A soundtrack of a concert film of a performance art show, with wild technological magic under its skin.
Album of the Week, May 30, 2026
Following Mister Heartbreak, Laurie Anderson continued to develop and tour shows based around her unique combination of performance art and music, as well as technology. In 1986 that led to an unexpected place: a theatrical release of a movie capturing the touring show that she mounted in support of the 1982 album. The movie flopped, grossing only $1.25 million at the box office, but it spawned a video release and a soundtrack, which provide a fascinating picture of how her art evolved alongside the technology she used to produce it.
The tour featured a subset of the musicians who had contributed to Mister Heartbreak, including Adrian Belew on guitar, David Van Tieghem on percussion, and William S. Burroughs as himself (he appears on stage only in a brief nonspeaking role); they were joined by keyboardist Joy Askew and backing vocalists Dolette McDonald and Janice Pendarvis, fresh from performing with Sting on his Dream of the Blue Turtles tour. Five of the soundtrack’s eight tracks were drawn directly from the performance captured in the film; the other three were recorded in the studio and featured additional musicians including Bill Laswell, Nile Rodgers, and others. Only “Sharkey’s Night” repeats from Mister Heartbreak, here in a greatly extended form; the rest of the songs are new.
“Smoke Rings” starts with a descending synth line slightly reminiscent of “From the Air,” but quickly veers into surrealist territory with a Spanish game show establishing what is more macho. This idea, while promising, is quickly abandoned for a dream about “a little town… and all the girls in town were named Betty.” As she moves past the humor of the opening image, though, we get to the song’s serious core: “Ah, desire! It’s cold as ice and then it’s hot as fire… And every time I see an iceberg it reminds me of you.” The music itself is driven by a pulsing drum + synth groove and punctuated by the gorgeous backing vocals of McDonald and Pendarvis and the high reverberating sampled soprano note, as well as the sounds of dense beasts from Belew’s guitar. It’s a dizzying introduction to the album.
After this we get a quiet moment, driven by a skittering synthesizer line, in which Laurie asks “What Fassbinder film is it? The one-armed man walks into a flower shop and says: What flower expresses Days go by / and they just keep going by endlessly / pulling you into the future… and the florist says, ‘White Lily.’” As gnomic moments, this one is high on the list of Anderson’s most quotable aphorisms, but it’s married to a texture that’s mostly throwaway.
The same can’t be said for “Late Show,” a hypnotic 9/8 riff over which Laurie plays an electric violin, first with a conventional bow and then with something very different. She had been experimenting with the idea of a “tape bow,” a violin bow in which a length of recorded tape replaces the hair of the bow and passes over a magnetic pickup on the violin to play fragments of the recorded sound, since the late 1970s. Here, this instrument acts instead as a MIDI controller, playing back a sample of William S. Burroughs’ voice at different speeds and timbres as he intones “Listen to my heart beat.” You kind of have to see it to believe it.
“Talk Normal,” one of the tracks recorded in the studio. is a scene of pure chaos, with a doo-wop backing vocal behind different improvisations: a wild saxophone line, screeching Adrian Belew guitar noises played on a guitar with a flexible neck, and a set of odd stories from Laurie, including my favorite: “I turned the corner in Soho today and someone / Looked right at me and said: / Oh No! Another Laurie Anderson clone!” I like the idea that there is an alternate reality version of the 1980s in which the streets of the world were full of Laurie Anderson lookalikes — at least elsewhere than in SoHo. The version in the movie is even more extended and surreal, with jugglers, weightlifters, and a giant projected head of Laurie behind the stage. (There’s an image of that on the back of the album cover.)
“Language is a Virus” is another studio recording, this one produced by Nile Rodgers, who also contributes guitar, keyboards and Synclavier to the track. The track riffs off William Burroughs’ line “Language is a virus from outer space,” and Laurie plays with the disconnect between words and intentions throughout: “I was talking to a friend/And I was saying: I wanted you / And I was looking for you / But I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find you / And he said: Hey! / Are you talking to me? / Or are you just practicing / For one of those performances of yours?” But the stories here feel a little flip, a little forced, as though the words have been squeezed to fit the pop song format. (Though I do confess to quoting the last stanza to myself whenever visiting a tourist attraction: “And there was a beautiful view / that nobody could see / Cause everybody on the island / Was saying Look at me! Look at me!”)
“Radar” is a brief snippet of wordless song against a crashing synth chord; if Laurie didn’t have another piece called the “Difficult Listening Hour,” the first minute of this would be a contender. But a synth melody punctuated by birdsongs provides an achingly beautiful bridge into “Sharkey’s Night,” here performed by Anderson using the Voice of Authority1 filter. This version loses the unforgettable William S. Burroughs “Paging Mr. Sharkey, white courtesy telephone please” tag from the original, but remixes in the vocal harmonies from “Talk Normal,” a bit that sounds a lot like a Prince song, an extended saxophone solo from Richard Landry, and a riff on World War III accompanied by an Adrian Belew guitar freakout that will upset your dog. Anderson gives us a backslapping moment with the “Big Boys in room 1003” who are “talking Big B, little O, little M, silent B” and then moments later asking “Hey, what’s that big noise from the sky? … It’s just those angels walking / They’re clomping around again / Wearing those big clumsy shoes we got for them.” Sharkey’s closing “ah, ah, ah, you’ve already paid for this / listen to my heart beat” feels at the end more like a threat, an implied standoff with the bomb as the payoff.
The song ends in a haze of klaxons, segueing into “Credit Racket,” an instrumental that harmonizes its guitar and synth parts from the sound of the sirens; the same track played over the closing credits of the film.
For me, part of the wonder of revisiting Laurie’s work is the ways in which her art, though undeniably limited by the technology available at the time, embraced those limitations (for example, the use of the Mac bitmapped system font Chicago as the title type for the record).2 As Anderson’s art evolved, the technology got more integrated into the work and the musical parts stepped forward more, leaving questions: was she a performance artist who sang or a singer who told stories? Her next album would deepen that confusion in strange and interesting ways. But first we’ll hear from another artist exploring the collision between technology and music with a completely different outcome.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: The full concert film is available on YouTube, somehow. Watch it for Laurie’s tape bow, the waltz between her and Burroughs, the drum dance, the “¿Que es mas macho?” game show, and more:
Footnotes
Years later, Lou Reed, who married Laurie in 2008, named the persona that she adopted with the Voice of Authority filter “Fenway Bergamot.” ↩︎
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
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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
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. ↩︎
An hour of sunny, dreamy happy music for late spring/summerish afternoons.
It’s spring here in New England which means that the days are finally warm enough for flowers to open and we can finally turn the heat off. Just in time for summer to come along in two weeks!
This set of Exfiltration Radio started when I found a song I had been looking for ever since I was living in Seattle that first summer of 2001 and listening to KEXP. There was a happy, sunny track that I kept hearing, perfect for the warm-but-not-hot, breezy summer days, but it literally took me over twenty years to track it down to a 2001 album by Swedish producers Koop, with guest vocals by Yukimi Nagano. There was also a burgeoning playlist of songs from that summer that I never committed to the blog or to Art of the Mix; unfortunately it was wiped out when I had to rebuild my iTunes library file one year, but a few of the tracks came from there.
And a few are definitely out of left field. I find OMD’s “Genetic Engineering” to be a happy, bouncy song; not all will agree. And The Blue Nile’s “Tomorrow Morning” appeared in the playlist yesterday, after listening to Peace at Last for the first time in many years.
Youth – Langston Hughes (The Voice of Langston Hughes)
I Feel – The Sundays (Blind)
The Lifting – R.E.M. (Reveal)
Dreams – The Cranberries (Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? (The Complete Sessions 1991-1993))
Kiss Me – Sixpence None the Richer (Sixpence None the Richer (Deluxe Anniversary Edition))
Summer Sun – Koop (Waltz for Koop)
Genetic Engineering (312MM Version) – Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark (Dazzle Ships)
Sweetness And Light – Lush (Ciao! 1989-1996)
Alison – Slowdive (Souvlaki)
Temptation [7″ Version] – New Order (Movement [Collector’s Edition])
Lost Outside The Tunnel – Aztec Camera (1981 – Cassette)
Today is the Day – Yo La Tengo (Summer Sun)
The Big Sky – Kate Bush (Hounds of Love)
Tomorrow Morning – The Blue Nile (Peace at Last (Deluxe Version))
Um Canto De Afoxé Para O Bloco Do Ilê (Ilê Ayê) – Caetano Veloso (Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropical)
We have taken control as to bring you this special show and we will return it to you as soon as you are exfiltrated.
On taking control of an artistic career and creating an unparalleled work of genius.
Album of the Week, May 9, 2026
We come at last to Kate Bush, whom we’ve heard as a backing vocalist on Peter Gabriel 3, but whose own body of solo work was already substantial by this time. At age 27 she was already on her fifth album, and having had a reasonably high level of success with the first four was able to record it with considerable artistic freedom. What she produced has few peers in pop music history: a record with both hits and a conceptual suite, self-produced, that seamlessly blends new wave influences with progressive rock and traditional music sounds, and still manages to sound new today.
Kate Bush grew up in Kent, with both parents harboring amateur musical talents. She taught herself piano at age 11 and was writing songs in grammar school. In the early 1970s she recorded a demo tape which found its way into the hands of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour via a mutual friend. Gilmour sponsored a more professional demo recording; this led to Kate being signed to a recording contract with EMI at age 16. EMI, fearing Bush was too young, kept her on retainer for two years during which she studied interpretive dance with David Bowie’s dance instructor and finished her secondary education.
Her first album, The Kick Inside, was recorded when she was 19 years old and yielded a Number One UK single, “Wuthering Heights.”1 She set a Guinness World Record as the first woman artist to have written every track on a million-selling debut album. But she wanted more artistic control than she was able to exercise on The Kick Inside or her second album Lionheart. Starting with her third album, Never for Ever, she began co-producing her work, bringing a diversity of sounds to the songs and featuring heavy use of synthesizers for the first time, in particular the Fairlight CMI to which she had been introduced while working with Gabriel. This album and the follow-up, The Dreaming, were much more experimental, and the fourth album in particular was received with puzzlement. Undeterred, but noting the high price of studio time, she built her own private studio, allowing her to work at her own pace.
Much of the fifth album was written and performed by Kate on the Fairlight, the Linn drum machine, and piano, but there were a small host of other musicians present, including her longtime bass player and then-partner Del Palmer, bassist Eberhard Weber, percussionist Morris Pert (also on PG3), session guitarist Alan Murphy (Level 42, Mike and the Mechanics), bouzouki and bodhran player Dónal Lunny (Planxty, The Bothy Band), whistle and fiddle player John Sheahan (the Dubliners), Uillean piper Liam O’Flynn (Planxty), the Richard Hickox Singers, and her brother Paddy, who had played on all her prior albums, on balalaika, didgeridoo, violins, and vocals.
“Running Up That Hill” is by this point the best known song on the album, after its second life in Stranger Things. But it’s still a mesmerizing track, with the rhythmic drums (session player Steve Elliott and a healthy dose of Linn) underpinning Del Palmer’s bass and that synth vocal line playing the hook, all before Kate even sings her first lyric. But it is precisely the lyrics and Kate’s voice that are the heart of the song as she sings about the failure to communicate and the desperate wish for empathy: “If I only could, I’d make a deal with God/and I’d get him to swap our places.” Kate’s early albums had her vocals in her high soprano, which was mesmerizing but which could also be harsh depending on her choice of vowel production; here she embraces her lower register as a grounding and a dramatic accent (as on the famous “Yeah, yeah, yo” backing vocals, themselves an iconic hook).2
“Hounds of Love” is a more joyous song, somehow, as Kate sings about being afraid to fall in love over a woofing chorus: “I’ve always been a coward / And I don’t know what’s good for me / Oh here I go… Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake / And I’ll be / Two steps on the water.” The song is almost entirely Kate’s, with only the two drummers (Elliott and Charlie Morgan, who appeared on Wham!’s On the Edge of Heaven and Paul McCartney’s Flowers In the Dirt and who later played with Elton John for thirteen years—and a single cellist credited as joining her on the track. The melody is in a major key but relentlessly descends in thirds and fourths, giving a feeling of giddy instability. It’s a blast.
