Once again, 76-year-old art-rock eminence Peter Gabriel is slowly rolling out a new album, one song at a time, with a new track arriving every time we get a full moon. That's what Gabriel did in 2023, when he released i/o, his first new album in 23 years. Now, he's doing the same thing with the in-progress LP o\i. We've already heard his songs "Been Undone" and "Put The Bucket Down." Now that the full moon is back again, he's shared the lush, orchestral new song "What Lies Ahead."
As with i/o, Gabriel is sharing two mixes of every song on o/i, Tchad Blake's Dark-Side Mix and Mark ‘Spike’ Stent's Bright-Side Mix, along with a piece of visual art chosen for each track. Right now, the Stent mix of "What Lies Ahead," with the Blake mix coming later in the month. It's a slow, swelling, dramatic track. In a press release, Gabriel says that it started out as an instrumental that his band would perform on tour, and he got songwriting help from Brian Eno and his son Isaac. Here's what Gabriel says about it:
On the Back To Front tour, along with "Playing For Time," it was one of the songs that was played without words, as a work in progress. The song actually began with a melody that my son Isaac was playing with and I thought, oh, that's really nice — I could build that into something.
On that tour, we had our wonderful Scandinavian contingent of Jennie Abrahamson and Linnea Olsson, who was also playing cello. I’d always liked Linnea’s cello line so it ended up on this final recording. John Metcalfe added some other elements for the orchestral sessions in 2022.
There is also more of the magnificent Orphei Drängar choir, another Scandinavian element, who also featured on "This Is Home" on the i/o record. It's a very strange mood that they create, powerful and emotional and it's a great way to start a song — which was Brian Eno’s suggestion. I've always liked spiritual, inspirational music because sometimes people get to a different place when they remove themselves and are just present with this feeling of something else out there. Although I'm not religious myself, I definitely have the feeling for it and that's what I was hoping we would have with the choir at the front, that you go straight away into this other world…
It’s a song about inventors and invention. My dad was an electrical engineer, inventor, and I saw him go through the frustrations of not only trying to realize an idea, which has to normally go through so many iterations, but then to sell it, both to the people who've got the money and then to the outside world. So, I've always been curious about the creative process and how that applies to inventors.
This month’s artwork is from the legendary feminist artist, Judy Chicago. "Birth Tear / Tear" shows the pain of birth and, clearly, no man will ever have an understanding of what that really is, but giving birth to an idea has many (less painful) parallels. I'm delighted that she was happy to let us use it.
Judy Chicago employed over 150 people working to her designs from 1980-1985, all on the subject of birth, as she felt that Western culture had not really tackled birth as a proper subject matter. This particular design was embroidered by Jane Thompson in Houston, Texas and it's a really strong piece.
There’s a wonderful quote where she said that "truth can be found in the ignored, the forgotten, and the left out," and it reminds me a little bit of a Gaetano Pesce quote, "that beauty in the future will lie in the imperfection," particularly in this robotic AI world in which we are now entering. It seems our society is backing away from open-minded thinking. The creative arts and universities, too, have been preserves for exploring ideas and debate, and I hate the moves toward shutting all that down.
Hear "What Lies Ahead" below.
o\i doesn't have a release date yet, but the next full moon is Apr. 1, so that's when we should get another song.
