The 25 best Peter Gabriel songs, according to me (Part 4)
In which things get deeper and darker
The overwhelming success of the So album in 1986 made Peter Gabriel much, much richer. This new wealth enabled him to build and maintain a state-of-the-art residential recording studio in Wiltshire called Real World, which in turn enabled him to spend as much time as he wanted tinkering with musical ideas in said studio and find as many ways as he could to avoid the completion of a follow-up to his commercial breakthrough. One could argue that on a certain level he never really did follow up So. Three years later, the double album (on vinyl at least) Passion appeared, an outgrowth of Gabriel’s work on the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s an astonishing creation, up there with his best, but I haven’t included anything from it here as it doesn’t contain any songs as such—at least not songs with words, though there’s plenty of splendid singing (most of it in the sounds-like-it-should-mean-something-but-doesn’t patois colleagues and fans have long called “Gabrielese”). If you like PG but have never heard Passion for some reason, I recommend that you do so with all haste.
In 1992, three years after Passion, Us showed up. This was by default the “real” follow-up to So, only so much time had passed in between that it felt in many ways like the work of a different person. During those years, a lot more had changed in Gabriel’s life than his bank balance. The year after So’s release, he definitively split with Jill, his wife of 16 years and mother of his two daughters. They’d been together since their schooldays and married since he was 21; their marriage had been emotionally complicated for years, with affairs on both sides. Now that he was a divorcé, Gabriel’s life became even more tumultuous, peppered with various female partners. He was flailing, and spending more time trying to figure out what the hell it all meant. The liner notes of Us offer thanks to “the group.” If you didn’t figure out right off the bat that this was a therapy group, you’d know once you listened to the album—the line about sinking self-esteem in “Love to Be Loved” was a giveaway.
Three things hadn’t changed, though: Gabriel’s way with a tune, his artistry as a producer/sonic conceptualist, and that magnificent voice.
“Blood of Eden” (Us, 1992)
On May 9, 1991, Peter Gabriel and Sinéad O’Connor sang “Don’t Give Up” live at the Statenhal in the Hague as part of the Simple Truth Concert to raise money for Kurdish refugees. (Sting was on bass.) Before O’Connor appeared from the wings, Gabriel called her “one of the most soulful artists to come through in the last few years.” Photographer Michel Linssen took a shot of them standing next to each other on stage that night. They’re wearing variations on the bride-and-groom outfits you see them don in the video for “Blood of Eden.” Gabriel is looking at O’Connor and beaming; O’Connor’s eyes are downcast in what may be slight embarrassment, but she’s clearly grinning too. These are two people in love.
If anyone doubted that there was indeed a relationship here, Sinéad put those doubts to rest in her 2021 memoir Rememberings. She confirmed that the two singers had had “an on-and-off fling” and that their breakup had inspired “Thank You for Hearing Me,” one of her greatest and most unnerving songs. “I was basically weekend pussy,” she wrote—not exactly what a fan of both artists would most like to learn.
My suspicion is that Gabriel and O’Connor loved each other as artists more than they loved each other as people. The evidence of that love is in the two songs they sang together on record, this one and “Come Talk to Me” (see Part 3). For both, Gabriel is nominally the lead singer, with O’Connor merely providing backup on the choruses. His singing has grandeur and gravity; when it’s on its own, it commands the sound field. But the character of her voice is so stark and arresting that it takes control of the music whenever it enters. Sinéad turns both songs into duets. These two superb vocalists truly bring out the best in one another. I only wish there’d been more.
“Washing of the Water” (Us, 1992)
Gabriel mines a wide gospel vein here, as on “Don’t Give Up,” but this time he doesn’t have to share space with Kate Bush—or, for that matter, Sinéad O’Connor. He makes the most of the extra room, giving us a full inventory of his vocal mannerism workshop: halting phrases, evocative cracks (when he means to reveal the most, he pushes his voice not to work properly), soulful shouts, and leaps into keening falsetto, capped by the almost unbearable devotion he gives to the line “Till the sun has left the sky.”
“Digging in the Dirt” (Us, 1992)
The song’s sharpest hook, the one we remember the most, is carried by Gabriel’s voice and is wordless. It’s that extra high syllable after the line “This time you’ve gone too far.” Is it a sigh? A show of surprise? A sharp intake of breath after a sudden shock (the monkey)? Maybe it’s all of these, and quite possibly more. Whatever it’s meant to be, it’s classic PG, breaking through the fourth wall and shoving his distress right in our faces.
“Fourteen Black Paintings” (Us, 1992)
The words to this song are, in their entirety, “From the pain come the dream/From the dream come the vision/From the vision come the people/And from the people come the power/From this power come the change.” When Gabriel pens lyrics as minimal as these—“We Do What We’re Told” from So is another good example—he invests them with unusual weight. Here he’s back on the mountaintop, prophesizing with such authority and decisiveness that by the time he reaches top fervency (on “From this power”), you can’t help but be won over.
“I Grieve” (Up, 2002)
We begin this song deep in the realest shit there is, by the side of a loved one who has died within the past hour. Gabriel’s singing is ravaged, sometimes philosophical, sometimes pleading. Toward the end, things perk up, and the words “Life carries on” become almost a joyous mantra. Then the drums fade away and the sense of loss returns with a round of guilty self-questioning: “Did I dream this belief/Or did I believe this dream?”
Although the definitive version of “I Grieve” is on 2002’s Up, the song originally appeared four years before that on the City of Angels soundtrack. This first take has a less confident, more one-dimensional lead vocal; its fragility is appealing, but one gets the sense that Gabriel may not have lived with his composition long enough. By Up, he has. Also, the City of Angels version ends with an instrumental coda that adds nothing to what’s gone before. The Up ending is far more effective: Gabriel’s voice hangs in space, stretches out one note for longer than seems comfortable, then stops. Earlier on he sings, “The news that truly shocks/Is the empty, empty page.” Here the shock is in the silence.
Next and last up: Part 5—Gabriel in the new millennium.