“The Big Sky” is another disorientingly happy song, with an edge on it, as Kate’s ragged vocal expresses her excitement at the clouds in the big sky while simultaneously accusing her past lover: “You never understood me/ You never really tried.” A chorus rises behind her as she proclaims, “This cloud/Says ‘Noah / Come on, build me an Ark / And if you’re coming, jump / ’Cause we’re leaving with the big sky.’” The ending chorus—“Rolling over like a great big cloud / Walking out in the big sky”—is as close to a gospel moment as Kate’s songs come, and her ecstatic melisma over it is one of her biggest highs.
“Cloudbusting” seems to flow out of “Mother” naturally, but it’s an entirely different song, closer to “Running Up That Hill” in concept and writing. Indeed, the chorus “Every time it rains you’re here in my head/Like the Sun coming out” could be a continuation of the “Running Up That Hill” chorus, only here powered by a churning string section instead of the synthesizer. The song itself carries immense longing in the chorus, “I just know that something good is going to happen,” with only the chugging low strings hinting that there’s tragedy ahead. The song is based on the memoir of Peter Reich about his father Wilhelm’s experiments with attempting to tap “orgone energy” to create rain, but you don’t need to know that story3 to feel the hopeless sadness mixed with the sense that this time it just might work.
The seven songs on Side Two form a complete song cycle which is titled “The Ninth Wave” in the liner notes. “And Dream of Sheep” opens the cycle with Kate’s character in the water, kept afloat by a life vest, “Little light will guide them to me / My face is all lit up.” She tries to keep herself awake, to keep from drowning in the ocean, but she fails to keep her eyes open and enters a dream state, pulled under by her hallucinations.
We get those dreams in “Under Ice,” and they’re frozen; she skates over a frozen body of water, only to see “There’s something moving under/Under the ice… Something / Someone help them / It’s me…” With the realization that the narrator is watching herself drown she comes to herself, and the track hard cuts to “Waking the Witch,” where the narrator hallucinates voices telling her to wake up, alternating with an accusatory judge accusing her of witchcraft, fragmented voices spinning past in a vortex of sound, and even the sound of rescuers: “Can you not see that little light over there?” followed later by the sound of helicopters arriving and a voice yelling at her to “get out of the water.” There are layers upon layers in the sound; it replicates the disorientation of near-death convincingly.
She’s out of the water but not out of the woods. “Watching You Without Me” finds her at her house watching her lover but unable to interact with him; meanwhile he seems utterly unaware of anything that’s happened to her. The track is a ballad tempo, an ordinary major key loop that seems frozen in time, with only a prominent bass melody pushing at the edges to signal the narrator’s distress. There’s a section that appears to have been recorded backwards and played forward; the sound of seagulls drifts in, cutting through the hallucination, as “Jig Of Life” confronts the narrator with her future self, who insists that she bring herself back to life for the sake of her future and her children. As the emotional energy peaks, suddenly we’re in a jig, led by the violin and accompanied by the skirling of the Uillean pipes. Coming out of the jig, the narrator tries to unfragment her memory: “I put this moment here/I put this moment over here.” The song ends with Kate’s older brother John Carder Bush reciting a dramatic poem about her being one with the water.
The hallucinating victim seems in danger of losing all contact with life in “Hello Earth,” which seems to reprise the melodies of “And Dream of Sheep,” “Running Up That Hill” and “Cloudbusting” all at once. A men’s chorus anchored by deep bass voices (possibly pitch shifted) makes us wonder: has she died? The full chorus accuses her of being the “murderer” from “Waking the Witch” as Kate’s character asks “Why did I go?” The bass chorus returns again; is she being sung to rest? But there’s a beep as of a hospital machine, and through the whooshing sounds we hear a German voice: “Deeper, deeper… Somewhere there is a light.”
“The Morning Fog” returns to the “Hounds of Love” melody, this time tempered by gentle guitar melodies and played down a step, as the drowning victim gratefully regains her life: “Do you know/I love you better now/…I’ll kiss the ground/I’ll tell my mother/I’ll tell my father/I’ll tell my loved ones/I’ll tell my brothers/How much I love them.” At the end of the cycle, we’ve come full circle, only instead of seeking to bring empathy to her lover, she is filled with a desire to live and love in the present instead, changed by her near-death experience.
Hounds of Love is like that, a circular, endlessly self-referential album, full of depths and supporting many interpretations. (There are Kate fans who argue that “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning victim dies and is reborn, or that the drowning is symbolic of ego death and investigating the subconscious, or that Kate is the Ophelia to her own Hamlet).4 However you interpret it, the album is first rate, with a philosophically deep second side, a first side full of absolute killer songs, and an everything-goes approach to production. The album hit Number 1 in the UK in 1986, and when “Running Up That Hill” soundtracked an episode of the fourth season of Stranger Things in 2022, it rocketed up the UK charts, giving Kate her second career Number One and going all the way to Number Three in the US. There’s hope for the world still.
And speaking of Number Ones, we’re going to be talking about a few of them next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Here’s Kate performing “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, with none other than David Gilmour backing her up:
BONUS BONUS: Here’s Kate performing “Hounds of Love” at the 1986 Brit Awards:
BONUS BONUS BONUS: Here’s a 1985 interview with Kate on the BBC’s “Old Grey Whistle Test.” She talks about the building of her new studio and the making of the album.
BONUS X4: Kate didn’t tour behind this album; she famously played very few live shows, and most of the “live” performances I’ve linked to (except the Secret Policeman show) have her lip-syncing. But as a performer she was still electric even when lip-syncing. This appearance on Wogan from 1985 was the first time anyone had ever heard the music from the album, and the whole thing is completely electrifying.
There was a memorable karaoke outing in San Francisco while I was there for the RSA Security Conference one year, where a young man sang “Running Up That Hill” in the original key, and the entire bar sang along on the “yeah, yeah, yo”s, about five years before the song made its Stranger Things comeback. This song is wired into GenX’s brain. ↩︎
Gathered posts from rec.arts.gaffa, the Kate Bush USENET newsgroup. This is what discourse on the Internet really used to be like, in the days before memes and shitposting. ↩︎
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
You don’t ever get to write a sentence like that one in these reviews; I could not resist. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Anderson’s second studio album expands her sonic palette, producing a hypnotic record full of the rich and the strange.
Album of the Week, April 18, 2026
Laurie Anderson had made an album that had a high-charting single. She had gone from performing conceptual art pieces on the street to a major-label contract, with an album that sold over 100,000 copies. Many artists would have rested on their laurels, or tried to pander to a broader audience. Instead, she took her art to somewhere rich and strange… and sold many more copies in the process.
It helped that she had a budget. Artistic choices allow you to make great songs. A budget lets you get a Synclavier II, a then-new digital synthesizer that supported multiple voices with a single keypress as well as digital sampling. It lets you hire a Who’s Who of guest musicians, including guitarist Adrian Belew (cf: Lodger-era David Bowie, Talking Heads, David Byrne, King Crimson), drummer Anton Fier (Golden Palominos), bassist Bill Laswell (Brian Eno, John Zorn, Sonny Sharrock, Material), Nile Rodgers (Chic, Diana Ross, Debbie Harry, Let’s Dance-era Bowie), and William S. Burroughs, as well as her collaborators Roma Baran and David Van Tieghem.
While on tour with her United States show in the spring of 1983 , she also met Peter Gabriel. Later artist Nam June Paik suggested that Gabriel and Anderson collaborate on a song and music video that could become part of a PBS special she was curating called Good Morning, Mr. Orwell; the song, recorded under time pressure in Anderson’s studio, became “Excellent Birds.”
“Sharkey’s Day” has almost all of that sound coming at you all at once; as my former Tanglewood Festival Chorus conductor James Burton would say, it “sounds expensive.” There are layers of Synclavier flutes, Adrian Belew guitar, Bill Laswell bass, Anton Fier drums, bata drums and shekere courtesy Cuban-American jazz percussionist Daniel Ponce, and Laurie’s violin all stirred up together, with a healthy dollop of female backing singers courtesy of the group November, consisting of Michelle Cobbs, Brenda Nelson, and none other than a pre-Sting Dolette McDonald. Anderson’s protagonist Sharkey wanders through this sonic landscape in a spoken-word reverie, alternately fascinated and frightened by both the natural world and the artifacts of modernity (“All night long I think of those little planes up there flying around/You can’t even see them, they’re specks!/And they’re full of tiny people going places/And Sharkey says, You know? I bet they could all land/On the head of a pin.” The wildness in the discoveries of Sharkey are reflected in the instrumentation, as Sharkey hypothesizes that all life “comes from some strange lagoon.” Laurie Anderson is no longer ironically commenting on the future being a place about 50 miles from here; she’s reveling in it.
If “Langue d’Amour” feels a bit more like the material from Big Science, that may be because it doesn’t feature the cast of thousands—it’s just Laurie and her Synclavier. It may also be because the track originated in the same place much of Big Science did, as part of her United States show, as a spoken word track called “Hothead.” Here, the work is transformed into something hypnotic—and erotic—thanks to the stumbling bass line and the vocal-like synthesizer chords, as well as the air of unreality added by the harmonies on Laurie’s voice (as well as Peter Gabriel’s subtle backing vocals). The story, about a restless Eve-like character who falls in love with a snake through his stories, ends with an extended section in French declaring: here is the language of love. Here is the language of my heart. And it is revealed to be a meditation on the power of language to upend everything—a theme Laurie would return to later.
“Gravity’s Angel,” named after Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,1 is a full band track with some of the space of Laurie’s solo work, telling the story of the end of a love affair (“You can see in the dark/But I’ve got one thing: I loved you better”). The hypnotic percussion, loping bass line, and the chorus vocal (again with Gabriel) all combine to produce a meditative space in which magic happens, as when “this ghost of your other lover walked in/And stood there. Made of thin air. Full of desire” and reveals the collapse of the relationship. At the end Laurie pulls the lyrical camera way back to the big picture, then zooms in tightly on the scene of the ending: “ Why these mountains? Why this sky? This long road? This empty room?” The entire work reveals itself in this compressed journey from the broad to the hyper-specific, but still leaves the listener in a fog of mystery.
“Kokoku” had also originated in United States, but is here given a sparse reading on the Synclavier with Fier and Laswell providing the rhythm section, accented by Japanese (and Korean) backing vocalists and a solo on the kayagum (performed by Sang Won Park). Coming after “Gravity’s Angel,” it reads as a song of loss and regret: “They say the dead will rise again/ And here they come now, strange animals out of the Ice Age/ And they stare at you, dumbfounded, like big mistakes. And we say:/ Keep cool. Maybe if we pretend this never happened, they’ll all just go away.” The spoken English words alternate with brief poems in Japanese, which Laurie translates in the liner notes: “Mountain with clouds. A cry. My voice. Home of the brave. I’m here now. And lost.” Laurie’s echoing of “home of the brave” from “Mister Heartbreak” suggests another common thread through the songs, as her narrator’s loneliness and alienation is grounded in American soil (despite the dislocating Japanese affectations of the song.)
“Excellent Birds” comes as a gear-shift, Anderson and Gabriel accompanied only by Nile Rodgers’ guitar, Bill Laswell’s bass, and Gabriel’s Linn drum machine. Both sing and play Synclavier as they tour a strange landscape full of “excellent birds… excellent snow… excellent words,” finding motion and activity in looking out onto an empty landscape, surrounded with pictures of people who seem poised to some unspoken action. But the heart of the song is in the groove, not the words, and in that Synclavier bass line made of a sampled voice that seems to provide the wordless root of everything that happens.
“Blue Lagoon,” by contrast, is an opera in a song, driven by the relentless Synclavier in a stumbling waltz pattern underscored by that sampled-voice bass. But Adrian Belew’s guitar and Bill Laswell’s bass, as well as more Synclavier, build additional layers on top of the ground until we are taken away by Laurie’s gentle spoken voice to a strange desert island. At first it seems like a vacation, but little clues (“Days I remember cities… Days, I dive by the wreck”) suggest a more sinister imprisonment. As the wordless cries of the guitar rise up, there’s an extended quotation from The Tempest (“Full fathom five thy father lies…”) that ends with “Call me Ishmael,” invoking both shipwreck and death. Anderson says, “Always used to wonder who I’d bring to a desert island,” but as the sounds of bamboo and steel drum (played by Van Tieghem) rise, she ends accepting her loneliness: “If you ever get this letter, thinking of you.” The piece is hypnotic, mesmerizing, utterly distinctive.
