Album of the Week, October 17, 2026
Peter Gabriel’s album Us came out when I was in college, in 1992. As the subsequent decade passed there was a live album, Secret World Live; some soundtrack songs; and the OVO project. I began to despair of Peter releasing another album of original material ever again. Though there were rumors of an album being worked on, it almost felt like a joke because the rumored album title was one that was being used by other artists.1 And when Up finally appeared in September 2002, twelve days after the first anniversary of 9/11, I felt an immense relief. Surely, I thought, this would be the longest time between albums that Peter would ever go. Heh.
I also felt, honestly, concern. Because while we were all still mourning a year after 9/11, the depths of his despair as it surfaced on Up were striking. Has Peter been hospitalized? Listening to this album for the first time, it seemed as though the answer was yes, that the therapy that had gotten him to such a helpful place around the time of Us had let him down. But on subsequent listens I found hope and beauty among the emotional desolation.
Up is also a Peter Gabriel album, with all that implies: immaculate production, anthemic sweeps, and a long list of musicians who had recorded with Gabriel before or who had come through Real World Studios and found themselves sitting in on a Peter Gabriel recording session as well as recording their own albums. In addition to the stalwarts Tony Levin, Manu Katché, David Rhodes, and Shankar, they included percussionist Ged Lynch, former drummer for Black Grape and the Ruthless Rap Assassins; Daniel Lanois and David Sancious, both of whom had affiliations with Gabriel going back to So; Passion–era collaborators Hossam Ramzy and Assane Thiam; composer/producer/session player Jon Brion; bassist and Pentangle co-founder Danny Thompson; the Black Dyke Band, who played on OVO; the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; and Gabriel’s daughter Melanie on backing vocals. There were a whole cluster of musicians, influential producers in their own right, who showed up to contribute arrangements, play instruments, or generally bask in the aura, including Bob Ezrin (brass arrangements), Stephen Hague (percussion), Will Gregory (string arrangements), and Mitchell Froom (backwards guitar) in addition to Brion and Lanois. And there were, improbably, the Black Boys of Alabama, a gospel group formed at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talladega in 1939 and whose first album on the Real World Label, Spirit of the Century, won the Grammy award for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album in 2002.
“Darkness” is appropriately titled; his most abrasive sound since Peter Gabriel 3, the song has screaming guitars and giant percussion as Peter recites a series of confessions from the heart of a depressive episode: “Every fear I swallow makes me small… I’m afraid I can be Devil Man / And I’m scared to be divine… I’m afraid of loving women / And I’m scared of loving men…” The so-called monster that he chases through the forest ultimately turns out to be “curled up on the floor / just like a baby boy,” as he confronts the dark reality that the things he fears most are helpless and small and deep inside. The bombast of the song makes it feel like a Bob Ezrin production, but it’s actually Will Gregory’s string arrangement sawing away behind the rest of the musicians and propelling things forward. The song ends with the image of the monster curled up on the floor, with a heartbeat of a synth line fading away.
The strings continue into the intro of “Growing Up,” though that cello line appears to have been programmed rather than played. The main part of the song builds on a shuffling drum beat and whooshing synths, but Gabriel’s lyrics take us on a journey from the womb through birth and life as “my ghost likes to travel / so far in the unknown,” ultimately moving through the final transition: “the breathing stops … in a transition once again / such a struggle getting through these changes.” The ghost ultimately confides its disconnection with life: “It all seems so absurd / To be flying like a bird / When I do not feel I’ve really landed here.” The track builds off a massive groove, but the meditative lyrics don’t seem at home above the beats (though perhaps that’s the point).
The third track, “Sky Blue,” floats in on Daniel Lanois’ steel guitar, feeling as though it comes from the same emotional center as “Blood of Eden” or “Don’t Give Up.” The narrator becries his alienation: “Train pulled out said my goodbyes, sky blue / Back on the road alone with the sky, sky blue … So tired of all this traveling / So many miles away from home.” But the narrator paradoxically finds beauty in the distance and motion: “Warm wind flowing over the Earth / I sing through the land, the land sings through me … There’s a presence here no one denies, sky blue … I keep moving to be stable.” The slow 6/8 groove builds up to a wordless hymn as the Blind Boys of Alabama join to sing the cry at the end, accompanied by David Sancious’s Hammond organ. The track had been around since the Us sessions, but the addition of the Blind Boys take it over the top, finding the emotional center of the song in the narrator’s wordless cry to creation.
“No Way Out” comes closer to more traditional Gabriel territory, but is still immersed in the fear, despair and difficulty of facing death. The track builds up from a tight Danny Thompson acoustic bass line, with shuffling drums (both programmed and live) joined by Hossam Ramzy’s tabla under an insistent David Rhodes guitar line and a spare piano line. Here the narrator confronts the death of a loved one: “Someone runs to make a phone call / And the man kneels on the ground / There’s a tightening in my chest / I know that I’m drawn in / Oh God, let it not be you.” The chorus is more direct: “Don’t leave us / Don’t leave like this / Don’t leave me here again / I’m not quitting on you / There’s no one else.” The song is epic in emotional scope but only captures a brief flickering moment of despair; the band’s coda, in its crashing cymbals and circling bassline, leaves us in anger and despair.
That ultimately yields to the dark, spare opening of “I Grieve.” Originally written for the soundtrack of City of Angels, the American remake of Wings of Desire,2 it finds us in a moment after the fighting is done and the narrator is left only with the grief and anger of figuring out how to move forward: “It was only one hour ago … Looks like it always did / This flesh and bone / It’s just the way you were tied in / Now there’s no one home.” But the narrator moves past the feeling of abandonment: “Let it out and move on / Missing what’s gone / They say life carries on … Life carries on in the people I meet / In everyone in the street / In all the flies and rats / The rot and the rust / The ashes and the dust…” Ultimately the soul lives, he thinks, and the body is “just the car that we ride in / The home we reside in.” The narrator ends having made this transcendental argument but still acknowledging the emptiness left behind: “Now I can find relief / I grieve.”
What follows is a rarity in Gabriel’s catalog, a funky soul-inspired track that works as a mean groove while completely falling flat lyrically. “The Barry Williams Show” has a fantastic deep Tony Levin bass line, some great New Orleans style shuffle drums, and a killer horn line. Unfortunately it also comes with a fairly uninteresting vocal and lyrics that skewer reality television hosts like Jerry Springer, which firmly dates the song. It’s also not clear whether it is punching up at the host or down at his guests, which is not the sort of ambivalence you want in a song like this.
From sneers to the quiet echoes of a disturbed mind, “My Head Sounds Like That” takes us back into Gabriel’s survey of human experience, with a song that shows us how it feels to perceive the world through depression, where everything scrapes along jagged exposed nerve endings, both paradoxically dull and unbearably bright. It’s a painful song for anyone who’s had to live the experience of a visitation of the Black Dog, but it’s also quietly beautiful with the sounds of the Black Dyke Band behind the pain.
With an opening guitar riff that feels like a deliberate return to pop forms but which is actually Peter playing a Telecaster sample through a keyboard, “More Than This” finds the narrator contemplating the liminal, unseen things just beyond perception as he decides that there must be something more to the world, decides that the sense that is made when people are put together is like the sense constructed from words one after another. “So much more than this, there is something else there / When all that you had has all gone / And more than this, I’m alone, feeling so connected / And I’m all there, right next to you.” The song aches up against the edge of resolving the minor key chords that comprise it; Gabriel’s self-harmonies climb up the scale, landing on the minor tonic in a way that suggests that they’re really hanging on the edge of resolving to something brighter.
We don’t get that brighter in “Signal to Noise,” though the song (which I discussed in my post about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Night Song, does tie into the central message of finding that connection between people as the narrator begs to “turn up the signal, wipe out the noise.” How much of his catalog boils down to the resolution of this song: “Receive and transmit”! There are echoes of songs from “Secret World” all the way back to “On the Air” in those words, and ultimately a central thesis that we’re all better off when we actually open up the channels of communication one to the other. The incredible Nusrat vocal that anchors the song, extracted from the inaugural performance of “Signal to Noise” on Peter’s 1995 VH1 special, explains why the song holds such a strong place in PG fans’ hearts, as much as the centrality of his message. The choice to underpin this version with strings rather than a bombastic rock sound adds immensely to the rising tension at the end that is ultimately unresolved.
The album ends with “The Drop,” Peter playing piano and singing a melody that he couldn’t make fit OVO but which here anchors the album with the visual of paratroops jumping off into the unknown: “One by one, they’re going out / You watch them dim / One by one, you watch them fall / And wonder where they’re falling to.” A koan, and the only song shorter than three minutes on an album where the rest are more than twice as long, the tune echoes bits of “Downside Up” but ends, unresolved, on an open fifth, leaving us to decide the destination.
Gabriel toured behind Up (the “Growing Up” tour) and then seemed to drop back into the shadows. He released a few loose singles in the late 2000s, but much of what he recorded seemed like stock-taking projects: a long-in-progress collaborative album from the Real World recording weeks called Big Blue Ball; his Scratch My Back project featuring covers of other singers’ work; his orchestral album New Blood (and companion live album Live Blood), featuring arrangements of his own works; and several compilations and live albums. It seemed at the time like the end. But the lesson of Gabriel’s discography is to never count him out. In 2023, twenty-one years after Up, he released the album i/o, taking advantage of Bandcamp’s subscription features to push out a track a month to subscribers, which may have helped the famously distractible Gabriel stay focused on the project. He’s repeating the process right now with the album’s sequel, o/i. But though we’ll end our survey of his studio albums here, we’re not quite done with Peter, or this series, yet, as you’ll hear over the next two weeks.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: I didn’t own Up on vinyl when I started this series, so I ended up using a few tracks written for the album as bonus tracks, including “Signal To Noise.” But there are a few other gems connected to these sessions out there, including this one from The Long Walk Home which uses the Blind Boys of Alabama part from “Sky Blue” as a standalone soundtrack cut:
BONUS BONUS: Peter has done a lot of live performances in Real World Studios for video and album releases. Here’s one recorded during the run-up to the “Growing Up Live” tour in 2002:
Footnotes
- Not only did R.E.M. release their own Up in 1998, but Ani DiFranco had her own Up Up Up Up Up Up in 1999. ↩︎
- A completely unnecessary film given the brilliance of Wim Wenders’ original. ↩︎
