Shipping notice from Jpc.de
Peter Gabriel I/O (2CD/Blu-Ray with Dolby Atmos mix out 12/1!)
- Thread starter César
- Start date
Help Support QuadraphonicQuad:
splinter
Member
Mine arrived today. Just listening to the Atmos mix (in 5.1). All very nicely done, high production value, but it seems a little like a tame late work - which it probably is 
The surround mix is good, but mostly as you would expect it.
The surround mix is good, but mostly as you would expect it.
popshop
800 Club - QQ All-Star
I believe a couple listens will reveal it isn't tame in any way.
splinter
Member
Not sure about that, but the album definitely grows. But I still feel there is no experimentation or daring or even modernism in sound compared to the last two studio albums (Us and Up). It feels like a follow-up that comes about 15 to 20 years late. Still a fine album though.
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2010
- Messages
- 940
Mine is "arriving tomorrow by 10 PM". We also saw the I/O show in San Francisco. First/Last time seeing Peter live, despite being a huge fan.
I just ordered AMAZON 2/CD/BLU RAY, arrives tomorrow.
kap'n krunch
2K Club - QQ Super Nova
.
Last edited:
My only one time seeing him live was back in the early 90s. That tour featured the So album. He handed himself off to the audience during Beko and travelled around the front of the venue on peoples hands.
He often releases videos of the larger tours, so you might get a keepsake. .
Have you seen the Secret World or Growing Up concert videos? They are well worth seeking out.
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2010
- Messages
- 940
Yes I think I have all the tour DVD/BlueRays. Secret World (what an opening! and Paula Cole!) and Growing Up Live are probably my favorites.
Forgive me for being pedantic, but the song he crowd-surfed to was- appropriately enough- Lay Your Hands on Me.
alansanchez86
800 Club - QQ All-Star
I'm just listening to the album for the first time, and it's marvellous!
Question, how do I find most of the in-side mixes (atmos) in Apple Music? when I browse and search for Peter Gabriel, I only find the in-side mixes for Panopticon and some other under Singles & EPs
Question, how do I find most of the in-side mixes (atmos) in Apple Music? when I browse and search for Peter Gabriel, I only find the in-side mixes for Panopticon and some other under Singles & EPs
popshop
800 Club - QQ All-Star
It's weird. Some show up, some don't. 'Other versions' sometimes brings you to them. Here's a playlist if you want:
alansanchez86
800 Club - QQ All-Star
Much appreciated!
Hopefully it will get sorted tomorrow.
I can see it being published in one of two ways:
They could upload all 3 versions in one long “album”, Light followed by Dark followed by In
or
It’s 3 discrete albums, and they’ll be available under “other versions”. So if you open Light, and scroll all the way down you’ll see the other versions.
OR
All of the above, because chaos.
Ya know.... You are right. Now where is my Prevagin
popshop
800 Club - QQ All-Star
PG's words about the songs for anyone interested. Happy i/o release!!!!
PANOPTICOM:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Panopticom was recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London.
‘The first song is based on an idea I have been working on to initiate the creation of an infinitely expandable accessible data globe: The Panopticom,’ says Gabriel. ‘We are beginning to connect a like-minded group of people who might be able to bring this to life, to allow the world to see itself better and understand more of what’s really going on.’
THE COURT:
‘I had this idea for ‘the court will rise’ chorus, so it became a free-form, impressionistic lyric that connected to justice, but there’s a sense of urgency there. A lot of life is a struggle between order and chaos and in some senses the justice or legal system is something that we impose to try and bring some element of order to the chaos. That’s often abused, it’s often unfair and discriminatory but at the same time it’s probably an essential part of a civilised society. But we do need to think sometimes about how that is actually realised and employed.’
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, The Court was recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London, and features contributions from Brian Eno alongside Tony Levin, David Rhodes and Manu Katché, as well as backing vocals from Peter’s daughter Melanie Gabriel. The orchestral arrangement is by John Metcalfe with Peter Gabriel and was recorded at British Grove Studios in London with a number of players who previously featured in the New Blood Orchestra.
PLAYING FOR TIME:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Playing For Time was recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London, and features Tom Cawley on piano. The orchestral arrangement, by Ed Shearmur, was recorded at British Grove Studios in London with a number of players who previously featured in the New Blood Orchestra.