The album closes with “Sharkey’s Night,” which revisits the chorus and bass line of “Sharkey’s Day” with a darker, more cynical Sharkey read by William Burroughs: “Hey, kemosabe, long time no see! … You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.” We are left with Sharkey’s assertion that he is “deep in the heart of darkest America, home of the brave… Listen to my heart beat,” as Laurie pulls back the focus a final time to show the loneliness mixed with determined forward motion at the heart of the world.
Remarkably, the album cracked the top 200, rising to number 60 in the US. Anderson continued to evolve the songs in her live performances, eventually creating a full show out of her exploration of the alienation and joy of living in the technology-rich present. We’ll visit that another time. Next week, we’ll see another film project in which Gabriel found himself involved following the completion of Security, one whose soundtrack may sound both familiar and strange.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Anderson produced videos for several of the songs on Mister Heartbreak. The video for “Sharkey’s Day” combines animation, green screen dancing, and a generally phantasmagoric artistic statement into a blender:
BONUS BONUS: Here’s the music video for “Excellent Birds,” also produced by Laurie over a green screen. Interestingly it seems to use the version of the song that Peter later released on his 1986 album (about which more later):
BONUS BONUS BONUS: Anderson would revisit much of the music for Mister Heartbreak live, making a concert movie called Home of the Brave after the lyric in “Sharkey’s Day.” Here’s that live concert version:
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS: While on tour behind Mister Heartbreak, Laurie was booked on Late Night with David Letterman, where, rather than performing one of the numbers from her album, she opted to do “Walk the Dog” (!). Here’s that little piece of television history:
Footnotes
Laurie famously asked permission from Pynchon to compose an opera based on Gravity’s Rainbow. To her surprise, the reclusive novelist wrote back with his agreement, with one stipulation: that it be scored for solo banjo. She has said, “Some people have the nicest way of saying no.” ↩︎
Gabriel gives a definitive send-off to the sound and songs of his first four albums in his first live record.
Album of the Week, April 11, 2026
Live albums serve a different purpose for a rock artist than for a jazz musician. In jazz you’re documenting the spontaneous magic that happened on a particular night, in a particular venue. With rock you sometimes get that, but more often it’s about getting the sound of a certain era, about all the different ways an artist takes music that originated in a studio into a live performance. And sometimes it’s about summing up an era of an artist’s work, getting all the hits performed in front of a screaming crowd as a souvenir of a particular moment.
This last category is definitely where Plays Live falls, but there are elements of the other motivations as well. In particular, some early songs are revisited and updated, while others faithfully recreate their studio sound. Some of that “faithful” sound might be due to touch-ups; the notes on one of the dust sleeves say, “Although this album was compiled from four concerts in the mid-west of the United States, some additional recording took place not a thousand miles away from the home of the artiste. The generic term of this process is ‘cheating’.” Whatever the means, the album presents music from four concerts in November and December 1982 that show how Gabriel transformed the music from his first four albums into a coherent stage performance, with the stalwart help of Tony Levin, David Rhodes, Jerry Marotta, and Larry Fast.
“The Rhythm of the Heat” is remarkably faithful to the album original, with Larry Fast and Peter playing the same loops and synths used to construct the studio track. Only at the end does the performance deviate from the original, and that’s only because Jerry Marotta only has four limbs; while his drum performance is appropriately climactic, it doesn’t have the apocalyptic frenzy of the polyrhythms played by Ekome on the original track. “I Have the Touch” is slightly looser, with a combination of drums and synth percussion backing up Peter as he swaggers through the song. Peter’s outro has some vocal improvisations that carry the imprint of Motown, pointing ahead to a change of direction in future albums.
“Not One of Us” is another faithful recreation, with Tony Levin’s bass lines prominently front and center and Jerry Marotta’s drums leading into the massive breakdown at the end of the song. A quiet “Family Snapshot” has the epic arc of the original, greeted with respectful applause to close out the first side.
“D.I.Y.” is the first song of the set to have a substantial revision, with synths standing in for Robert Fripp’s guitar but carrying the same rhythmic intensity. “The Family and the Fishing Net” faithfully recreates the spooky quality of the voodoo and wedding rituals from the original, with some extra synth lines adding slightly polyrhythmic accents at the beginning and a massive choral outro with the band singing backing vocals behind. (This is a good time to shout out appreciation for the collective voices of Levin, Rhodes, Marotta and Fast, who create a great backing sound behind Peter.)
“Intruder” is great live here, with Marotta’s drums ably filling in for Phil Collins’ legendary gated reverb and Fast’s synths somewhat less ably replacing the marimbas in the instrumental. But that’s a note-perfect whistle at the end, over some sort of idiophone, presumably played by Marotta, and a massive finale with Peter taking the final line up an octave to great effect.
“I Go Swimming” is a gift of sorts, the only song here not to have previously appeared on a PG album. It’s a fun tune led off by a locked-in groove by Tony Levin, soon joined by the rest of the band as they play in the chromatic intro. Peter’s vocal on the chorus gives a bit of an Al Green feel, which abruptly switches into a more traditional Gabriel verse in 6/8. The song was apparently a leftover from the 1980 PG3 session that became a live staple, and a great break in the set.
Both “San Jacinto” and “Solsbury Hill” hew closely to their recorded versions, albeit with keys replacing the jubilant twelve-string guitar in the latter plus an extended joyous vocal coda. (Okay, not hewn quite as closely as all that.) “No Self Control” gets the most dramatic retooling of all the back catalog numbers, with a moody synth-driven groove replacing the marimba and dueling guitars of the original. Played about 20% slower than the original, it carries less manic intensity than resignation and despair. “I Don’t Remember” maintains the disco-funk brilliance of its predecessor thanks to Tony Levin’s deft playing and a wordless vocal bridge in the extended outro that raises the hackles on the back of the neck.
“Shock the Monkey” is a jittery wonder here, all funky high notes above a relentless, mechanical dance rhythm. It’s also arguably the farewell to an early Gabriel practice—the use of face paint to portray different characters in live performance (and videos). The blue make-up on the album cover (and the insert above) is a simplified version of the elaborate ritual monkey make-up used in the video; photographer Armando Gallo recalls it was actually taken during “Lay Your Hands On Me,” a track omitted from the original LP.
“Humdrum” is a pleasant surprise in the running order, a throwback all the way to PG1. The song offers the opportunity to hear how Peter’s vocals evolved during this first six-year stretch of solo performance. His low notes are richer, his high notes with a bit of sandy grit around the edges but with assurance as he takes rhythmic liberties with the line. The vocals are also mixed much further forward than in Bob Ezrin’s original, allowing the lyrics to be more clearly understood; this might be the definitive version as a result. “On the Air” is a last intense workout, with the band lending it more polish than the dry Fripp-produced original and somehow also carrying a greater intensity throughout. The audience is in it all the way, shouting their response to Peter’s sung “on the air” in the chorus. The band gets a great workout in the outro, with an instrumental workout before Peter sings the final chorus as a great shout.
The album ends, as did so many of his concerts, with “Biko.” Stripped of its opening and closing South African hymns, it plays as a more direct protest anthem, with the crowd’s singing along audible under the third verse and the extended outro. The album ends with a long fade-out as Peter calls “Good night!” and the crowd chants “Peter, Peter, Peter” in response.
Plays Live is unique in Peter’s discography for serving as a perfect punctuation mark at the end of his first four-album run. With five tunes each from the third and fourth albums and the hits from the first two, you could be forgiven for never checking back to listen to the originals. (I would strongly recommend making time for 3 and 4, both of which stand as massive accomplishments.)
In a way it was also a farewell to this portion of his career, as what came after would prove a powerful transformation for his sound and his fortunes. But before we get there, he had one last project, albeit a slightly obscure one, that revisited the sound from this period in a more unexpectedly direct way. And before that, we have one of the collaborations that began to shape his new direction; we’ll hear that next week.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: While “Lay Your Hands on Me,” with Peter pictured singing while crowd-surfing on the back cover, was part of the set for these concerts, it was never issued on a version of Plays Live. That makes this 1983 video from Gabriel’s performance in Copenhagen all the more interesting, if frustrating for its low resolution and high levels of background chatter at the beginning:
Embracing both musical sounds from around the globe and modern technology produces a pioneering album that is still compelling and strange today.
Album of the Week, April 3, 2026
Two important things happened to Peter Gabriel in the lead up to his fourth self-titled album, which, thankfully for those of us who write or talk about music, his new label Geffen talked him into giving an actual title, Security, in the United States. The first was that the sampling synthesizer, the Fairlight CMI, that he had first encountered in 1979 became more powerful and able to manage up to 64 kilobytes worth of samples in memory. The second was a series of encounters with musicians from outside the UK that led to something that changed his career, and the careers of countless others, forever.
The Fairlight CMI had been invented by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, from an earlier invention by Tony Furse. Struggling to get an instrument that was easier to control than the all-analogue Moog synths which were then the kings of the market, Vogel and Ryrie hit on two important ideas: to use a microprocessor—a digital chip, rather than analog—to control the device; and—a discovery by Vogel while studying the harmonic waveforms of acoustic instrument sounds)—to use samples (short recordings of real instruments) as part of the sonic palette of the instrument. Vogel brought a first-generation Fairlight CMI to Gabriel’s home while he was working on Peter Gabriel 3, and he was smitten, using the sampling feature to record real world sounds—though he used glass breaking and other percussion, rather than piano or strings. Gabriel was so impressed that he and his then-brother-in-law Stephen Paine formed a company to sell the instrument in the UK. It sold like hotcakes, with Kate Bush, John Paul Jones, Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons, Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright, and Thomas Dolby among the early purchasers.1 By 1982, the Series II was released, giving higher-frequency samples. Gabriel famously showed the use of this feature on the BBC’s The South Bank Show in a special on the making of PG4.
The other thread would seem to be the complete opposite pole. Following the release of PG3 and based on Gabriel’s burgeoning interest in African music and politics following the release of “Biko,” he launched the first World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival in 1980. Artistically2 a huge success, it brought performers from India, Burundi, Cameroon and Nigeria together with pop and world music luminaries from the UK.
Gabriel continued to meet with new African musicians, some of whom appeared on his next album. They joined a cast of by-now familiar faces: Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta, David Rhodes, Larry Fast, Morris Pert (here on percussion and Ethiopian pipes)—and also Peter Hammill, who had played at the first WOMAD, and David Lord, who co-produced the album with Gabriel. For this recording they were at Ashcombe House, a 19th century manor in Somerset that had a barn that Gabriel converted to a recording studio, while he rented the main house as a domicile.
The first track, “The Rhythm of the Heat,” combines the synthesizer, sampling, and world music threads of Gabriel’s interests into a single whole. Starting with a sampled loop on the Fairlight, Gabriel utters a cry that seems to swoop from somewhere in a resonant acoustic right up next to the listener, as a giant tone sounds on the tonic against a syncopated beat in the drums. Gabriel sings about losing oneself in rhythm (“the rhythm has my soul”), as neat a summation of the ethos he was exploring in his songwriting from PG3 on as one could hope for. It’s mostly successful here; the rhythms in the main song are careful (“the rhy-thm of the heat”) and feel a little too controlled. But on the last reprise, as he sings “smash the radio… smash the watch… smash the cameras… the rhythm is around me, the rhythm has control/the rhythm is inside me/the rhythm has my soul,” suddenly the heavens break open and an avalanche of drums, courtesy the Ekome Dance Company from Ghana, carry the track away in a massive, reverberating, polyrhythmic frenzy. If Gabriel was looking for transcendence in rhythm, he surely found it.
“San Jacinto” is a different feeling, a careful dance-like pattern in synthesizers that contrasts with the story sung by the narrator, a Native American man feeling despair at the loss of his culture to modernity. Some listeners interpret the lyrics as the narration of a young man coming of age in a ritual involving a rattlesnake bite; I’ve always heard it as the narration of an older man taking his last journey to the mountaintop, where he faces the decision to live or die. The coda (“We will walk on the land/We will breathe of the air/We will drink from the stream/We will live, hold the line”) seems a declaration of revitalized intent in the face of this despair, and is tonally distinct from the rest of the song, almost a hymn to itself.
