Peter Gabriel has an usual but quite simple release plan for his forthcoming o/i: Every time there's a full moon, he's releasing one new song from the album. Gabriel is the kind of iconic figure who can command the attention to turn every new song release into an event, so he might as well give each track its spotlight moment.
Today's offering, "Won't Stand Down," is an inspirational political ballad. "The servants of the people have forgotten how to serve," Gabriel sings. "This is not the way we want to live/ It's not the way it has to be." On the chorus, he asserts, "No, we won't stand down/ 'Til the job is done." He offered a lengthy statement on the track:
It's really a song to encourage some sort of activism. I had originally thought about trying to create some music for The Elders.org, who are an extraordinary group of people. Their currency is not based on military power, economic power or political power, but just the moral authority they have from having lived extraordinary, selfless lives. That's something which I wanted to talk about, write about and encourage, because it's pretty dark out there in lots of places and I think we need people who can just nudge both us and our leaders and keep alive some basic values of justice, compassion and democracy – a hope that can help us start envisioning a just, peaceful and fairer world.
I think people generally respond much better to positive pictures of what’s coming than they do when they are bombarded and scared by negative ones. We are much more likely to engage if we feel hope. Right now, we don't see so many positive visions of the future, at least they're not being projected so strongly as the negative, so I think it's really important that we start looking for visions to which we can aspire and looking for people who can provide that.
I have always been a fan of Marvin Gaye and there was a Cuban element to his song Sexual Healing that I loved and was exploring - it was something in the way that it allowed the rhythm to move that I liked, and I tried to bring an element of that to this song, while allowing it to evolve into something different.
I think it's a good band performance in the sense that it's not built up over a lot of time with many different layers, so it feels more alive and, with this song more than any others on the record, I wanted to have real, live emotion in it.
Both Mark "Spike" Stent (Bright-Side) and Tchad Blake (Dark-Side) have taken their mixes in quite different directions, but there is a real sense of emotion coming out of both mixes. People always think that the emotion all comes from the song, but actually you can change that enormously by the way you move things and dip them and bring them out and isolate certain sounds and instruments – by the way you tell the story. It's very much a creative contribution with these wonderful mixers.
Below, hear the Bright-Side mix of "Won't Stand Down" and watch a commentary video in which Gabriel orates a more informal version of the above statement.
If we understand the lunar calendar correctly, o/i should be out in full by Feb. 1 of next year.
