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
Who??
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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.
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No Vampire Weekend?
Thank God!
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Sweet! Shame there are no originals though.
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Bob Ezrin was the expert at knowing exactly where pretty and creepy meet...
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this might be sort of cool, but i sort of wish it was new songs by him.
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Listening Wind. such a great song
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"The Book of Love" is kind of untouchable, even by you, sir!
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f**k the book of love. there's nothing that pete can't touch.
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Buried a friend today.
A cold, still-born day
Listened to Peter
Just by the way
Wanted to say
A Simply thanks
It's Heartfelt
It's Honest
Brilliant Album
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The Beatles changed the world in 8 years (1962-70). Gabe takes that long between albums.
These releases are so far apart that you'd expect each release to be iconoclastic, to imply in its creativity that it's been that long in the making, which they don't.
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Hmmm- trying to do a Johnny Cash maybe? I love Gabriel but this album is very hard to listen to- and I love Animal Collective!
It's just a little boring- I will give it another go and decide whether it deserves to be bought on vinyl or not. I do agree though since So he has hardly been productive.
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Peter Gabriel not productive? He hasn't released new albums under his own name in 8 years, but he's been running a label, putting on WOMAD events, curating the Big Blue Ball project that released a CD in 2008, touring and releasing every show of his 2007 European and 2009 Latin American tours.
He HAS changed the world, BTW, just mostly through WOMAD and RealWorld. No P.G., no mainstream world music, no Vampire Weekend, no fair trade music, or at least significantly less attention to any of those things. As for 'doing a Johnny Cash', remember even John Lennon and Patti Smith have done cover albums. Good or bad, there's plenty of precedent.
"Scratch" may not be his best work, but I'm willing to give it a few extra listens just for being by P.G. If it doesn't grow on me, there's still plenty from his own catalog and his labels' catalogs worth the repeats. And sooner or later he's bound to put out something cool and unexpected.
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Peter Gabriel is God, please God deliver us from Evil "music". You can sing "The book of love" anytime you want and im pretty damn sure you´re gonna make it right.
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