“I Have the Touch” is one of two more pop-leaning songs on the album, but it doesn’t ease up the thematic intensity; here Gabriel seems to revisit the theme of the outsider that he first explored in the nightmarish “Intruder” on PG3, only this time, instead of maliciously breaking and entering, the narrator is in the street and filled with a yearning for human contact. “I move with the movement and/I have the touch… Only, only/wanting contact/with you”: he finds some respite in the crowd, the “pushing of the people,” but knows that he cannot be happy without true human contact.
The dark reverse of this longing for contact, perhaps the ultimate “be careful what you wish for” song, comes with the last track on the first side. “The Family and the Fishing Net,” which sings of marriage as a dark ceremony that enmeshes the participants through strange rituals, seems to warn of too much of a good thing. In a college poetry seminar I brought the lyrics, with their super-specificity and descriptive language, as an example of pop music as good poetry. I’m not so sure now; the whole thing seems rather over-egged. But “moist as grass, ripe and heavy as the night” is not a good way to describe a bride to be. And the attempted intersection of Christian imagery and voodoo in the last stanza “In the darkness, as the cake is/Cut and passed around/In little pieces/The body, the body and the flesh” doesn’t land for me. Then again, it did for the unmarried me at 18, still anxious about the future, which is maybe all it was supposed to do.
Speaking of anxiety: has there ever been a stranger Top 40 hit than “Shock the Monkey”? With the music track drawing inspiration from Motown and progressive rock in equal measure, there’s a relentless beat driving Peter’s plea to an unknown lover not to “shock the monkey”—that is, not to arouse the creature of jealousy that sits in the core of relationships. But you don’t need to have the psychological background to appreciate the song; it’s a banger, even if it sits uncomfortably high in the vocal range for singalongs. (As the University of Virginia Hullabahoos discovered when they covered it on their first album, years ago.)
In a sort of through-line with “I Have the Touch,” “Lay Your Hands on Me” is a song about finding healing in opening up and being vulnerable to connection with another human. The opening, with skittering percussion and an ominous spoken narrative (that veers into silliness—“fat men play with their garden hoses… sausage speared by the cocktail satellite”), masks a real portrait of alienation, as the narrator seeks to escape the crowds and find solace in being alone, whether out of introversion or fear, or both. But the chorus—“It’s only common sense/There are no accidents round here/I am willing (Lay your hands on me)/I am ready (Lay your hands on me)/I believe (Lay your hands on me)”—roars back into an embrace, literally, of the healing power of touch. Gabriel would ultimately end live performances of the song by standing at the edge of the stage and falling backward into the crowd, trusting them to buoy him up. (I recall reading an interview in the 1980s when one of the band wryly remarked, “We all did it; the problem was, no one wanted to catch the drummer.”) Gabriel has been open over the years about the power of therapy to help heal emotional wounds, and you can hear it starting here—and in true PG fashion it arrives as a massive anthem that delivers an emotional punch with each repetition. And that bass line!
“Wallflower” is in similarly hymnic territory, but with a different subject. Sketches of the melody originated during the recording of PG3, but the lyrics didn’t come together until Peter viewed television programs sponsored by Amnesty International about political prisoners in Eastern Europe and Latin America, particularly the plight of Lech Wałęsa and of dissidents who were imprisoned in mental hospitals. In this way the lyrics feel like a merging of the lyrical concerns of “Lead a Normal Life” and “Biko” and give the former tune an additional layer of universal meaning.
There’s nothing but good times in the closer, “Kiss of Life”—at least in the massive rhythms that spur one to dance in imitation of the “big woman” who dances on the tables at the Easter feast for the fishermen, welcoming each one. And then there’s a turn: in the bridge, we learn that “there’s a body in the sand” which the big woman resuscitates: “With heat from her skin and fire from her breath/She blows hard, she blows deep/In the mouth of death.” Did the narrator have a near death experience? Whatever the narrative truth, there is an inexorable dual meaning in the final chorus of “Kiss of life/kiss of life,” with life and death dancing together—however awkwardly, with alternating 3/4 and 4/4 meter in the opening and outro.
In embracing both modern technology and non-European rhythms, Gabriel found a more consistently adventurous sound that enabled him to span between art rock and pop, and landed him an unlikely top-40 hit—all while staying true to his distinctive artistic vision. It came at a cost: the album was recorded and mixed in sessions spanning from early 1981 through the summer of 1982, with hints of the songs only peeking through in a 1982 WOMAD festival performance in which he premiered seven of the eight tunes. That 1982 performance has recently been released, and is worth a listen in its own right, as the musicians dig into tunes that would seem to be designed only for studio performance and miraculously transform them into riveting live bangers.
Peter’s future albums would gestate even longer, as touring and his growing perfectionism stretched the time between albums further and further. Fortunately for us, his collaborators were also releasing spectacular music in their own right in between these infrequent records, and we’ll hear from one of those next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Here’s what might be the first live performance of “The Rhythm of the Heat,” from the 1982 WOMAD festival complete with the original rhythm section:
BONUS BONUS: “Shock the Monkey” is the most coverable of all the songs on the album, so it takes a lot for a new cover of it to surprise me. This one by Local H with both band members sharing a gorilla costume achieves the goal.
BONUS BONUS BONUS: A sort of cover? Here’s Peter Gabriel with Sting performing “Shock the Monkey” live in 2016:
Footnotes
Horn would famously help to popularize one of the key samples from the Fairlight’s built-in set, an orchestral “hit” called ORCH5, in his work with both Yes and Art of Noise. ↩︎
It might have been an artistic success, but it was a financial flop; faced with substantial debt, Gabriel reunited with Genesis for a single show, which put the festival, and his own finances, back on an even keel. ↩︎
In this 1980 recording, a massive drum sound and sharpened songwriting lead to the discovery of a new voice.
Album of the Week, March 14, 2026
It’s the drums that hit you first. The booming sound, enormous and then cut off, of the opening snare on the first track of Peter Gabriel’s 1980 album (also called Peter Gabriel), might be the most iconic of all 1980s percussion sounds, and it immediately arrests your attention—as does the crackling sound of fingernails on guitar strings that follows. You begin to understand why Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records (who had distributed Peter’s first two albums in the States), asked upon hearing the album, “Has Peter been in a mental hospital?” But that rhythm-centered sound and the lyrical unease were the key to unlocking Peter Gabriel’s most successful period of songwriting, and it’s all here in the first few seconds.
Peter was continuing to look for new sounds, and he found them here, starting with the idea that he would write “rhythm first.” Keyboard player Larry Fast had introduced him to the PAiA Programmable Drum Set, which allowed Peter to build his own rhythms so that he could write his songs around them during the songwriting process.
Part of the magic of the album was the cast of musicians. In addition to Collins, the core band of Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta and Larry Fast were all back, joined by David Rhodes, recently of Random Hold. Robert Fripp was out of the producer’s chair but still contributed hot solos on three of the tracks; also in the guest guitarist chair were Dave Gregory of XTC and Paul Weller of The Jam. Jazz artist Dick Morrissey brought saxophone to a number of the tracks. John Giblin, who had joined the British jazz-fusion band Brand X alongside Collins, played a fair amount of electric bass on the album. And appearing on two tracks with guest vocals was Kate Bush (who we briefly met at the end of our discussion of Peter Gabriel 1); at age 21 she had two albums under her belt (including a Number One hit in the UK), and was working on her third.
All together the musicians produced a recording that, while met with puzzlement by Atlantic Records (who distributed Peter’s music in the US and ultimately passed on the release, causing him to switch to Mercury Records), stands as one of his most original and enduring. Let’s dive in.
“Intruder” (with Collins on drums) brings forward all the unique aspects of Gabriel’s songwriting that defined this album: the heavy rhythmic focus, the paranoia and alienation, and the painstaking focus on aural textures. Opening with that immense gated reverb sound in the drums, Gabriel’s narrator confesses to disturbing crimes: “I know something about/Opening windows and doors… Slipping the clippers/Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires.” There’s a new sense of artistic confidence in Peter’s voice; the lyrics are terse, the chords stabbing, and that thunderous drum sound all combine to terrifying effect, culminating in the final verse: “I like to feel the suspense/When I’m certain you know I am there.” Also noteworthy is the percussion part in the midst of the song; Peter has said that he was hugely influenced by Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and its marimba textures, and the sound of the marimba would feature at several other key points in the album (here played by composer Morris Pert, who had also spent some time in Brand X). The whistled melody at the end is the chilling cherry on top.
“No Self Control” opens with a guitar hook that is panned hard in the stereo mix, alternating between the left and right channels, courtesy Robert Fripp. But the main story of the song is the textures behind the verse: Pert’s marimba, wordless choruses of backing vocals from Kate Bush, an unassuming piano part, and then going into the chorus a massive build up in Phil Collins’ gated snare that sounds like the apocalypse arriving. The lyrics reference compulsive behavior (“Got to get so food, I’m so hungry all the time… Got to get some sleep, I’m so nervous in the night/And I don’t know how to stop”), but the real story may be the connecting thread of implied violence in a relationship, picking up where the last verse of “Intruder” left off: “You know I hate to hurt you, I hate to see your pain/But I don’t know how to stop, I don’t know how to stop.” The song is a superb miniature where all the parts work together
We get a breather from the intensity thanks to the jazz interlude of “Start,” which combines synthesizer and sampling keyboards with a grade-A rock saxophone solo from Dick Morrissey. It builds up to a hard cut into “I Don’t Remember,” powered by Jerry Marotta’s thudding backbeat and a killer guitar sound from Dick Gregory, alongside Tony Levin’s Chapman Stick and a falsetto vocal intro that seems equally influenced by disco and Middle Eastern chant. More alienation here, with verses that could be read both as immigration to a strange land and to interpersonal communications breakdowns: “Strange is your language and I have no decoder/Why don’t you make your intention clear/With eyes to the sun and your mouth to the soda/Saying, ‘Tell me the truth, you’ve got nothing to fear.’”
“Family Snapshot” puts us in the mind of an assassin with a twist. There’s a quiet introduction on the keyboard as the narrator surveys the crowded street awaiting the arrival of his target, and anticipating becoming part of the story: “Today is different/Today is not the same/Today I make the action/Take snapshot into the light… I’m shooting into the light.” The band takes off with excitement as the action deepens: “The governor’s car is not far behind/He’s not the one I’ve got in mind/‘Cause there he is, the man of the hour/Standing in the limousine.” It’s at this point that the song takes a twist as the narrator makes it clear his action has nothing to do with his feelings about his target, but about being abandoned and anonymous. By shooting his victim, he reclaims some part of his own narrative, even through infamy. And then the final twist: “All turned quiet, I’ve been here before/A lonely boy hiding behind the front door… Come back mum and dad/You’re growing apart, know that I’m growing up sad.” Gabriel would later write honest songs about the pain in his relationship with his father; here for the first time he explores that dynamic of interpersonal relationships leading to tragic outcomes in one five-minute epic. It’s deeply moving and instantly memorable. Small wonder that when Gabriel’s nascent Internet fan club asked members to write in their favorites for his 2001 WOMAD performance in Redmond, Washington, that this song made the cut.
“And Through the Wire” stays focused on relationships, this time through the lens of communication and introduced by the crunch of Paul Weller’s guitar lead. Though it has the sharper focus and songwriting characteristic of this higher level of Gabriel’s artistry, its combination of 7/4 and triple meter is a reminder of his progressive rock roots. But with that insane guitar and Marotta’s drumming, you hardly notice the rhythmic complexity. It’s a breath following “Family Snapshot” and an effective closer for a stunning Side 1.
Side 2 doesn’t let up, either. Peter counts in the intro and “Games Without Frontiers” kicks off with a vaguely disco-feeling drum machine, heightened by the combination of David Rhodes’ lead guitar, Marotta’s percussion and, most of all, Kate Bush’s high backing vocals as she sings “jeux sans frontières.” The lyrics are playful with an undercurrent of menace as “Hans plays with Lotte/Lotte plays with Jane” yields to “Adolf builds a bonfire/Enrico plays with it.” But it’s all somehow danceable and weirdly singable, and it yielded his first top 10 UK hit.
