Thinking Out Loud

Tag: Brian Eno

Peter Gabriel pioneers a new album release strategy, whether his fans like or not (I do)

Peter Gabriel announced a world tour and (very) long-awaited new album i/o on December 22, 2022. He has since released a new single on each subsequent full moon (a long running conceit of his) via Bandcamp. At this time of writing, he has released four songs slated for the album, with about three versions of each: dueling mixes by mixing engineers Tchad Blake and Spike Stent, and an early demo or band studio session, all featuring longtime collaborators Tony Levin, David Rhodes, Manu Katché, and Brian Eno. Subscribers to what he’s calling The Full Moon Club have also received four full live albums, and several additional rarities from the vaults.

Sounds like a great time to be a Peter Gabriel fan, right? Certainly not if you lurk on The Steve Hoffman Music Forums, a boisterous online home for audiophiles and music collectors. In a rolling thread dedicated to everything i/o, you’ll find a great deal of bitter complaint:

20 years to make a new album and Gabriel can’t decide which mix is better
Chemically altered

i keep coming back to this page thinking and hoping there will finally be some ALBUM release news, but just strewn about singles here and there. i haven’t listened to any of them yet, i want the full thing once and for all. i love Peter, but he’s making it hard to be patient lately, haha
MechanicalAnimal6

Maybe he’ll bring two different mixing engineers on tour and play all the songs twice!
indigovic

I love Peter Gabriel’s music and am looking forward to this album when it lands but with the exception of the first song, I’m not listening to any others until the whole thing is released and I can enjoy it as a whole body of work.
Porkpie

Peter sees more $$$$$$$. To hell with him.
Chemically altered

Things are less bitter on the Genesis News fan site or on SuperDeluxeEdition, but fans do sound dubious:

Peter enough of this ‘new moon stuff’ just release the album.
wayne klein

VERY good song. Won’t make my all-time top 20 PG songs, but I would expect it to make my 2023 year-end list. I do hope it doesn’t take a whole year to get the entire album a song at a time, though. Looking forward to an announcement of a U.S. tour!
AdamW

No denying his continued talent. Though I feel the release cycle reeks of the #Occult!? or maybe that’s the idea?
AcidPunk

These are just a few excerpts, but this general negativity is comically out of proportion, and it’s frankly rather depressing to read. If the general tenor online is representative of Gabriel’s fandom right now, then I really worry that the long gap since his last album of new material (2002’s Up) has curdled and embittered his fanbase. I hope I’m wrong, and I also hope Gabriel’s team doesn’t come across postings like the above and conclude that their release strategy is widely hated.

Detail from the artwork by Tim Shaw for the single “The Court” from Peter Gabriel’s i/o.

I’m a longtime fan myself, but I wouldn’t say I’m the type to automatically defend his every creative choice. For example, I simply cannot stand “Excuse Me” or “The Book of Love”, I was a little bored by the orchestral projects he undertook between 2010-12, and I’m still in disbelief that the much-desired rarities collection Flotsam and Jetsam was a digital-only release. And I admit that when I read the i/o announcement in December, I rolled my eyes to see former with hard dates but the latter still vaguely described as coming out… sometime… in some form… maybe? I say all this so I hope you won’t think I’m some kind of fanboy apologist who lionizes him.

But right now? Personally, I’m delighted to get new music from him a couple times a month. Over the years, I have spent way too much money and time tracking down imported CDs and vinyl just to collect a few remixes and b-sides. If you had told me that one day I could pay $3 a month to subscribe to a magical service called Bandcamp that would send me at least three new Peter Gabriel tracks a month through the air (or On the Air, as a Gabriel fan might put it), or that I could subscribe to a general streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music and get them for “free”, I would have called it science fiction.

But in a way, Gabriel has been leading up to something like this for some time. He has long spoken of his first four self-titled albums as issues of a magazine called Peter Gabriel, later experimented with print magazine and CD-ROM publications like The Box and Real World Notes, and was an early online pioneer with the original incarnation of the Full Moon Club circa 2002 as a video & MP3 subscription.

Detail from the artwork by Olafur Eliasson for the title track “i/o” from Peter Gabriel’s i/o.

I suppose if I were to strain to find something to complain about with regards to the Full Moon Club release model, I might say that I’m a little surprised that Tchad Blake and Spike Stent’s mixes aren’t more different (I would have expected there to be more significant variance in the arrangements and instrumentation, whereas in reality, each engineer evinces different taste and emphasis, not structure, so I have found the contrast between the two to be rather subtle), and I wish that the four included live albums were from more than one tour. But other than that, I’m more than happy to subscribe, and have my digital library regularly refreshed with new Peter Gabriel music for the first time in years.

