Old Cabell Hall, being lucky enough to score tickets after a Glee Club rehearsal. I was starting to explore jazz beyond Coltrane and Miles and Wynton and Branford. Good times indeed.

  1. Fu Manchu – Frank Black (Frank Black)
  2. 99.9 F° – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
  3. Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven) – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
  4. Before You Were Born – Toad the Wet Sprocket (Fear)
  5. Ever So Lonely/Eyes/The Ocean – Sheila Chandra (Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices)
  6. Ava – David Byrne (The Forest)
  7. Tin Man – New Dominions (Salamander!)
  8. Tilliboyo – Kronos Quartet (Pieces of Africa)
  9. Road To Nowhere – Talking Heads (Sand In The Vaseline Popular Favorites 1976-1992)
  10. Precious Things – Tori Amos (Little Earthquakes)
  11. The Dream Before – Laurie Anderson (Strange Angels)
  12. Seven Days – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
  13. Drawing Room Blues – Joe Henderson (Lush Life – The Music of Billy Strayhorn)
  14. Sassy – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
  15. Ed Is Dead – The Pixies (Come On Pilgrim)
  16. Warning Sign – Talking Heads (More Songs About Buildings And Food)
  17. As Girls Go – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
  18. Dirt In The Ground – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
  19. Death Of A Train – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
  20. Washing Of The Water – Peter Gabriel (Us)
  21. Motorway To Roswell – The Pixies (Trompe Le Monde)

If you have Apple Music, you can listen to the mix here, though it doesn’t include all the tracks… 🙁

Errata: Although “Upside Down” is in the track listing on the j-card for the tape, it wouldn’t fit on the end of Side 1. So I saved it for another mix.

Also noting: I added a page to the blog to track all the articles about mixes.