“Not One of Us” starts with Peter’s ululating vocals and a Robert Fripp guitar solo that sounds like shredded glass. John Giblin’s bass is a lead character in the song as Peter sings about racism, first telling the immigrant “A foreign body and a foreign mind/Never welcome in the land of the blind,” then telling the racist “All shades of opinion feed an open mind/but your values are twisted.” Between the two verses, the chorus—“You may look like we do, talk like we do/But you know how it is/You’re not one of us”—inverts its meaning. In the coda, the last minute-plus of the song becomes a monster driven by a massive four-note hook in the guitar and bass and Jerry Marotta’s frenetic, polyrhythmic drumming. It’s among the most intense music Peter had ever created to that point, and he would return to it later in the 1980s.
After the climax, “Lead a Normal Life” seems to offer a respite in the cool tones of Morris Pert’s marimba. But the marimba pattern refuses to settle in tonality, playing on an open fifth indefinitely, and the synth lead is similarly unsettled, wandering past but never landing on the tonic. A distorted cry accompanies the bridge but then we return to the music of confinement, which repeats three times and then suddenly drops into tonality. But what initially sounds like a refuge reveals itself to be even more of a trap: “It’s nice here with a view of the trees/Eating with a spoon, they don’t give you knives/‘Spect you watch those trees blowing in the breeze/We want to see you lead a normal life.” And the menacing music of what is now revealed to be an institution returns, with a reprise of the distorted cry, with guitar distortion that subliminally builds in the background into a constant weeping. It’s masterful and deeply discomforting.
The final track, “Biko,” prompted Ahmet Ertegun’s other unfortunate comment about the album: “What do people in America care about this guy in South Africa?” Peter had been deeply moved by the story of the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in the custody of the South African police in 1977, and wrote the final song of the album as a eulogy. It opens with an excerpt of “Ngomhla sibuyayo” and segues into a massive two-tone drumbeat on the Brazilian Surdo drum (played by Collins), with an emphatic David Rhodes guitar drone above which Peter sings about Biko’s death: “September ’77, Port Elizabeth weather fine/It was business as usual in Police Room 619.” He sings in Xhosa “Yila moja” (Come Spirit), invoking the continued presence of Biko’s cause even as he sings “The man is dead” over the sounds of bagpipes. In the last verse he warns, “You can blow out a candle/But you can’t blow out a fire/Once the flames begin to catch/The wind will blow it higher… And the eyes of the world are watching now.” This first Western protest song against the inhumanity of the South African apartheid system would have been sufficiently noteworthy; its incredible anthemic quality and singability made it a totem of a new movement.
Gabriel found his voice on this third self-titled album, and found a connection to the broader outside world. “Biko” in particular led to performances with Amnesty International later in his career, but it would also bring him into contact with a world full of musicians who would radically shape his music even as he brought them to wider attention. We’ll explore some of those connections in a few weeks. But next week we’ll listen to the work of a future Gabriel collaborator who brought a different kind of artistic sensibility to the unlikely world of pop music.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Peter had found German audiences receptive on his late-1970s tours, apparently, because he did a version of Peter Gabriel (1980) in German, with him singing translated lyrics over the original backing tracks from the album. Here’s “Keine Selbskontrolle”:
BONUS BONUS: “Biko” became an enduring part of Peter’s musical legacy and has been played many, many times live. Here’s an early one from the very first WOMAD festival in 1982 (about which, more later…):
BONUS BONUS BONUS: Peter’s 2010–2013 project of cover songs yielded a bunch of fascinating Peter Gabriel cover versions of some great songs (Scratch My Back), and some reciprocal covers. In exchange for Peter’s cover of the Talking Heads song “Listening Wind,” David Byrne recorded this fascinating take on “I Don’t Remember” which led off the compilation And I’ll Scratch Yours:
The second PG album finds him experimenting, with sometimes thrilling and sometimes uneven results.
Album of the Week, March 7, 2026
Looking back at Peter Gabriel’s career, some of the consistent themes are perfectionism and painstaking deliberation. We’re talking about a performer who went from 2002 (Up) until 2023 (I/O) — 21 years between releases of original music. (There was other music of merit in that period, but that’s a different story.) So it comes as a surprise to realize that Peter Gabriel’s second album was released only 15 months after his first. Almost all of that is due to his choice of producer for the second album: Robert Fripp.
Fripp was starting to transition in his career from sideman (most notably for David Bowie on “Heroes”) and leader of the intermittently active King Crimson to producer, on the strength of his ingenious guitar work and technological inventiveness (the unique “Frippertronics” system, the first live looping solution for performers, is the best known example). Peter was looking for a specific sound texture, and brought musicians to the record who could provide it, like the redoubtable Tony Levin, drummer Jerry Marotta, and synth player Larry Fast, all of whom would appear in more PG albums. He also admired Fripp’s more improvisational and brisk working methods; he’s said about the album, “Robert Fripp was very keen to try speeding up my recording process, as many people have been since and failed, but he got closest to it.”
Unusually, the album is the second to be titled Peter Gabriel; Gabriel felt this allowed more attention to be paid to the album artwork by design house Hipgnosis (who also shot the “rainy windshield” on Peter Gabriel (1977)). I’ve also read that he thought of it almost like a magazine or periodical—“here’s the latest Peter Gabriel.” Looking at the entire discography, it’s clear he was never much of a fan of album titles, as we’ll see.
“On the Air” starts in a very different sonic landscape from where PG1 left off. Bright synthesizer lines lead to muscular guitar and bass, backed up by the massive drums of Jerry Marotta. The song is a straightforwardly driving 4/4 until the chorus, which drops into 6/8 for a few bars. And the vocals, while rough—you can hear the strain in his high notes, and his sometimes sandy tenor sounds thin and scratchy—are exciting, especially as he soars up the lines of “on the air” in the chorus. Lyrically, the subject—Gabriel’s Mozo character building a radio transmitter so that he can project his psychic energy out to the world—is obscure but the writing is taut: “Built in the belly of junk by the river my cabin stands/Made from the trash, I dug off the heap with my own fair hands/Every night I’m back at the shack and I’m sure no one else is there/I’m putting the aerial up so I can go out on the air.”
“D.I.Y.,” driven by a throbbing Tony Levin line on the Chapman Stick, is even more tautly wound. Gabriel says he was listening to punk and new wave at this time, and this song shows the influence even though it’s in 5/4 and has a complex chord change in the pre-chorus. It’s another song dealing with the aftermath of his time in Genesis: “You’re still looking for the resurrection/Come up to me with your ‘What did you say?’/And I’ll tell you, straight in the eye.” It’s short and pointed and a great song.
“Mother of Violence” is the only song in Peter’s work with a writing credit by his then-wife Jill. It’s a quiet tune with unusual instrumentation—pedal steel, acoustic piano—and a vocal that sounds a bit like late-1970s Phil Collins and ends with vocalese. It’s all in service of a lyric about difficult family relationships that is one of the more fraught bits of writing on the album.
“A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World” is an odd bit of a song, with a vocal that sounds a bit like a scratch take and a slightly proggy reggae feel, and a lyric that is reminiscent of some of the odder corners of Paul Simon, particularly in the dialog with the old man in the second verse. But it also has some of the better vocal harmonies on the album in the chorus, so that’s something in its favor at least. It’s followed with the frustratingly opaque “White Shadow,” which marries an instrumental track that could have been at home on late-1970s Genesis, circa …And Then There Were Three…. The first verse starts promisingly enough—“Ten coaches roll into the dust/Chrome windows turned to rust”—but then we’re rhyming “spirit died” with “Kentucky Fried.” Fripp’s guitar solo at the end is a thing of beauty, though, in duet with Tony Levin’s increasingly virtuosic bass, and there are hints of a synthesizer sound played by Peter that would become an increasingly familiar backdrop in his other albums.
“Indigo” is a piano-driven ballad with recorder and pedal steel, a story of an elderly man coming to terms with his impending death. The track seems to have a bunch of different ideas that never quite cohere, but the vocal is one of the finer on the album technically, with properly prepared high notes and controlled dynamics adding to the emotional affect. That’s a contrast with “Animal Magic,” which has one of the rougher vocals on the album and a lyric about proving manhood by becoming a soldier, and an anonymous guitar solo that sounds a bit like generic ’70s rock.
“Exposure,” though, is one of the key sonic pieces on the album. Driven by a mean locked in groove from Levin and Marotta, the main event here is the Frippertronics and Peter’s repeated chants of “exposure… space is what I need…” It’s the groove, though, that feels the most like a Peter Gabriel song, and we’ll hear it again in many other contexts.
“Flotsam and Jetsam” is a song of lament for a failed relationship. It’s competently written but ultimately forgettable, thanks in part to indifferent vocal recording featuring one of the few instances of an echo or reverb on the album which only serves to underscore the brevity of the song. Peter seems rather in a hurry to get on to “Perspective,” which feels a bit like a downtown 1970s New York number complete with saxophone on the chorus and a repeated “I need perspective” on the verses. Gabriel sings from the perspective of an industrial businessman to his former lover, who may or may not be the earth (“Oh Gaia, if that’s your name/Treat you like dirt, but I don’t want to blame…”)
That leads us to “Home Sweet Home,” which frustratingly sums up all the off characteristics of this second album. The songwriting feels a bit like Peter’s version of Randy Newman (last heard on “Waiting for the Big One”), the pedal steel seems like we’re in a country song, and we have another one of the indifferently recorded scratch vocals. And it’s about a man whose wife commits suicide, killing his child at the same time; despairing, he gambled with the insurance check and won big, buying a country home far away from his eleventh floor walk-up. The last verse features one of Peter’s most challenging-to-listen-to vocals, as his high vocal obbligato provides an impression of the man’s wordless sobs. It feels dark in an exploitive way. We will get much more earned dark passages in future albums, but here it feels like he’s trying on someone else’s pain.
Ultimately 1978’s Peter Gabriel is a frustratingly uneven album. There are some great songs—both “On the Air” and “D.I.Y.” are in the canon of his greatest songs, and “Exposure” is affecting, but many of the others suffer from the rapid approach to recording and writing. He took more time on the next record, and it showed. We’ll listen to that one next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Fripp connected a series of albums that he produced in the late 1970s, including Peter Gabriel, Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs, and his own debut solo album Exposure, as a loose trilogy. He re-recorded “Exposure” for the latter album, and it’s … really something, thanks to vocals by Terre Roche of the Roches:
BONUS BONUS: The band for this tour, with Sid McGinnis in for Fripp, was a tight machine. Here’s a German performance of “On the Air” from 1978 that shows Peter had been watching punk acts:
A former prog-rock frontman steps out of the machinery and begins the long process of reinventing himself.
Album of the Week, February 28, 2026
In 1977, Peter Gabriel was preparing to put a new face forward. He was no stranger to the spotlight; the band he co-founded, Genesis, had released six albums, with their fifth, Selling England by the Pound, reaching Number 3 on the UK Albums chart. Gabriel, the band’s lead vocalist, had become the visible face of Genesis, with elaborate costumes and stage makeup; the rest of the band grew frustrated on the tour for their last album together, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, as fans would bypass the instrumentalists and go straight to Gabriel, praising his theatrics. On Lamb, Gabriel had wanted to tell a coherent story and had taken over writing all the lyrics, where prior songwriting had been more collaborative, raising tensions within the band. Furthermore, the tour for Lamb, consisting of 102 dates, had put a strain on Gabriel’s marriage to Jill Moore. It was time to move on, in other words.
Gabriel took a year off so that it wouldn’t be perceived that he had departed on bad terms. When his self-titled debut album arrived in February 1977, about a week before Mingus and his band entered the studio to start recording Three or Four Shades of Blues, it was a very different kind of record and a different sound than he had achieved with Genesis. Instead of an album-spanning narrative, there were episodes that focused on hallucinatory flashes of insight and personal connections. There was hard rock, arty carnival music, and twisted barbershop that sounded for all the world like Randy Newman. And there was a strange little ditty in 7/4 time.