I would go even further: at this point, I think it would be a mistake to assume that the eventual album itself will be a traditional release. Why would it? Maybe some or none of these mixes will appear on the album at all; perhaps they will be new mixes entirely, and some or all of these tracks may not even make the final cut. Maybe it will be a tight 45 minutes, a multi-disc extravaganza, digital-only like Flotsam and Jetsam, or maybe there will never be a definitive “album” in the sense that we’re used to. In this streaming era, recent releases by Kanye West, Lizzo, and Beyoncé have all been modified or revised after initial release — in the case of West, repeatedly! Maybe there will never be one definitive i/o album to put on your shelf.

Detail from the artwork by David Spriggs for the single “Panopticom” from Peter Gabriel’s i/o.

At this point, I’m simply unbothered that i/o remains on the horizon. Fans like me have waited two decades since Up, so a few more months doesn’t really matter much to me. It’s worth noting that while Gabriel has been casually promising new music in interviews for years, it’s almost always with a bit of self-deprecating humor (often jokingly saying something like: a new album is coming out in the fall, but pointedly not specifying a year).

He has other professional, philanthropic, and personal interests. It’s true that most of his post-Up musical projects may have been archival and retrospective (Big Blue Ball, Hit, Scratch My Back, the Rock Paper Scissors tour with Sting, Flotsam and Jetsam, Rated PG, just to name a few), and I understand the frustration of fans that want something new. I am one of those too! But I think it’s worth remembering that he has also been busy with projects like Real World Records, WOMAD, Witness, and The Elders. More important than anything, he’s spoken in interviews about becoming a grandfather, and caring for his spouse during an illness.

Detail from the artwork by Annette Messager for the single “Playing for Time” from Peter Gabriel’s i/o.

So to sum up, geez, take it down a notch, everyone! His life has changed, and the music business has changed. The time is long over for artists like him to be obligated to deliver fairly regular albums and tours to honor record company contracts. A few of the old guard (like Madonna and U2) still labor under big contracts, but we live in an era where many other big-name artists like Gabriel have essentially gone indie, and don’t have to do things the old-fashioned way if they don’t want or need to, in order to pay their mortgages and support their families, or support themselves generally as they pursue their other interests.

I’m just happy the time is finally right for Gabriel to finally share some of the music he’s been tinkering with for almost 20 years, and enjoy a victory lap. I wish the online haters could be happy too.

To name a counterexample release strategy that does annoy me: Brian Eno is another of my long-time favorite musicians, but I haven’t yet bought his new album FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE (yes, it’s stylized in one word and all caps). It’s available in numerous formats, but none of them particularly convenient or ideal for me: a 10-track CD, a 10-track LP, a 10-track Blu-ray, an 11-track Japan-only CD, a 10-track digital release on almost every outlet except Bandcamp, a 20-track deluxe digital-only release, plus a 1-track single (an extended version of one of the album tracks). I don’t like buying from the Apple iTunes music store, because of the peculiar way macOS and iOS handle purchased audio files (long story short: differently than ordinary audio files). Qobuz would a good option, but they prohibit VPNs, and I use iCloud Private Relay. A physical edition would also be fine with me, but there is no version that includes all 22 tracks. I would instantly buy any and all new Brian Eno music, immediately on release, if I could simply get it on Bandcamp, as Peter Gabriel is doing.

April 23, 2023
Scratching in the Dirt: Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back

As a Peter Gabriel fan for over two decades, it’s difficult to admit that I find myself struggling to appreciate his first new album in many years.

There have always been three core things to love about Gabriel’s work: his literate songwriting, meticulous soundscapes, and emotionally expressive voice. Behind the creepily organic album art, Scratch My Back is an experiment in subtraction. It finds Gabriel covering other artists’ songs, accompanied only by solo piano or orchestra (the oddly defensive marketing pitch “No drums, no guitars” says it all).

That leaves only the voice. Soulful and gravelly even as a teenage cofounder of Genesis in 1967, Gabriel’s voice should be more than enough to justify anything, so my pat reduction here is not totally fair. Gabriel and John Metcalfe clearly labored over these orchestral arrangements, but I miss the complex sonics of the rock and world music instrumentation that has characterized most of his music for over 40 years.

Gabriel did very nearly the opposite a decade ago, when his high-concept millennium project Ovo made a point of casting Paul Buchanan and The Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser to sing his songs. The most recent collection of his own songs was 2002’s Up, followed in 2009 by the collaborative project Big Blue Ball.

Casual fans of his music might not be aware that Gabriel is an active humanitarian, particularly as cofounder of Witness and The Elders, so the temporal gap between his musical ventures is not entirely explained by chronic procrastination (although he would probably be the first to admit he’s easily distracted). Gabriel has stated that he hopes to work on more song-swap projects in the future, but first plans to work on some of his own songs. How long until he prepares a new album over which he can claim sole authorship?

Gabriel told The New York Times:

“I was trying to make a grown-up record […] This is treating people as if they can handle difficult music and words. Not that I’ve courted the lowest common denominator before, but there’s a playfulness and childishness in some of my older work that isn’t present on this record.”
Peter Gabriel

He is presumably referring to the media satire of “Games Without Frontiers” and “The Barry Williams Show”, the randy sex romps “Sledgehammer” and “Kiss That Frog”, and the vaudeville silliness of “Excuse Me” and “Big Time”. Gabriel is one of the few musicians that I first listened to as a teenager, but whose music has aged with me. So I would have expected myself to appreciate an album of him covering many songs that I know and love well (particularly David Bowie, Lou Reed, Elbow, and Talking Heads), but I find that I don’t know what to make of Scratch my Back even after repeated listens.

Many songwriters lose their dark edge as they age (case in point: Pink Floyd’s once tortured and prickly Roger Waters is now a big smiley softie), and by all accounts Gabriel should have been following that track too. After leaving Genesis in 1975 to deal with family issues, his first four solo albums were increasingly dark and sinister. But 1986’s So marked a noticeable turnaround in tone and an apparent psychic healing.

Now reportedly still pals with his old Genesis cohorts, aging gracefully into a gnomish goatee, remarrying, fathering two new sons, and reconciling with his two daughters from a previous marriage, he seemed to be transforming into a cuddly grandfather figure. A trickle of releases over the past decade showed him favoring directly-worded songs for children, including the Oscar-nominated “That’ll Do” (from the movie Babe), the unsubtle “Animal Nation” (from The Wild Thornberrys Movie), and “Down to Earth” (from Wall-E).

Suddenly, he appears to have reversed back into depressive territory. Nearly every song chosen for Scratch My Back has been transformed into a mournful dirge. Especially when listened to in one sitting, I find many of the interpretations to be too depressing, and I actually like depressing music. My favorite examples along these lines are Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ cry-your-guts-out cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” (from the movie Donnie Darko), and Elbow’s agonizingly heartrending version of U2’s “Running to Stand Still” (from the War Child benefit album Heroes).

Gabriel’s version of The Magnetic Fields’ “Book of Love” has apparently become something of a sensation on YouTube, licensed in television shows, and played at celebrity weddings. Perhaps I’m coldhearted, but it does absolutely nothing for me. Songwriter Stephin Merritt says his version was sarcastic, while Gabriel’s is deadly serious:

At first I thought, How hilarious, he’s got a completely different take on the song. But after a few listens I find it quite sweet. My version of the song focuses on the humor, and his focuses on the pathos. Of course, if I could sing like him I wouldn’t have to be a humorist.
Stephen Merritt

Did Gabriel just plain miss Merritt’s point, or did he intentionally transform it into something sentimental, singing the same words but altering the instrumentation and delivery? All that said, something to cherish in Gabriel’s cover is the presence of his daughter Melanie on backing vocals.

Elbow’s “Mirrorball” is one of the most ravishing love songs I’ve heard. Elbow remixed Gabriel’s “More Than This” in 2002, providing a more organic rock structure to Gabriel’s perhaps over-processed studio original. But Gabriel does not return the favor here, turning their gorgeous love song into a depressive bummer.

The once case where Gabriel’s bummer-o-vision may have actually been appropriate is with Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bubble”, which actually does have very dark lyrics.

The original recording of David Bowie’s “Heroes” boasts an unforgettable lead guitar line from Robert Fripp, which by his own rules Gabriel must subtract. He sings Bowie’s Berlin-inspired lyrics in cracked, anguished tones, not an emotion I associate with the song.

The one song I liked immediately was “Listening Wind”. The original is one of the odder tracks on Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, and Gabriel rather amazingly draws out a catchy melody embedded in the experimental song.

The Special Edition includes a second cd with four bonus tracks: a cover of The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” and alternate versions of “The Book of Love”, “My Body is a Cage”, and “Heroes”. It might have been interesting to also include some of Gabriel’s past covers, including The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields”, Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”, and Joseph Arthur’s “In the Sun”. I would have also very much liked to hear instrumental mixes of some of Metcalfe’s orchestral arrangements.

March 22, 2010
David Byrne, Live at Radio City Music Hall, February 28, 2009

David Byrne and Brian Eno, both long favorites of this blog, collaborated extensively between 1978-1980. Many of these classic albums have passed into the musical canon, most especially Talking Heads’ Remain in Light (1980) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981).

There are lingering rumors of interpersonal friction, certainly within the four Talking Heads, but Byrne and Eno appear to have remained in light, as it were. As Byrne relates the story in the liner notes to their new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the possibility of his completing several of Eno’s stockpiled instrumental demos arose over dinner. The eventual result is a brilliant new album that is unmistakably the product of these two unique musicians, but is certainly no sequel or retread of past glories.

Touring to support the new material, Byrne challenged himself with the self-imposed restriction to draw from only the five albums on which he worked with Eno, with or without Talking Heads: More Songs about Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, Remain in Light, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. Even with this self-imposed limitation of albums that are all, frankly, kind of weird, it’s amazing how many toe-tapping pop songs they contain.

The excellently sequenced set list, mostly alternating between the weird and (relatively) normal, kept the massive Radio City Music Hall audience singing along. “Strange Overtones”, my favorite song from the new album, came first. Talking Heads’ “Crosseyed and Painless” proved an early climax, bringing the entire audience to their feet for most of the rest of the show. The only disappointment was that Byrne selected only one single track from the legendary My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: “Help Me Somebody”. It was imaginatively rearranged with live voices replacing the original’s found vocals (or as Byrne noted that we would call them today, samples). Why not try the same with some of the other great tracks on that album?

The long white splotch in the middle is David Byrne and the Rockettes!

The stage design was perfectly austere, and deceptively simple. I especially liked the stark, monochromatic lighting design. The entire band was clad in white, and three modern dancers accompanied several songs with wittily choreographed routines. The show climaxed with a truly barnstorming version of “Burning Down the House”, with the entire band dressed in frilly tutus. It could only be completed by the startling appearance by… wait for it… the Rockettes! OMGWTF!? Needless to say, the crowd went bananas.

In short, I had a grand time. I have fewer qualms about rating movies on a five-star scale than I do concerts. Movies are cheap enough to rent in consume in large gulps. I end up seeing many bad or mediocre movies, but few concerts that suck. The likely explanation is the expense involved, which often limits the concerts I go to to artists that I already very much like. The only reason I didn’t rate this particular show higher is that I could imagine that if I could time-travel back to the 1980s and see the original Talking Heads (preferably during the period Adrian Belew was in their live band), it would easily merit five stars.

March 13, 2009
Daniel Lanois Maximizes the Room in Here Is What Is

Daniel Lanois is a unique musician, as gifted a singer-songwriter in his own right as he is a collaborator and producer. I originally came to recognize his name after finding it listed in the credits of many key items in my music collection, including Peter Gabriel’s So and Us, U2’s The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind. His 1993 solo album For the Beauty of Wynona remains an all-time personal favorite.

The feature documentary Here Is What Is premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2007, directed by Lanois, Adam Samuels, and Adam Vollick. It captures the recording of the album of the same name, but also serves as a kind of retrospective and mission statement. Conversations between Lanois and early mentor (now equal) Brian Eno punctuate the film. Lanois states to Eno his intentions for the movie: to create a film about the beauty of music, not everything that surrounds it (which I took to mean hagiography, celebrity gossip, and the sometimes tedious behind-the-sceens documentation typical of the genre). Eno suggests that his film should try to show people that art often grows out of nothing, or from the simplest of seeds in the right situations, not from what outsiders might assume are the miraculous inspirations of allegedly brilliant or gifted artistes.

Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno recording their new ambient masterwork, “Music for Staircases”

Lanois is Canadian by birth, but has a special affinity for the American South, especially New Orleans. He credits New Orleans for the original sensual groove that formed the basis of rock music. Perhaps intended as a visual echo of this theory, the stunningly beautiful Carolina Cerisola often appears dancing in her scanties.

Lanois details his longtime, fruitful collaboration with drummer Brian Blade. Legendary keyboardist of The Band, Garth Hudson, also joins them in the studio for some truly awesome performances. One of my favorite sequences intercuts between “The Maker” performed by Lanois’ band live in studio, covered by Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris, and Lanois’ band live on stage. Billy Bob Thornton, still friends from collaborating on the score to Sling Blade in 1996, drops in for a visit. We catch exciting glimpses of recording U2’s forthcoming album (since christened No Line on the Horizon, to be released in February 2009) with Eno and Steve Lillywhite.

Which button dials down Bono’s ego?

Lanois names a primarily influence to be the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which he describes as a fairly straightforward rock trio but with ambitious, experimental production. He describes how he himself approaches production, in just one word: “feel.” He reportedly had a contentious relationship with Dylan in the studio, but the resultant albums are classics, and Dylan affirmed that “you can’t buy ‘feel.’” Another Lanois aphorism, “maximize the room,” means to make the most of what you have, rather than invite guest musicians or order up more equipment.

Here Is What Is features full performances of songs, which is especially welcome compared to two recent music documentaries recently screened by this blog: Low in Europe and You May Need a Murderer, which both shy away from actually showing Low perform. Here Is What Is‘s visuals are sometimes compromised with cheesy video effects. The film is at its best when simply following the hypnotic movements of Lanois’ hands on his pedal steel guitar.

January 22, 2009
The atmospheres and soundtracks of Al Reiner’s Apollo Missions documentary For All Mankind
It was a weird experience to finally see the original film for the soundtrack to which I’ve listened to countless times. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks is a gorgeous piece of work, and very much colored my expectations of what the film would be. Having long pictured a largely abstract compilation of otherworldly lunar footage, I was surprised to find For All Mankind a more straightforward documentary than what was already in my head. (Bits and pieces from the compilation album Music for Films III also appear.)

Unlike In the Shadow of the Moon, the 2007 feature documentary on the same subject, For All Mankind exclusively uses original footage taken during the Apollo Missions, much of it by the astronauts themselves. The absence of new narration or footage rightly places the emphasis solely on the achievements of the original participants. But a drawback is that the interviewees on the soundtrack are not identified (the Criterion DVD edition includes an option to display subtitles identifying the speakers).

I have little to add to Matthew Dessem’s excellent review on The Criterion Contraption, or to my own thoughts on In the Shadow of the Moon. Three small observations:
- I was completely ignorant that NASA first began spacewalks during the Apollo missions. I was under the impression they began during the later space shuttle missions. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that NASA would test spacewalks in orbit over the Earth before attempting to step out of a capsule onto the moon, but: Wow!
- The astronauts were very conscious of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Each astronaut could bring one cassette tape to play on a portable deck, and one chose Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra”. Another describes seeing the moon surface up close as being like something from 2001.
- Due to the film’s nature of being comprised of original footage, there’s perhaps too much of the astronauts goofing off in zero-G, and not enough of the spectacular lunar footage. But it goes to show that even the pilots selected for being the most sane and calm people in the word still turn to excited kids when playing in outer space (with the rare exception to prove the rule).
March 5, 2008
Everything You Know is Wrong: U2: Zoo TV Live From Syndey

If I could build a time machine to take me to see any band in history, it would be a trip to the early 90s to catch U2 at any point along their legendary Zoo TV tour.

New to DVD, director David Mallet’s Zoo TV: Live From Sydney documents the lads’ performance in Sydney during the aptly named Zoomerang leg. Rewatching the event in the 21st century is interesting; on one hand, it’s almost shocking how far ahead of the curve U2 was in 1993, preaching a pretty weighty post-modern, ironic kill-your-television thesis in front of thousands of rock ‘n’ roll fans each night.

But on the other hand, the fixation on cable and satellite TV now looks rather quaint. True cultural desensitization and alienation via media oversaturation came, in the end, from the internet. “Everything you know is wrong”, indeed.

Zoo TV was less a rock concert than a carefully choreographed theatrical event. Bono donned multiple costumes and personas throughout each show: a drunken rock star clad in leather and fly shades, a paramilitary guerrilla in fatigues, a gold lamé cowboy hat-wearing megachurch televangelist blasting millions of U2 bucks into the audience, and finally emerging as MacPhisto, a kind of washed-up wasted devil tired of life, but still up for a good time.

I’d hate to see the band’s utility bill at the end of this tour…

Regardless, what’s amazing is that despite all the high-mindedness and avant-garde video art contributed by Brian Eno and Emergency Broadcast Network, U2 still managed to put on a truly spectacular rock concert and get millions of people around the globe to come and love every second of it. And for me to buy the DVD.

November 30, 2006