‘Playing For Time is a song that I have been working on for a long time and have performed live, without lyrics, so some people may be familiar with it. It’s been an important song for me. It's about time, mortality and memories and the idea that each of us has a planet full of memories which get stashed inside the brain.
It is more of a personal song about how you assemble memories and whether we are prisoners of time or whether that is something that can actually free us. I do think it’s good to push yourself towards more bold or interesting experiences because then you will have richer memories to feed you when you get to my age. You also get taught by every meaningful experience that you go through.’
The presence of Tom Cawley on piano and Ed Shearmur’s arrangement, provide nice touch-points with Gabriel’s previous work. Cawley, having played piano on the New Blood Tour, was an obvious choice, ‘even though I performed and played piano live quite a lot I felt that this was something that I could get a real piano player in for and Tom Cawley is a brilliant musician.’ The connection to Ed Shearmur goes even further back;
‘I thought back to That’ll Do, the Randy Newman song that I sang, and Ed Shearmur had done a beautiful arrangement on that and I thought that maybe that sort of thing would really suit this song well, so we managed to track Ed down again. When I first heard the demos it brought a tear to the eye because I felt so much emotion in it, particularly at the end. That was definitely what I wanted to try and do with this song, to give that emotional journey. It means a lot to me.’
Gabriel’s thoughts about time were, in part, influenced by the work of the Long Now Foundation, and Danny Hillis’s extraordinary invention, The 10,000 Year Clock, which is an idea designed to try and encourage us to think long-term. ‘I’m sure that if we have a chance of surviving the existential problems that we now face we have to start thinking much bigger and longer to make some real headway. So, I think what they do is enormously valuable and there are some amazing talks on their website, so for those that want a deep dive into the role of time and long-term thinking, the Long Now Foundation is a wonderful place to start.’
I/O:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, i/o was primarily recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London. The song features Soweto Gospel Choir, who were recorded at High Seas Studios in South Africa.
'This month the song is i/o and i/o means input / output. You see it on the back of a lot of electrical equipment and it just triggered some ideas about the stuff we put in and pull out of ourselves, in physical and non-physical ways. That was the starting point of this idea and then trying to talk about the interconnectedness of everything. The older I get, I probably don't get any smarter, but I have learned a few things and it makes a lot of sense to me that we are not these independent islands that we like to think we are, that we are part of a whole. If we can see ourselves as better connected, still messed up individuals, but as part of a whole, then maybe there's something to learn?'
i/o as a potential album title has long-been known within fan circles, and is now the name of the current project, the album and the forthcoming tour, but as Gabriel says, 'It's been around for a long time as a title for this project. I always knew I was going to write a song called i/o, but the title came first.'
i/o sees Gabriel working again with Soweto Gospel Choir, who previously featured on the song Down to Earth that was recorded for the film Wall-E and who he’s also performed with twice in South Africa at events for Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu;
'I didn't always hear the Soweto Gospel Choir on this song, but every time I've worked with them it's always been fantastic. You can just feel the energy whenever they sing on this record, and on the song I did for Wall-E, it's just joyous. It hits you in the heart.'
FOUR KINDS OF HORSES:
"Four Kinds of Horses actually began on Richard Russell’s project ‘Everything Is Recorded’. He’s a friend (and founder of XL Records) and he asked me to pop in to his studio. I came up with some chords, melodies and words on top of a groove he was working on. We tried a few things that didn't altogether work and so it laid dormant for quite a while. Then I started playing around with it again and changed the mood and the groove and something else began to emerge with a better chorus."
There were a number of things that triggered ideas for the song as it developed, including the Buddhist parable of the Four Kinds of Horses, which describes different ways a student can approach their spiritual practice. There is also a focus on “the interesting overlap of religion and peace on the one hand and violence and terrorism on the other. There was also a wonderful film by Hany Abu-Assad called ‘Paradise Now’ which shows two young men who end up being trained to become terrorists and it's a real insight into where the head goes.”
As well as Russell, who set things in motion, Four Kinds of Horses also features Brian Eno on synths which “sounded like electric worms to me,” says Gabriel. “As soon as I heard one I thought they would make a great three dimensional wall paper of sound and asked Brian to create eleven more.” John Metcalfe again provides string arrangements, “beautiful work and as the song progresses, the strings play a key role” and backing vocals from Peter’s daughter Melanie, “another lovely moment for a dad.”
ROAD TO JOY:
Written by Peter Gabriel and produced by Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno, Road to Joy features Soweto Gospel Choir, a string arrangement from John Metcalfe and contributions from a number of Gabriel’s current touring band; long-time collaborators Tony Levin (bass), David Rhodes (guitar) and Manu Katché (drums) as well as two newer members Don E (bass keys), ‘he did the funkiest bass line that you can imagine’ and Josh Shpak (trumpet), ‘beautiful playing, a super musical guy.’ The song was recorded at Real World Studios, Bath, The Beehive and British Grove, London and High Seas Studios, South Africa.
‘I'm working on a project which is partly a story focused around the brain and how we perceive things and this song connects to that. It deals with near-death experience and locked-in syndrome situations where people are unable to communicate or to move. It's an amazingly frustrating condition. There have been some great books and films about this subject, but at this point in our story the people looking after our hero manage to find a way to wake him up. So, it’s a lyric about coming back into your senses, back to life, back into the world.’
The song is one of the last tracks to emerge for the i/o record, but it has some DNA from an earlier project; ‘It was actually very late in the record that we got to this. There had been a song that musically I'd started, I think, around the OVO project called Pukka. It was very different to this, but it was actually the starting point for coming back to this song. I just felt there was a good groove there, and I wanted something else with rhythm and so we tried a few things when I was working with Brian Eno. The excitement and energy in the song was something that I was getting off on. I felt we didn't have enough of that for this record.’
SO MUCH:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, So Much is ‘a simple song’, that features a string arrangement from John Metcalfe and contributions from Tony Levin on bass, David Rhodes on guitar and backing vocals from Peter’s daughter Melanie Gabriel. The song was recorded at Real World Studios, Bath, The Beehive and British Grove, London.
‘I was trying purposefully not to be clever with this. I wanted to get a very simple chorus but one which still had some substance to the harmony and melody. Something that was easy to digest but still had a bit of character to it.
So Much is about mortality, getting old, all the bright, cheerful subjects, but I think when you get to my sort of age, you either run away from mortality or you jump into it and try and live life to the full and that always seems to make a lot more sense to me. The countries that seem most alive are those that have death as part of their culture.’
As Peter goes on to explain, there’s a duality to the meaning of So Much, which is just as much about reveling in all the experiences and joyous distractions still to be had right now as it is about contemplating the future; ‘The reason I chose So Much as a title is because I’m addicted to new ideas and all sorts of projects. I get excited by things and want to jump around and do different things. I love being in a mess of so much! And yet it also means there's just so much time, or whatever it is, available. Balancing them both is what the song is about.’
OLIVE TREE:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Olive Tree is another song about connection, both how we interact with nature and the other species around us, but also a greater sensitivity to the potential for broadening human experience, ‘in some ways I do think we are part of everything and we probably have means to connect and communicate with everything that we often shut off. We only want to see and listen to the things that seem important and relevant to us and shut out the noise of everything else when, probably, hidden in that noise there are all sorts of things that can help us realise our place in this future world.’
Like the song Road to Joy, released in June, Olive Tree is also part of a separate brain-related project that Peter is currently working on, as well as being partly influenced by his interest in the brain reading research of the likes of Jack Gallant’s Lab at Berkeley and Mary Lou Jepsen’s work at Openwater.cc, ‘it feeds into this idea that we're no longer these islands that have our own private thoughts, that our thoughts are going to get opened up to the outside world. The lubrication that allows society to function is based, in part, on not being able to read what's going on in other people's minds, so unless we get more comfortable with how we really are, we're probably going to prefer to stay partly buried in our private worlds.’
Musically, Olive Tree provides another up-tempo moment for the i/o record, ‘I wanted it to have some speed to it but I also wanted some mystery, too. I think it is a celebration in a way and there's a real sense of being alive.’ The song features a string arrangement from John Metcalfe, with further contributions from Manu Katché on drums, Tony Levin on bass, David Rhodes on guitar, Josh Shpak on trumpet and additional percussion from Jed Lynch. The song was recorded at Real World Studios, Bath, The Beehive and British Grove, London.
LOVE CAN HEAL:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Love Can Heal is ‘a dreamy, experiential piece with some abstract imagery,’ says Gabriel, ‘a carpet of sound, a tapestry where things are woven together, but not necessarily supposed to stick out, but just form part of a whole.’
Love Can Heal is a song that has been performed during the recent i/o tour, but actually had its live premiere during Peter Gabriel and Sting’s Rock, Paper, Scissors tour of North America of 2016.
‘Love Can Heal was written around 2016 and I did start playing it midway through the tour and dedicated it to Jo Cox, who was the British MP brutally murdered by an extremist and someone that I had met at a leadership conference. I think the song fits right in to the themes of the album in the sense that i/o is about feeling and being connected to everything and in a way, the next evolution of being connected to things is a feeling of love for everything.’
THIS IS HOME:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, This Is Home is, he says, ‘a love song.’
‘It began with inspiration from some of the great Tamla Motown rhythm sections so we’re trying to recreate that in a modern way, complete with the tambourine and handclaps. The groove I like a lot, Tony Levin does a great bass part there.’
‘I did an unusual thing for me in that I tried doing this low voice / high voice thing, so you get this almost conversational voice at the beginning and the second part is a higher, more emotional voice. I thought that would be both intimate and emotive to put the two side by side.’
Though he doesn’t appear on the final track, some of the early brainstorming for what was to become This Is Home was done with the DJ and producer Skrillex;
‘I’d had a call from Skrillex, who’s a very talented musician, and I thought it would be interesting to see what he had in mind, so he came to my home studio and we sat down and talked and tried to evolve bits and pieces and it was mainly for this song. He was trying to encourage me to write a song about staying up all night in a night club and that sort of thing, but that’s not really my life so I made it more about family and home and I like it. Though we took the song in this other direction it was an interesting experience nonetheless, and I think it is good for me to be taken outside my normal comfort zone sometimes.’
This Is Home features contributions from a Swedish male voice choir called Orphei Drängar, as well as another orchestral arrangement from John Metcalfe;
‘I think it’s got a groove but unlike most pop songs that have a middle eight or bridge this has two and they are both quite different. The first one is atmospheric and dreamy and we have this amazing all male choir which comes in slowly into this dreamy, garden-like section. The choir, Orphei Drängar, are based in Sweden and I think they get a fantastic sound, it’s dark, stirring and emotional. The strings in the other middle section I really like, it’s quite catchy, poppy in a way. I think John picked up on what I was trying to go for there and did a beautiful job, as always.’
AND STILL:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, And Still is arguably one of the most skin-prickingly personal songs that Peter Gabriel has ever written. It is not just an elegy, it’s also an exploration of the nature of memory: how it tethers us, how it secures us.
‘I wrote a song for my dad a number of years back, which I was actually able to play him, which was ‘Father, Son’. When my mum died, I wanted to do something for her, but it's taken a while before I felt comfortable and distant enough to be able to write something.
‘I was trying also to write a little bit in the style of the music that my parents responded to, so I think there is some music from the 40s probably that had an influence on the song. In the middle I wanted to write my mum a beautiful melody. She loved classical music, so we have a beautiful cello playing there. It took a while to get that right, it can't be too emotional or too underplayed, but I think we got there in the end.’
And Still has been a stand-out moment in the recent i/o tour, with the cello part played by Ayanna Witter-Johnson, but in the studio recording the solo cello comes courtesy of the New Blood Orchestra’s Ian Burdge.
LIVE AND LET LIVE:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Live and Let Live is a song about forgiveness, tolerance and optimism. A joyous, rousingly-positive closing note for the album.
‘Music can be like a box of mood pills that we can use to treat ourselves and a lot of the work of the Reverberation project is focused on that sort of idea. When someone suggested that forgiveness might be a topic to write about, at first, I thought, ‘that's not interesting to me,’ but then I remembered two things. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was the chair of The Elders and a real mentor for me, led the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa and that really allowed people to expose, report and maybe feel again some of the horrors of the apartheid era. I remember he always said that listening made a huge difference, just making sure people felt heard and recognized. Then, sometimes, it created a space for forgiveness.
There's also a description that Nelson Mandela gave when he was released from jail after 27 years in prison and found himself about to become president of South Africa, standing next to some of the people who'd been responsible for keeping him in jail all that time. He said he felt some of the old fear and hatred swelling up inside him but when he thought hard about it, he realized that he needed to find a way to work with these people, to build what he called his rainbow coalition. He needed to feel their humanity and ultimately to find a way to forgive them. He was quite sure that if he couldn't forgive them and find a way to work with them, that he would remain their prisoner for the rest of his days.
Now, I know if we look at what's happening in the Middle East now or in Ukraine, all sorts of places around the world where there's still violence and brutality, to walk around with a bunch of flowers, preaching forgiveness seems trite and pathetic, maybe. But in the long run, I think people have to find a way. ‘Peace only happens when you respect the rights of others’ is a quote from the Peace University in Costa Rica and I think that's a really important message for me and for my life. You either belong to that hurt or you free yourself and forgiveness is clearly a super effective way of freeing yourself.’
Live and Let Live, the last song to have been written for the album, features contributions from many players already heard on other songs, such as Tony Levin, David, Rhodes, Manu Katché, Brian Eno, Melanie Gabriel, John Metcalfe and the New Blood Orchestra. Notable other contributions come from Steve Gadd ‘wonderful grooves created with brushes’ that are looped at the start of the song, some beautiful trumpet by Paolo Fresu ‘soulful and poetic’ and the return of the singers of Soweto Gospel choir ‘great voices and this deep soulfulness, their additions are always wonderful for me.’
...
PANOPTICOM:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Panopticom was recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London.
‘The first song is based on an idea I have been working on to initiate the creation of an infinitely expandable accessible data globe: The Panopticom,’ says Gabriel. ‘We are beginning to connect a like-minded group of people who might be able to bring this to life, to allow the world to see itself better and understand more of what’s really going on.’
THE COURT:
‘I had this idea for ‘the court will rise’ chorus, so it became a free-form, impressionistic lyric that connected to justice, but there’s a sense of urgency there. A lot of life is a struggle between order and chaos and in some senses the justice or legal system is something that we impose to try and bring some element of order to the chaos. That’s often abused, it’s often unfair and discriminatory but at the same time it’s probably an essential part of a civilised society. But we do need to think sometimes about how that is actually realised and employed.’
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, The Court was recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London, and features contributions from Brian Eno alongside Tony Levin, David Rhodes and Manu Katché, as well as backing vocals from Peter’s daughter Melanie Gabriel. The orchestral arrangement is by John Metcalfe with Peter Gabriel and was recorded at British Grove Studios in London with a number of players who previously featured in the New Blood Orchestra.
PLAYING FOR TIME:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Playing For Time was recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London, and features Tom Cawley on piano. The orchestral arrangement, by Ed Shearmur, was recorded at British Grove Studios in London with a number of players who previously featured in the New Blood Orchestra.
‘Playing For Time is a song that I have been working on for a long time and have performed live, without lyrics, so some people may be familiar with it. It’s been an important song for me. It's about time, mortality and memories and the idea that each of us has a planet full of memories which get stashed inside the brain.
It is more of a personal song about how you assemble memories and whether we are prisoners of time or whether that is something that can actually free us. I do think it’s good to push yourself towards more bold or interesting experiences because then you will have richer memories to feed you when you get to my age. You also get taught by every meaningful experience that you go through.’
The presence of Tom Cawley on piano and Ed Shearmur’s arrangement, provide nice touch-points with Gabriel’s previous work. Cawley, having played piano on the New Blood Tour, was an obvious choice, ‘even though I performed and played piano live quite a lot I felt that this was something that I could get a real piano player in for and Tom Cawley is a brilliant musician.’ The connection to Ed Shearmur goes even further back;
‘I thought back to That’ll Do, the Randy Newman song that I sang, and Ed Shearmur had done a beautiful arrangement on that and I thought that maybe that sort of thing would really suit this song well, so we managed to track Ed down again. When I first heard the demos it brought a tear to the eye because I felt so much emotion in it, particularly at the end. That was definitely what I wanted to try and do with this song, to give that emotional journey. It means a lot to me.’
Gabriel’s thoughts about time were, in part, influenced by the work of the Long Now Foundation, and Danny Hillis’s extraordinary invention, The 10,000 Year Clock, which is an idea designed to try and encourage us to think long-term. ‘I’m sure that if we have a chance of surviving the existential problems that we now face we have to start thinking much bigger and longer to make some real headway. So, I think what they do is enormously valuable and there are some amazing talks on their website, so for those that want a deep dive into the role of time and long-term thinking, the Long Now Foundation is a wonderful place to start.’
I/O:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, i/o was primarily recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London. The song features Soweto Gospel Choir, who were recorded at High Seas Studios in South Africa.
'This month the song is i/o and i/o means input / output. You see it on the back of a lot of electrical equipment and it just triggered some ideas about the stuff we put in and pull out of ourselves, in physical and non-physical ways. That was the starting point of this idea and then trying to talk about the interconnectedness of everything. The older I get, I probably don't get any smarter, but I have learned a few things and it makes a lot of sense to me that we are not these independent islands that we like to think we are, that we are part of a whole. If we can see ourselves as better connected, still messed up individuals, but as part of a whole, then maybe there's something to learn?'
i/o as a potential album title has long-been known within fan circles, and is now the name of the current project, the album and the forthcoming tour, but as Gabriel says, 'It's been around for a long time as a title for this project. I always knew I was going to write a song called i/o, but the title came first.'
i/o sees Gabriel working again with Soweto Gospel Choir, who previously featured on the song Down to Earth that was recorded for the film Wall-E and who he’s also performed with twice in South Africa at events for Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu;
'I didn't always hear the Soweto Gospel Choir on this song, but every time I've worked with them it's always been fantastic. You can just feel the energy whenever they sing on this record, and on the song I did for Wall-E, it's just joyous. It hits you in the heart.'
FOUR KINDS OF HORSES:
"Four Kinds of Horses actually began on Richard Russell’s project ‘Everything Is Recorded’. He’s a friend (and founder of XL Records) and he asked me to pop in to his studio. I came up with some chords, melodies and words on top of a groove he was working on. We tried a few things that didn't altogether work and so it laid dormant for quite a while. Then I started playing around with it again and changed the mood and the groove and something else began to emerge with a better chorus."
There were a number of things that triggered ideas for the song as it developed, including the Buddhist parable of the Four Kinds of Horses, which describes different ways a student can approach their spiritual practice. There is also a focus on “the interesting overlap of religion and peace on the one hand and violence and terrorism on the other. There was also a wonderful film by Hany Abu-Assad called ‘Paradise Now’ which shows two young men who end up being trained to become terrorists and it's a real insight into where the head goes.”
As well as Russell, who set things in motion, Four Kinds of Horses also features Brian Eno on synths which “sounded like electric worms to me,” says Gabriel. “As soon as I heard one I thought they would make a great three dimensional wall paper of sound and asked Brian to create eleven more.” John Metcalfe again provides string arrangements, “beautiful work and as the song progresses, the strings play a key role” and backing vocals from Peter’s daughter Melanie, “another lovely moment for a dad.”
ROAD TO JOY:
Written by Peter Gabriel and produced by Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno, Road to Joy features Soweto Gospel Choir, a string arrangement from John Metcalfe and contributions from a number of Gabriel’s current touring band; long-time collaborators Tony Levin (bass), David Rhodes (guitar) and Manu Katché (drums) as well as two newer members Don E (bass keys), ‘he did the funkiest bass line that you can imagine’ and Josh Shpak (trumpet), ‘beautiful playing, a super musical guy.’ The song was recorded at Real World Studios, Bath, The Beehive and British Grove, London and High Seas Studios, South Africa.
‘I'm working on a project which is partly a story focused around the brain and how we perceive things and this song connects to that. It deals with near-death experience and locked-in syndrome situations where people are unable to communicate or to move. It's an amazingly frustrating condition. There have been some great books and films about this subject, but at this point in our story the people looking after our hero manage to find a way to wake him up. So, it’s a lyric about coming back into your senses, back to life, back into the world.’
The song is one of the last tracks to emerge for the i/o record, but it has some DNA from an earlier project; ‘It was actually very late in the record that we got to this. There had been a song that musically I'd started, I think, around the OVO project called Pukka. It was very different to this, but it was actually the starting point for coming back to this song. I just felt there was a good groove there, and I wanted something else with rhythm and so we tried a few things when I was working with Brian Eno. The excitement and energy in the song was something that I was getting off on. I felt we didn't have enough of that for this record.’
SO MUCH:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, So Much is ‘a simple song’, that features a string arrangement from John Metcalfe and contributions from Tony Levin on bass, David Rhodes on guitar and backing vocals from Peter’s daughter Melanie Gabriel. The song was recorded at Real World Studios, Bath, The Beehive and British Grove, London.
‘I was trying purposefully not to be clever with this. I wanted to get a very simple chorus but one which still had some substance to the harmony and melody. Something that was easy to digest but still had a bit of character to it.
So Much is about mortality, getting old, all the bright, cheerful subjects, but I think when you get to my sort of age, you either run away from mortality or you jump into it and try and live life to the full and that always seems to make a lot more sense to me. The countries that seem most alive are those that have death as part of their culture.’
As Peter goes on to explain, there’s a duality to the meaning of So Much, which is just as much about reveling in all the experiences and joyous distractions still to be had right now as it is about contemplating the future; ‘The reason I chose So Much as a title is because I’m addicted to new ideas and all sorts of projects. I get excited by things and want to jump around and do different things. I love being in a mess of so much! And yet it also means there's just so much time, or whatever it is, available. Balancing them both is what the song is about.’
OLIVE TREE:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Olive Tree is another song about connection, both how we interact with nature and the other species around us, but also a greater sensitivity to the potential for broadening human experience, ‘in some ways I do think we are part of everything and we probably have means to connect and communicate with everything that we often shut off. We only want to see and listen to the things that seem important and relevant to us and shut out the noise of everything else when, probably, hidden in that noise there are all sorts of things that can help us realise our place in this future world.’
Like the song Road to Joy, released in June, Olive Tree is also part of a separate brain-related project that Peter is currently working on, as well as being partly influenced by his interest in the brain reading research of the likes of Jack Gallant’s Lab at Berkeley and Mary Lou Jepsen’s work at Openwater.cc, ‘it feeds into this idea that we're no longer these islands that have our own private thoughts, that our thoughts are going to get opened up to the outside world. The lubrication that allows society to function is based, in part, on not being able to read what's going on in other people's minds, so unless we get more comfortable with how we really are, we're probably going to prefer to stay partly buried in our private worlds.’
Musically, Olive Tree provides another up-tempo moment for the i/o record, ‘I wanted it to have some speed to it but I also wanted some mystery, too. I think it is a celebration in a way and there's a real sense of being alive.’ The song features a string arrangement from John Metcalfe, with further contributions from Manu Katché on drums, Tony Levin on bass, David Rhodes on guitar, Josh Shpak on trumpet and additional percussion from Jed Lynch. The song was recorded at Real World Studios, Bath, The Beehive and British Grove, London.
LOVE CAN HEAL:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Love Can Heal is ‘a dreamy, experiential piece with some abstract imagery,’ says Gabriel, ‘a carpet of sound, a tapestry where things are woven together, but not necessarily supposed to stick out, but just form part of a whole.’
Love Can Heal is a song that has been performed during the recent i/o tour, but actually had its live premiere during Peter Gabriel and Sting’s Rock, Paper, Scissors tour of North America of 2016.
‘Love Can Heal was written around 2016 and I did start playing it midway through the tour and dedicated it to Jo Cox, who was the British MP brutally murdered by an extremist and someone that I had met at a leadership conference. I think the song fits right in to the themes of the album in the sense that i/o is about feeling and being connected to everything and in a way, the next evolution of being connected to things is a feeling of love for everything.’
THIS IS HOME:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, This Is Home is, he says, ‘a love song.’
‘It began with inspiration from some of the great Tamla Motown rhythm sections so we’re trying to recreate that in a modern way, complete with the tambourine and handclaps. The groove I like a lot, Tony Levin does a great bass part there.’
‘I did an unusual thing for me in that I tried doing this low voice / high voice thing, so you get this almost conversational voice at the beginning and the second part is a higher, more emotional voice. I thought that would be both intimate and emotive to put the two side by side.’
Though he doesn’t appear on the final track, some of the early brainstorming for what was to become This Is Home was done with the DJ and producer Skrillex;
‘I’d had a call from Skrillex, who’s a very talented musician, and I thought it would be interesting to see what he had in mind, so he came to my home studio and we sat down and talked and tried to evolve bits and pieces and it was mainly for this song. He was trying to encourage me to write a song about staying up all night in a night club and that sort of thing, but that’s not really my life so I made it more about family and home and I like it. Though we took the song in this other direction it was an interesting experience nonetheless, and I think it is good for me to be taken outside my normal comfort zone sometimes.’
This Is Home features contributions from a Swedish male voice choir called Orphei Drängar, as well as another orchestral arrangement from John Metcalfe;
‘I think it’s got a groove but unlike most pop songs that have a middle eight or bridge this has two and they are both quite different. The first one is atmospheric and dreamy and we have this amazing all male choir which comes in slowly into this dreamy, garden-like section. The choir, Orphei Drängar, are based in Sweden and I think they get a fantastic sound, it’s dark, stirring and emotional. The strings in the other middle section I really like, it’s quite catchy, poppy in a way. I think John picked up on what I was trying to go for there and did a beautiful job, as always.’
AND STILL:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, And Still is arguably one of the most skin-prickingly personal songs that Peter Gabriel has ever written. It is not just an elegy, it’s also an exploration of the nature of memory: how it tethers us, how it secures us.
‘I wrote a song for my dad a number of years back, which I was actually able to play him, which was ‘Father, Son’. When my mum died, I wanted to do something for her, but it's taken a while before I felt comfortable and distant enough to be able to write something.
‘I was trying also to write a little bit in the style of the music that my parents responded to, so I think there is some music from the 40s probably that had an influence on the song. In the middle I wanted to write my mum a beautiful melody. She loved classical music, so we have a beautiful cello playing there. It took a while to get that right, it can't be too emotional or too underplayed, but I think we got there in the end.’
And Still has been a stand-out moment in the recent i/o tour, with the cello part played by Ayanna Witter-Johnson, but in the studio recording the solo cello comes courtesy of the New Blood Orchestra’s Ian Burdge.
LIVE AND LET LIVE:
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Live and Let Live is a song about forgiveness, tolerance and optimism. A joyous, rousingly-positive closing note for the album.
‘Music can be like a box of mood pills that we can use to treat ourselves and a lot of the work of the Reverberation project is focused on that sort of idea. When someone suggested that forgiveness might be a topic to write about, at first, I thought, ‘that's not interesting to me,’ but then I remembered two things. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was the chair of The Elders and a real mentor for me, led the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa and that really allowed people to expose, report and maybe feel again some of the horrors of the apartheid era. I remember he always said that listening made a huge difference, just making sure people felt heard and recognized. Then, sometimes, it created a space for forgiveness.
There's also a description that Nelson Mandela gave when he was released from jail after 27 years in prison and found himself about to become president of South Africa, standing next to some of the people who'd been responsible for keeping him in jail all that time. He said he felt some of the old fear and hatred swelling up inside him but when he thought hard about it, he realized that he needed to find a way to work with these people, to build what he called his rainbow coalition. He needed to feel their humanity and ultimately to find a way to forgive them. He was quite sure that if he couldn't forgive them and find a way to work with them, that he would remain their prisoner for the rest of his days.
Now, I know if we look at what's happening in the Middle East now or in Ukraine, all sorts of places around the world where there's still violence and brutality, to walk around with a bunch of flowers, preaching forgiveness seems trite and pathetic, maybe. But in the long run, I think people have to find a way. ‘Peace only happens when you respect the rights of others’ is a quote from the Peace University in Costa Rica and I think that's a really important message for me and for my life. You either belong to that hurt or you free yourself and forgiveness is clearly a super effective way of freeing yourself.’
Live and Let Live, the last song to have been written for the album, features contributions from many players already heard on other songs, such as Tony Levin, David, Rhodes, Manu Katché, Brian Eno, Melanie Gabriel, John Metcalfe and the New Blood Orchestra. Notable other contributions come from Steve Gadd ‘wonderful grooves created with brushes’ that are looped at the start of the song, some beautiful trumpet by Paolo Fresu ‘soulful and poetic’ and the return of the singers of Soweto Gospel choir ‘great voices and this deep soulfulness, their additions are always wonderful for me.’
...
popshop
800 Club - QQ All-Star
Sooo many fantastic releases to enjoy
This one arrived today
This one arrived today
Is this showing up as just lossless stereo for anyone else or just me?
JoshBasswood
Well-known Member
Same on my iPhone (I am in the Netherlands). THe playlist I made from the individually releases in-side mixes has all the tracks in Atmos though, so that might be a workaround for now.
A bit miffed that Amazon UK has not even dispatched mine yet. THey suddenly complained yesterday that my creditcard bounced so I had to confirm payment again.