The musicians weren’t really a band, just a quiverful of studio aces. Producer Bob Ezrin, who was previously known for producing such diverse artists as Alice Cooper (14 albums over the years including School’s Out and Welcome to My Nightmare), Lou Reed (Berlin), Aerosmith (Get Your Wings), Flo & Eddie’s self-titled album, and Kiss (Destroyer)—and later Pink Floyd’s The Wall, would seem to be an odd choice to produce the former Genesis frontman. Ezrin pulled together a group of mostly US studio musicians including guitarist Steve Hunter (who had worked with Ezrin with both Cooper and Reed), Dick Wagner (ditto, also a longtime Reed associate), synth artist Larry Fast, percussionist Jimmy Maelen, keyboardist Josef Chirowski, drummer Allan Schwartzman, and virtuoso bassist Tony Levin, who would go on to a nearly fifty-year career with Gabriel. To this mix Gabriel added King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, several months before he collaborated with David Bowie on “Heroes.” The London Symphony Orchestra appeared on several tracks as well. A minimalist production this was not.
The opening of the album suggests that this may indeed be an exercise in rock and roll excess, but with a progressive-rock core. “Moribund the Burgermeister” opens with a quietly mysterious verse over squelchy synths, describing an outbreak of disease (possibly St. Vitus Dance) in a medieval village: “Caught the chaos in the market square/I don’t know what, I don’t know why/But something’s wrong down there/Their bodies twisting and turning in a thousand ways/The eyes all rolling ’round and ’round into a distant gaze…” But in the chorus everything swells, the symphony (or at least guitars and synths) enter, and suddenly we’re in the head of the titular burgermeister: “No one can tell/what all this is about/but I will find out.” There’s more than a hint of Dylan’s Mr. Jones in the burgermeister, a figure both threatening and ridiculous, the latter especially in the song’s long fade-out as Gabriel mutters, “I will find out… Mother, you know your son, and you know I will” in an affected deep voice.
And then “Solsbury Hill.” Arguably the most beloved of all Gabriel’s solo work and certainly a highlight of his early career, the twelve-string intro is sunshine and reflection, as Gabriel narrates a story that is either about his transition from Genesis to a solo career, or about a long-stranded extraterrestrial being rescued from a hilltop by his alien friends. Played in 7/4, the longer measures contribute to the sense of reflection, as well as a perpetual feeling of being slightly off-balance.1 It’s not just the 7/4 that contributes this impression; the focal beat shifts within the measure thanks to the dotted rhythm, keeping the listener in motion as Gabriel sings the greatest line ever written about going solo: “I was feeling part of the scenery/I walked right out of the machinery.” But leaving aside all the complex backstory and the prog-rock rhythms, it’s still a joyous anthem to freedom, and clear to see why it remains among his most popular songs.
“Modern Love” feels more like it could have come out of another Ezrin production, albeit one with a love for odd metrical structures (the verse here is set with groups of three measures in common time — or one long 12/4 measure). It features a strenuous rock vocal from Peter, particularly on the chorus (“Ah, the pain! Modern love can be a strain”). According to Ezrin, this was method acting; he thought Gabriel’s vocal was too polite, so he asked engineer Brian Christian to take the musician up a ladder and duct-tape him to a pillar by his armpits to record the chorus vocal.
“Excuse Me” is easily the oddest song on the album. Opening with a barbershop quartet arranged by Tony Levin and featuring Chirowski and Maelen alongside Levin and Gabriel, the song fairly quickly mutates into a British dance hall number, with a chorus vocal that could have been sung by Randy Newman (and only the second appearance in four years of columns of the Acme siren whistle). It’s weird, and maybe the best example of Gabriel’s free exploration of different sounds on the record, once he was freed from the constraints of Genesis.
“Humdrum” feels a bit more like the band he left, if you disregard the samba. There’s a combination of a quiet intro, some Latin percussion which is interesting over the three-quarter time of the verse, odd backing instruments (harmonium!), and sweeping synthesizers on the chorus that take us into a swooning bridge and ultimately into a grand chorus, featuring a grandly disappointing lyric from Peter: “Out of woman comes a man/Spends the rest of his life getting back when he can.” This clunker aside, the rest of the song reads as a moving, if surreal (“Hey Valentina, you want me to beg? You got me cooking, I’m a hard boiled egg”) paean to love.
“Slowburn” gives us a massive Ezrin rock banger that alternates massive verse and chorus orchestration with a pre-chorus that pulls way back to focus on Gabriel’s voice and the piano. The lyrics, seemingly about a relationship slowly being eroded by drugs and each other, are opaque, but they lean into that 1970s guitar sound that Steve Hunter did so well, particularly that diminished 6th that could have been a riff from any of Ezrin’s 1970s production. The song seems destined to be unfinished, going to an unresolved supertonic that fades into nothing, but then Peter returns with an unusually direct plea: “Don’t try to make it easy/It’ll cut you down to size/Darling, we’ve got to trust in something/We’re shooting down our skies…” A sort of clockwork instrumental coda really does fade out into nothingness, leaving the plea unanswered…
… because “Waiting for the Big One” is many strange things, but an answer to “Slowburn”’s direct plea it ain’t. It’s a blues, a barroom song, a showpiece for Ezrin’s hired guns to demonstrate their professionalism, the sound of a drunkard waiting at a bar for the end of the world. Peter’s Randy Newman impression is at its peak here; it’s not one of his finest vocal moments. The instrumental breaks are arguably the best thing about the song, and they’re replete with all the bombast Steve Hunter could summon.
The apocalypse finally arrives in “Down the Dolce Vita,” with chocka-chocka rhythm guitars, the London Symphony, and motifs of drowning amid repeated declarations that “You guys are crazy!” The song is patently part of a larger epic, with characters we never really meet (Aeron and Gotham) trying to charter a boat to make it out of the harbor of a fishing village in a storm. The orchestra adds thrilling musical tension to the number, but ultimately it’s a series of empty visions; the story is too obscure and we’re left to guess at what is happening.
Out of the chaos of “Dolce Vita” comes a sublimely quiet, sad moment. “Here Comes the Flood” revisits the summit of Peter’s apotheosis in “Solsbury Hill” but in a decidedly more apocalyptic mood. The jagged imagery—starfish stranded on a beach, an old trail along a seaside cliff, a nail sunk in a cloud—leads up to the third verse, in which Peter sings of an increase in cosmic energy accompanying the nighttime surge in shortwave radio strength that ultimately leads to the dissolving of barriers between minds and the creation of a mass psychic entity. But you don’t need to know any of that; all you need is the quiet prophetic despair in the chorus: “Ah, here comes the flood/we will say goodbye to flesh and blood/If again, the seas are silent, in any still alive/It’ll be those who gave their island to survive/Drink up, dreamers, you’re running dry.” The first recorded version of the song is full of patented Ezrin bombast, with triumphalist electric guitars and soaring strings, turning the vision into something somehow triumphant. Gabriel ultimately was unsatisfied with this version and recorded it several more times (as you’ll hear below).
The uncanny metal eyeballs in the inner liner are courtesy a pair of mirrored contact lenses.
Part of the impenetrability of the second half of the album is that we’re only getting fragments of a larger story that Gabriel himself hardly knew. The being who catalyzed the departure of the boats and heralded the arrival of mass consciousness was a character called Mozo, a Mosaic figure who didn’t save people so much as inadvertently bring about massive change. Peter played with the narrative for years but never got it into a coherent shape; that never stopped him from including Mozo in several of his early songs. We’ll hear one of those next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Gabriel almost immediately re-recorded “Here Comes the Flood,” this time with Robert Fripp on Fripp’s 1978 album Exposure. This version still has a little of the bombast of the Ezrin version, thanks to Gabriel’s taking the later choruses an octave up, but generally the energy level of the song is more introspective:
BONUS BONUS: In 1978, Peter paid a special visit to Kate Bush on her BBC television Christmas special (which is a good topic for an entirely different post), and stole the show with this stripped down piano and vocal version of “Here Comes the Flood”:
BONUS BONUS BONUS:As any good child of the 1980s knows, Peter did another studio recording of “Flood” for his first greatest hits compilation, 1990’s Shaking the Tree. This one features a freer melody on the verse and is somehow even more pathos-filled:
I’m reminded of Peter Schickele’s line about P.D.Q. Bach’s waltz music, which “suggests that one of his legs was shorter than the other.” ↩︎
Sting’s double-LP 1987 release is his last to feature a heavy jazz influence, and he goes out in strong form, with Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Manu Katché, Mino Cinelu, and a guest appearance from Gil Evans.
Album of the Week, April 26, 2025
So it is that we come to Sting’s second solo album, and I have to warn you that I’m not sure I can be objective about this one. I was fourteen, almost fifteen when …Nothing Like the Sun, complete with its elliptical title, was released, and it pretty much consumed me. My parents gave me a copy on cassette; I joined a CD club, in part, to get a copy on CD. The tour was my first rock concert, at William and Mary Hall. For goodness’ sake, it was “Sister Moon” that got me attention from girls when I sang at a talent show at the Governor’s School for the Sciences in the summer of 1989.
So let’s dive right in. “The Lazarus Heart” opens the album at full tilt and with seemingly every musician (as noted last week, both Omar Hakim and Darryl Jones did not return from Sting’s first solo album) making themselves known in the first couple of bars. There’s an arpeggiated guitar riff from none other than Andy Summers, over layers of more guitar and keyboards, percussion from Mino Cinelu and a bass pattern that seeks up to the supertonic. After four measures, Manu Katché’s snare and cymbals announce the start of the song. Branford and Kenny Kirkland play the opening hook together on soprano saxophone and a keyboard that sounds an awful lot like a flute. Sting’s vocals are syncopated and push and pull against the tempo as he tells the story of a dream of his mother and a wound in his heart. Even had Sting not dedicated the album to his mother’s memory, you would be able to tell that she loomed large in his subconscious still, seven years after he hurt both his parents with his words in a Rolling Stone interview. The arrangement itself feels dreamlike, with Andy Summers’ guitar and Kenny Kirkland’s keyboards echoing and washing around the corners of the song. There’s a brilliant moment at the bridge where Branford takes the tune out of the syncopated beat it’s been in since the start and pulls it into straight measure for about eight beats, and another in the last chorus where everyone but Mino Cinelu’s percussion drops out, revealing the richness of the arrangement by its absence.
Andy Summers sticks around for “Be Still My Beating Heart” (Sting asks in the liner notes, “Why does tradition locate our emotional center at the heart and not somewhere in the brain?”). This is a gentler song, but not a ballad, driven by a bass figure (doubled in the keyboards) that runs up from the dominant to the tonic, and washes of Andy Summers guitar that blend into saxophone obbligatos, all driven by the pulse of the percussionists. There’s subtle vocal harmony on the chorus and almost subliminal piano parts happening under the pre-chorus; the latter becomes apparent when the vocals drop out in the second chorus. The whole thing is the closest Sting ever got to writing a Sade song.
“Englishman In New York” stands as another in a long line of early Sting songs that are driven on the back of a busy synthesizer part, in this case a pizzicato string part that makes up the majority of the arrangement for the first verse of the song (turning into synth strings for the bridge). Thankfully there’s also a fantastic Branford Marsalis through-line on the soprano sax, as well as some top-notch contributions by Manu Katché (the hi-hat! the snare work on the first verse!) and Mino Cinelu (a fine use of the cuícathroughout the chorus). Branford gets a properly swinging solo verse after the bridge, with fine support from Kenny Kirkland. The whole thing was written as an homage to Quentin Crisp, as Sting reports in the liner notes.; there was a movie made of the gay icon’s last years in New York titled after the song, starring John Hurt.
“History Will Teach Us Nothing” is the one reggae-inflected song on the album, Sting having mostly moved well beyond the days of Reggatta de Blanc by now. The groove, with guitar, bass, drums and percussion, is tight, but unfortunately the trick of doubling the sax with the keyboards seems to water down both here. Sting is in verbose mode, working on the theme of “Spirits in the Material World” and “Love is the Seventh Way,” calling for us to stop repeating history’s mistakes in the most provocative way possible—telling us to stop listening to it. Alas, we now know what happens when you ignore signs that history is repeating itself… I would say, though, that the outro chorus (“Know your human rights/be what you come here for”) is now perhaps more relevant than ever.
