Peter Gabriel's Scratch My Back Features Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Bon Iver Covers

Peter Gabriel's first album in seven years is a Bob Ezrin-produced orchestral covers collection called Scratch My Back. It reportedly features reinterpretations of the folks mentioned above along with Elbow, the Kinks, Talking Heads, Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Neil Young. It's being called a "song swap," which implies some artists will also cover Gabriel, or each other, though we don't have all the details just yet. We do have a video of Gabriel and a string section doing Paul Simon's "Boy In The Bubble," before which he explains the project and introduces collaborator John Metcalfe, who's said (at Gabriel's site) that the album is acoustic, sans guitars, drums or "world instruments." So, many strings. This take on the Graceland opener happened at the WOMAD festival in July. We also have a possible Scratch My Back tracklist, but you know how those things go.

The "alleged tracklist" via NME:

'"Heroes"' - David Bowie
"Street Spirit (Fade Out)" - Radiohead
"The Book Of Love" - Magnetic Fields
"Flume" - Bon Iver
"My Body Is A Cage" - Arcade Fire
"Listening Wind" - Talking Heads
"I Think It's Going to Rain Today" - Randy Newman
"Après Moi" - Regina Spektor or Eartha Kitt
"Waterloo Sunset" - The Kinks
"The Boy In The Bubble" - Paul Simon
"The Power Of The Heart" - Lou Reed
"Philadelphia" - Neil Young
"Mirrorball" - Elbow

Nope, no Vampire Weekend.

The "Book Of Love" cover is presumably this version that Gabriel recorded for the Shall We Dance soundtrack in 2004.

Look for Scratch My Back in early spring 2010.

Posted at 9:06 AM by brandon in Video
Tags: Arcade Fire | Bon Iver | Paul Simon | Peter Gabriel | Radiohead | The Magnetic Fields

7 Comments

Who??

Posted by: .. at 10/29/09 10:20 AM  | Reply
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No Vampire Weekend?
Any news from PG is good news, but it's hard to get excited about an album of cover songs when we've been waiting so long for new stuff. He's only put out two proper albums in the last 17 years.

Posted by: daytracing at 10/29/09 10:23 AM  | Reply
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Sweet! Shame there are no originals though.

Posted by: a'tris at 10/29/09 10:28 AM  | Reply
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Bob Ezrin was the expert at knowing exactly where pretty and creepy meet...

Posted by: Family of others at 10/29/09 10:55 AM  | Reply
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this might be sort of cool, but i sort of wish it was new songs by him.

Posted by: woozefa at 10/29/09 12:53 PM  | Reply
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Listening Wind. such a great song

Posted by: njikolai at 10/30/09 7:25 AM  | Reply
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"The Book of Love" is kind of untouchable, even by you, sir!

Posted by: The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove at 11/04/09 5:32 PM  | Reply
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