This takes us into the most topical song on the album, which I spent years thinking was on the wrong side of topicality until this year. Sting has talked about his writing process for the album following the death of his mother, as he retreated to an apartment in New York in a monastic existence; when he debuted this song and others to friends, they were powerfully moved but he didn’t feel it, having been locked inside his head for too long. “They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo)” is potentially a moving song, and certainly made more powerful by Sting’s focus on the “mothers of the disappeared,” who danced by themselves in anguished protest against the abductions and murders of their loved ones by the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. After years of performing in Amnesty benefits, he had fully inhabited the grief as well as the outrage of this cause. It’s unfortunate that this performance is the most adult contemporary of all the songs on the album; stretching to over seven minutes long, the song doesn’t even get Branford Marsalis until the last verse, and it wastes guest guitarists Eric Clapton, Fareed Haque, and Mark Knopfler, who seem to disappear into the texture of the song. I would totally write this one off, but for two things: the brilliant outro, when Kenny Kirkland finally can kick things into high gear by going into double time and Branford is let off the leash; and the fact that we now have more than enough opportunities to dance alone, without having to go to Chile.
“Fragile” ends this topical segment of the album with one of Sting’s finest ballads, written in memory of Ben Linder, an American civil engineer killed by the Nicaraguan contras in 1987 while he was working on a hydroelectric project. It succeeds where “They Dance Alone” fails by virtue of its brevity and restraint, with the majority of the song carried by the gentle percussion of Cinelu and Katché and by Sting’s remarkable Spanish-style guitar work. “Fragile” has been the touchstone to which Sting has returned in his career at times of national grief; it took on extra resonance as the lead-off song of All This Time, an acoustic set from his Tuscan villa that was recorded on September 11, 2001 as the musicians became aware of the facts of the attacks.
I wrote about “We’ll Be Together” last week at least in part so I wouldn’t have to this week. (There are a lot of songs on this album!) So let’s skip ahead. “Straight To My Heart” is another straight-up love song, and another one built on a programmed keyboard riff, but again it’s substantially improved by the percussion; here Katché and Cinelu play polyrhythms throughout, and the cuica makes another appearance. There’s another of those whistly synth lines throughout the chorus, but it works better here, and the whole thing has the feeling of a sonnet in 7/4. It’s a great band-kid song by virtue of the unusual meter; when I saw Sting live for the third time in Richmond in 1993 with my sister and her friends Jeremy and Christina, we made his band double-take as we bobbed our heads in perfect 7/4 time to this song.
“Rock Steady” is that rarity, a Sting song with a sense of humor. Despite the name, this is more a blues than a reggae number. As Sting retells the story of Noah’s Ark in a modern setting, we get imitations of the cries of the animals, whether by the sampler or by members of the band I’ve never quite been clear. Sting tells the story of two young lovers who get dragooned into helping Noah with the animals during the flood; once they’ve finally found dry land at the end and are leaving the boat, one of the backing vocalists (I’ve always imagined it’s Janice Pendarvis) teasingly asks, “Got any more bright ideas?” We don’t get too many laugh-out-loud moments in Sting’s oeuvre, so I take this one while I can.
“Sister Moon” is a saxophone feature and a dark ballad, in some ways reminiscent of “Moon Over Bourbon Street.” But where that song’s arrangement builds from acoustic bass to keyboard and saxophone, here the track builds on washes of synthesizer sound, with only Branford’s playing to break it up. Thankfully he gives a bravura performance. I somehow found a saxophone player at the Governor’s School for the Sciences at Virginia Tech in July of 1989 and he learned the part by ear. We performed it twice, and by the time we were done I had decided I wanted to sing for the rest of my life.
Ironically, “Little Wing” is the other song I’ve performed from this album, about 21 years and change ago. The arrangement on this album is pretty special, marking Sting’s first collaboration with the great Gil Evans, whom we last saw working with Miles Davis in Carnegie Hall, and whom I mentioned had cut a killer version of “Murder by Numbers” with Sting in the late 1980s. This is where that collaboration started, though apparently Sting had met him years previously at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. The arrangement is an endorphin overload, with Evans’ orchestra and keyboards supporting Sting’s vocals as he sings the hell out of the Jimi Hendrix standard. Mostly what you hear, though, is Hiram Bullock’s guitar, which gets a great solo that transitions into a cool take from Branford before Sting recaps the verse once more at the end. (Bullock, who died in 2008, had played on a variety of rock and fusion recordings, including playing on Steely Dan’s “My Rival” from Gaucho and Paul Simon’s “That’s Why God Made the Movies” from One Trick Pony.)
On this album, “Little Wing” serves as the center of a three-song set about love, moving from the inchoate mooning of “Sister Moon” into a declaration of love that seems to combine muscular feats of strength with moments of heavenward striving. The last song on the album moves into something considerably more intimate. “The Secret Marriage” was written to a tune by blacklisted German composer Hanns Eisler, who partnered with Bertolt Brecht in both Weimar Germany and in the United States and who composed scores for some 40 films, before being run out of American on a rail by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Sting performed one of the duo’s songs, “An Den Kleinen Radio-Apparat,” in 1987 and adapted the song’s melody for “The Secret Marriage.” It’s an intensely private statement of love, and is a striking note on which to end …Nothing Like the Sun, as if declaring an end to the rule of the King of Pain.
The album cycle for …Nothing Like the Sun, from its release through the tour and the eventual follow-up, lasted for almost four years. During that time a great many things changed, including the almost complete cessation of new music releases on vinyl in the United States. You can find a copy of the follow-up, The Soul Cages, on LP but you have to really look hard, and the subsequent albums weren’t released in vinyl form in the US, or at all. (There’s still no US release of Ten Summoner’s Tales on vinyl, to my surprise.) Sting also played less jazz following the completion of this song cycle; though Kenny Kirkland played on The Soul Cages and Branford guested on a few songs, for the most part Sting has stayed straight on in the pop lane ever since. But Branford’s career as a bandleader was just taking off; we’ll hear one of his quartet’s albums next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: There were some really interesting b-sides from this album. Last week we heard “Conversation with a Dog,” but there was also the jazz piece “Ghost in the Strand,” a pop song that maybe should have made the album (“If You There”), Sting’s well-done cover of Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and an adventurous collaboration with Gil Evans on Jimi Hendrix’s “Up From the Skies.” (I wrote about getting “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Up From the Skies” off a 3-inch CD single, with some difficulty and an adapter, some time ago.) The last spawned a full concert collaboration between Sting and the septuagenarian arranger/bandleader at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy in 1987; you can watch that widely bootlegged performance below:
BONUS BONUS: There’s a popular but as far as I can tell apocryphal story that the song “The Lazarus Heart” was written for the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, to be played over a scene that would have come from the original novel in which Roger is killed at the end of the movie. Sad to say, there is no footage combining the two.
Sting got up to a lot between his first and second album, including reuniting with the Police, saving the world, and … making beer commercials? The #albumoftheweek checks out the road to “We’ll Be Together.”
Album of the Week, April 19, 2025
I’m going to talk about the lead off single from Sting’s second solo studio album in this post, but it’s going to take me a while to get to it, because Sting took almost two and a half years to make the song. And what he was doing in the meantime kept him very busy.
The last we heard from Sting, he had followed his debut solo album with a documentary and live album, covering the formation of the jazz-rock combo that accompanied him through both those projects (and the birth of his son Jake). Those projects took up a good portion of 1985, though the Bring on the Nightlive album would not see release until the summer of 1986. So what was he doing in the meantime? Well, first of all he had to save the world. He appeared in a series of six concerts for Amnesty International known as the Conspiracy of Hope tour alongside Peter Gabriel, U2, Lou Reed, Joan Baez, Bryan Adams and the Neville Brothers. A number of Very Significant Things happened in these concerts. First, it solidified Sting’s association with Amnesty and his commitment to the cause of prisoners of conscience.
Second, the concerts served as a venue for an unexpected reunion of the Police, who hadn’t played together since their Synchronicity tour ended in March 1984 in Australia. The band wrapped up the Conspiracy of Hope tour by reuniting during the last three concerts; on June 15, 1986, they played a set at Giants Stadium in New Jersey in which they closed their set with “Invisible Sun.” U2’s earnest lead vocalist Bono joined that performance, and at the end, the Police members handed their instruments to the members of U2 as they joined the all-star finale version of “I Shall Be Released.” Bono, naturally regarded it as “a very big moment, like passing a torch.”
Sting and the band weren’t quite prepared to pass the torch, though, and they made arrangements to reconvene in the studio in July to start working on songs for a new album. Fate might have looked very differently if that project had gone ahead as planned, but the night before the recordings Stewart Copeland fell from a horse and broke his collarbone. Without the ability to effectively play together in the studio, the band did not gel as a writing and performing unit and they left after only recording two songs, both re-recordings of hits from Zenyatta Mondatta. “Don’t Stand So Close To Me ’86” would feature on their Every Breath You Take: The Singles compilation (and be played endlessly by me), but “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da ’86” wouldn’t be officially released until 2000.
So much for the Police, alas. So what happened to Sting next? Well, the next thing he released was also associated with Amnesty; the “Conspiracy of Hope” tour begat a compilation record, also called Conspiracy of Hope (at least in the UK; the US version received the less euphonious name Rock for Amnesty). Other participants shared previously recorded album tracks (inevitably and appropriately, Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” from his third self-titled album leads the first side) or studio rarities like the re-recorded version of Tears for Fears’ “I Believe.”
Sting chose to go into the studio to record something specifically for the compilation. That he chose to cover Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” seems a little incomprehensible now, but in the context of Amnesty’s work for justice, a pointed callout to America’s own history of racial injustice can be perhaps forgiven. The performance itself is brief but memorable; Sting’s vocals are in fine fettle and he is accompanied mostly by his own upright bass, with some subtle cymbals and keyboards.
After that, in late 1986, Sting’s mother died. They had not been especially close; in fact, Sting was at this point all but estranged from his family, having made some impolitic remarks in 1980 to a Rolling Stone interviewer: “I come from a family of losers – I’m the eldest of four – and I’ve rejected my family as something I don’t want to be like. My father delivered milk for a living and my mother was a hairdresser. Those are respectable occupations, but my family failed as a family, I grew up with a pretty piss-poor family life. I lived in Newcastle, which would be like living in Pittsburgh, and the whole thing for me was escape.” Though he was penitent in a 1983 interview, the family did not appear to have reconciled before his mother’s death. Years later, he confessed that he threw himself directly into work as a way to cope.
And the work that he found, at least for the time being, was a beer commercial. If you ever thought that “We’ll Be Together” sounded a little slick compared to the rest of Sting’s second album from which it was drawn, that might be because it was literally composed on spec: the Japanese brewing conglomerate Kirin Brewing Company asked him for a song for a commercial, to include the word “together” in the lyrics. Sting apparently wrote the song in a few minutes, the producers liked it, and he went and recorded it with Eric Clapton on guitar. A tidy payday.
Apparently Sting felt some remorse or at least dissatisfaction with the track, because he re-recorded it for its single release and album incarnation, this time with session guitarist Bryan Loren (best known for authoring and performing the song “Do the Bartman” from the album The Simpsons Sing the Blues, with an uncredited Michael Jackson on backing vocals. You can’t make this stuff up). But you can hear the original version with Clapton on the expanded edition of his second album, or on the b-side of the 12″ single. The 12″ also features the original album version, an extended mix that elongates the intro and adds a few extra bars, and an instrumental version.
All the non-Clapton versions feature the same band: Sting on bass and vocals, Kenny Kirkland on keys, Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Dolette McDonald and Janice Pendarvis on backing vocals, and some new faces—French drummer Manu Katché, who had played with Peter Gabriel on So, percussionist Mino Cinelu who had played with Miles and Weather Report, and backing vocalists Renée Geyer and Vesta Williams (who scored six top-10 Billboard R&B hits in the 1980s and 1990s in her own right). Missing from the mix: Omar Hakim, who was busy with other commitments, and Darryl Jones, who had presciently observed in an interview segment in Bring On the Night that “I’m not so totally sure yet that this is a band, in that everyone has… a totally equal say in what happens.” He would not record again with Sting, though he went on to a long career as the bassist in The Rolling Stones.
The other song on the single is a true curiosity in Sting’s work. “Conversation with a Dog” features a tight bass groove, some robotic sequencing and funky keyboards, and some of Sting’s most philosophical lyrics, cast as a Socratic dialog with his dog: “What about our politics, philosophy, our history?/ ‘If something’s admirable in these, it is a mystery.’” It’s a great showcase for Kenny Kirkland, if nothing else, and for Sting’s moderately believable impression of a barking dog. And I must confess I continue to have in the back of my mind the couplet “There must be something in our scientific treasure/ ‘Despair,’ he said, ‘of which your weapons are the measure.’” “Conversation with a Dog” hinted that Sting had deeper preoccupations on his mind than beer commercials, and we’ll check more of those out next time.
You can see the original music video for “We’ll Be Together,” set to the extended mix of the song, here:
Sadly, there was no video for “Conversation with a Dog.” But! It turns out there were several Kirin beer commercials as part of the epic advertising campaign, all featuring Sting looking smoldering. You’re welcome.
PS: I have yet to forgive the graphic designer of this record sleeve for not knowing the difference between a straight quotation mark and a proper apostrophe. I haven’t been able to prove it, but I’ve long suspected that this cover was a contributing factor leading to Robin Williams’ creation of her groundbreaking work The Mac Is Not a Typewriter. Still worth a read, if only to clear up the mystery of the number of spaces after a period (one).
You’re a rock star who’s just changed genres and shifted into a jazz-rock hybrid with a band of up and coming jazz legends who have played with the best. You’ve had a few hits from your first solo album with this group. What do you do next?
Well, if you’re Sting, you start touring the minute the album hits the streets, and you hire a film crew, complete with an award winning director, to document the formation of the band as a touring unit and to capture the band at its inception, rather than waiting until the band is at its peak or dissolving. Then you release that movie while the album is still on the charts, and follow it up the next summer with a live double album release in which the jazz is even more prominent. Welcome to Bring on the Night.
The one thing that struck me forcefully, listening last week in detail to The Dream of the Blue Turtles, was how much of it was clearly directly from Sting’s sequencers, the band (especially Kenny Kirkland’s fine playing) audible mostly as color or commentary. That’s not the case here. This is the sound of a jazz band (again, composed of Kirkland, Branford Marsalis, Darryl Jones, and Omar Hakim, with Janice Pendarvis and Dolette McDonald on backing vocals) taking a concert’s worth of material and making it thoroughly their own.
That said, the opening to “Bring on the Night/When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” is all Sting. With the reggae rhythms of the Police’s version of “Bring on the Night” banished, Sting gives us a brisk, running arpeggio down the song’s key changes on his guitar, accompanied by quiet keyboards and percussion as he sings the opening in an easy voice. When he comes to the chorus, the stacked vocals of Pendarvis and McDonald bring that richness that they added to the chorus of “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free,” with Kenny’s keyboards adding mercurial chord changes around the edges of the tune. The second verse features a Darryl Jones bass line that anchors the tune in even more funk; when the second chorus comes in, Branford Marsalis plays a counter-melody that riffs into a minor key vamp that the band plays for 64 bars, under the chorus of “Bring on the Night” and then wordless vocals—and then Sting sings the opening notes to “When the World is Running Down You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” over the same vamp. After two verses and two choruses, the rest of the band drops back and Kenny Kirkland takes an extended solo that manages to continue the riff, extend the chordal palette, play with rhythm, and build dynamic contrast, all over the course of about 16 choruses in a little over three minutes. (Narrator: “It was about at this time, at the age of fourteen, that I decided I needed to listen to more jazz.”) The band does a little call and response with the chorus, and then: a rap break. Yes, that’s Branford Marsalis shouting out the band with some early 1980s rhymes, in what I believe is the saxophonist’s only rap credit on record. The band continues to jam over the vamp as they return to the verse once more, this time with Branford playing a tenor obbligato over the sung chorus and into an explosive but brief solo over one last chorus.
By contrast to the immense jam of the first track, “Consider Me Gone” hews much closer to the arrangement on the record; what excitement there is comes purely from the interchanges of the musicians, starting with Sting trading phrases with Branford in the opening and Dolette, Janice and Omar Hakim building stacks of harmony over the bluesy “You can’t say that” pre-chorus. Here Kenny’s Synclavier, sounding like a Hammond organ, primarily simmers rather than boiling, and Branford builds intensity by punctuating each line of the verse, sometimes just commenting, other times spinning lines of melody that pull in different directions. Darryl Jones and Omar Hakim anchor the blues, coming to a slow boil finally in the last chorus as the band moves into the closing vamp.
“Low Life,” originally released as the b-side to “Spirits in the Material World” and dating all the way back to 1979, is an odd tune, a lyric that seems to be about the hazards of slumming it: “A fatal fascination for the seedy party of town…” The band gamely gives it a full treatment nonetheless, blooming out of another Sting arpeggiated guitar opening, with Omar Hakim’s muscular drumming bringing up the energy through two verses until Branford’s saxophone enters as if summoned. The ultimate pleasure of the song is again hearing the band sing those crunchy chords over the chorus: “Low life/is no life” is an odd refrain to have stuck in your head, but here we are.
“We Work the Black Seam” again closely follows the studio arrangement, albeit with the synths of the original supplemented by a more prominent solo keyboard part that’s echoed by Branford’s soprano sax. But there’s also a very slight swing to Sting’s vocal and the instrumentalists’ accompaniment that brings some relief from the insistent repetition of the programmed keyboard track, and Branford’s free saxophone lines over the second verse again pull at the tonality of the verse, bringing it to unexpectedly rich places. The extra half-verse that is added in the third feels actually moving, despite being a bit of a word salad: “Our conscious lives run deep/You cling onto your mountain while we sleep/This way of life is part of me/There is no price so only let me be.”
“Driven to Tears” takes the intensity of the Police’s statement of empathy for the impoverished world around them and stretches it into a seven-minute-long workout. It’s an engaging listen, but proves the rare case where this band couldn’t elevate the source material above its existing heights. That’s not for lack of trying; there are some intense moments in the arrangement, and the crowd energy is high as they clap along with the band on the opening vamp. Again, Kenny Kirkland is the hero of the arrangement, playing mostly acoustic piano and opening holes of light in the harmonics of the vamp. Branford enters in the second chorus and takes an extended solo as the chords change from the dark tonality of the opening to a higher key and Branford repeats a blues riff, hopping up to a blue note on the minor third. The band comes back to the original tonality for the last verse and seems to come to a conclusion, but then starts to build up again and drops right back into the higher key. This is where the arrangement falls flat for me, as Branford continues soloing even though he doesn’t bring forward any new ideas. Ultimately when the band brings it back to one last chorus it comes as a little bit of a relief.
“The Dream of the Blue Turtles/Demolition Man,” on the other hand, gives us a brisk romp through the Blue Turtles instrumental theme, complete with a quick dip into three in the verse and a brief Kenny Kirkland solo. The band then drops into a driving rock beat and gives us a fierce rave-up on the Police song, with some improvised clavier soloing from Kirkland and apocalyptic drumming from Omar Hakim. Where “Driven to Tears” feels stretched thin, “Demolition Man” feels muscular and energetic, as though it could go on for hours. Maybe it’s that riff; maybe it’s Janice and Dolette singing the hell out of that chorus. Maybe it’s even having Branford play a real saxophone part on the hook instead of Sting’s enthusiastic amateur work. Whatever, it is, as they say, a banger.
When I first heard the album, “One World (Not Three)/Love is the Seventh Wave” opened the second CD; on the vinyl version it opens the second record with an a cappella version of the repeated vocal hook to the Police’s song (“It may seem a million miles away/But it gets a little closer every day”), here given a reading that puts reggae energy back into the song thanks to the steel-drum-like Synclavier work of Kenny Kirkland and Omar Hakim’s percussion. Sting leads the arena in a singalong of the chorus, brings back an a cappella rendition of the vocal hook, then returns to the chorus with some vocal improvisation atop it, only to slam right into “Love is the Seventh Wave,” with Kirkland, Darryl Jones and Omar Hakim continuing to play the same arrangement across the new song’s chord changes. Branford takes another solo, sort of; his approach to these songs appears to mostly be to repeat one idea across eight bars, then switch to another idea and do it again, as though making sure the folks in the cheap seats get the picture. There’s some decent harmonic imagination going on, but not enough of it. The band settles into a new key for a sort of New Wave blues vamp, and Sting and the vocalists alternate singing “One world is enough” with the lyrics to “Love is the Seventh Wave” in the new minor key. The arrangement winds up back in the original key in a sort of summation, but due to the drop in energy during the blues vamp it feels more like the band climbs to its feet than a culmination in energy.
“Moon Over Bourbon Street” again aligns closely to its arrangement on the record, which isn’t a bad thing, since the original was a standout on Dream of the Blue Turtles. Again, we get Sting on upright bass and Branford on soprano sax, though in this arrangement without the full orchestra Branford and Kenny have to fill in, ably, for the classical interlude; we even get what sounds like a little timpani roll from Omar Hakim. It’s a nice version of the original song but not transformative.
The transformation comes with “I Burn for You.” From the paranoiac, tense version on Brimstone and Treacle, the tune’s rebirth as a torch song is something of a surprise. Arrangement-wise, this is another one that opens with an arpeggio on both piano and guitar under Sting’s gentle melody. But it grows in intensity into the bridge as Branford layers a counter-melody over the crashing drums and questing bass line. Sting improvises vocally on the chorus as the band floats into a dreamy version of the “Brimstone” theme, given an entirely different character by Branford’s harmonization, and the song extends into a sort of reverie over a deep chord progression in the keys and bass. A swell of cheering seems out of place in the midst of this section; viewing the concert film reveals that Sting has pulled out his custom upright bass and started to play the Brimstone theme on it. The record fades out here rather than break the spell; in the concert video the band shifts gears into a long, higher energy improv over the Brimstone vamp, in one of the most satisfactory moments of the whole show, complete with some seriously Copeland-esque drum work from Hakim and a saxophone solo from Branford that betters anything that made it onto the record.
The last side of the album opens with “Another Day,” here transformed from the synth-driven New Wave energy of the b-side to a jazzy acoustic arrangement anchored by Kenny Kirkland’s piano and Omar Hakim’s percussion. Branford gets a good solo between verses, and Janice and Dolette’s harmonies carry the chorus, but otherwise this is a straightforward reading of the song. But “Children’s Crusade” is another story. Like “Moon Over Bourbon Street,” this starts as a straightforward translation of the record’s arrangement to the bandstand, with Kenny Kirkland’s piano substituting for the keyboards of the original. When we get to Branford’s sax solo following the chorus, though, we’re in deeper territory. Here we hear reams of ideas unspooling from his soprano sax, with Coltrane-esque “sheets of sound,” playing against the rhythm, and a seamless transition into the heraldic motif of the final chorus. It’s easily his best moment on the record, and one could wish that the producers had captured more moments like this from the performances.
In “Down So Long,” we have a peek of some of Sting’s affection for old American R&B, as previously heard on the Party Party soundtrack. Written by blues guitarist J.B. Lenoir and Alex Atkins, the track is here given a straightforward blues romp with a tight keyboard solo from Kirkland and a quiet coda on the last verse. (The song previously appeared in a duet with Jeff Beck on the 1985 cancer research benefit compilation Live! For Life, which I hadn’t heard before today.) The album closes with “Tea in the Sahara,” which gets a swinging shuffle from Darryl Jones’ bass, transforming the arid feeling of the Synchronicity track into something of a victory lap for the band. Again, Branford’s saxophone uplifts the final outro, playing into some atmospheric guitar work from Sting and an off-kilter piano pattern from Kenny.
You can get by without having heard Bring on the Night; the live album doesn’t introduce any material not heard elsewhere. But it serves as a transformation of the material, shaped by the tremendous abilities of this band, even if the versions on the record are sometimes paler shadows of the energy of the live improvisations captured in the movie. In some ways the playfulness and energy of the performances make this my favorite of Sting’s recordings. He wouldn’t be this unmannered and spontaneous very often throughout his career; as Trudie Styler says in an interview early in the film, it’s down to the influence of these American jazz musicians that we get to see a Sting who laughs and engages in true band dynamics in these performances.
We’re going to briefly turn from his music back to the music of the jazz musicians who sparked this musical rebirth. But first we’re going to see what happened to Wynton Marsalis’s sound after he fired his brother and Kenny Kirkland for joining Sting’s band. That’ll come next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: I strongly recommend watching at least the first half of Bring on the Night (the movie). Apted has a way of getting true things to come out of the mouths of the participants in the film and the band rehearsal scenes are a lot of fun to watch. But if you don’t watch anything else, you owe it to yourself to watch this bit as Sting and the band cook up a quick cover of the “Flintstones” theme:
