Peter Gabriel

Aw he's a good guy

Birdy ost is my favorite pg album now. No words just vibes for miles.

Has Gabriel ever spoke about Gary Brooker from Procol Harum as being an influence? Listening to A Salty Dog right now and man sometimes the melody and phrasing and even tone of his voice reminds me of Gabriel (or I guess it could be an coincidence or even vice versa as they are essentially contemporaries)

He supposedly has brought him up as an influence, though I don't know when/where. At the least Brooker (and most of Genesis, a couple of years later) all went to Charterhouse.

And, ha!, I've never heard this before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct_R6CPD5-o

So Peter Gabriel is doing a co-headlining tour with Sting this summer. Following his anniversary tour of "So," I think it's safe to say Peter Gabriel has officially ended his epic winning streak of originality and invention.

Pretty sure that ended with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TC8dwdz7Yg

I'm looking forward to the all-lute cover of Rhythm of the Heat.

Riding Pernwaves

Well then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_OtfstmDgo

So the guy follows up doing the most boring thing possible - a summer tour with Sting - by releasing something new? Relatively speaking, of course, because that sounds like a leftover from "Up." Wish the rhythm, track weren't so generic and boring. Guy used to be so good with drums and percussion. Backstory:

"I wrote a song a few years back – 'I'm Amazing,' which was, in part, inspired by Muhammad Ali's life and struggles," Gabriel wrote. "At the time of his death, when so many people are celebrating his life and thinking about all he achieved, it seemed the right time to release it."

Mentioned this on another thread but I'm pretty sure I would rather see this than Peter Gabriel proper these days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjOCaL-rmOM&feature=youtu.be

Gabriel live is still pretty great. He really knows how to stage things, and I heard amazing things about the "So" redux tour (despite it being the most boring choice short of touring with Sting; someone's got to pay those Real World bills).

His voice is well-preserved and there's still a hint of menace in even the new track, but yes, he's mostly boring now. Which he's certainly entitled to — after a lifetime on the road and a ruined marriage behind him, I can empathize if he just wants to be a wealthy family man for a while. As a selfish fan, though, I wish he took more risks. Someone like Robert Plant is the kind of late career I'd hoped for him. Or, more ambitiously, David Bowie — though it's clear now that Gabriel isn't nearly as restless or daring.

can't bring myself to go see him with Sting this year, but yeah the So tour was amazing.

i thought he'd done quite a lot to not be thought of in the same breath as Sting these days, ah well

oh I dunno. i saw a live DVD from an early '00s show in which Gabriel mostly played with a laptop or behind keyboards and his voice heaved with the sound of alimony and boredom.

Huh? What tour was that? The boring orchestra tour behind the boring orchestra albums?

Growing Up Live, was it?

Is that the one where he was on a Segway for part of it? Can't remember, but I know I saw the Up tour (which, like the Us tour, was designed by Robert Lepage), and it was cool. In the round? Also, literally in the round:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh80jJNgRrY

Honestly, I don't know much of what he's done the last 20 years or so, but the rot seemed to set in w Us. There really didn't seem to be the same energy once he hit the, uh, big time.

I think Us was pretty good, actually. Good songs, pretty, neat/novel performances/arrangements, like "Digging in the Dirt." It's not like he's done much since, but like I was saying before, even the stuff on Up - which I like - is pretty rhythmically inert, like band in a box generic. The soundtrack to Rabbit Proof Fence is great, though.

I liked Us, too. He'd really assimilated his African influences by this point, not just tacked on for effect but part of the melodies and structure of the songs. "Come Talk to Me" is beautiful, even if I don't fully know (or care) what the hell he's singing about. And the Secret World tour was his best, if only for Paula Cole in lbd and combat boots.

Although he's turned into Randy Newman at times, he's still put out really great one-off songs like "Burn You Up, Burn You Down" and "Signal To Noise".

I love Us. Didn't used to, especially when it was new, but I revisited it a couple of years ago and now it really moves me.

Us is tremendous and stands with his best work imo.

Us has the first evidence of the alimony voice I mentioned above and needs more fast ones, but I could tell at the time he was the sort of guy who abjured fast ones because they weren't serious; that's why the two fast ones are a "Sledgehammer" knockoff and an extended conceit about his dick which I hope Rosanne Arquette liked (the conceit, that is). I loved the tour, still one of the grandest I've seen.

Also: he still had the aura of a mainstream star in '92-'93: the Miami Arena was sold out that night.

lol I deleted "kiss that frog" from my iTunes and the album is better for it.

looking through his catalog the proportion of "fast ones" to great ones doesn't seem unusually low fwiw. he's recorded some great uptempo tracks but that's not really what I look to him for.

i really hate burn you up, burn you down. talk about a bog standard, pg in a box track. blech

Was Sting ever on a Disney soundtrack? Anyway the Gabriel tune from Wall-E was very nice I thought. Co-written by Randy Newman's cousin Thomas!

Thomas Newman!

It wasn't the paucity of fast ones on albums that bothers me as their increasing desperation, as if he bowed to pressure to Write Some Hits. Remember "The Barry Williams Show"?

Thomas Newman is great, he's fashioned a nice little sound world for himself in film.

It wasn't the paucity of fast ones on albums that bothers me as their increasing desperation, as if he bowed to pressure to Write Some Hits. Remember "The Barry Williams Show"?

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, June 17, 2016

ah gotcha. totally agreed then. and lol that's another one that is conspicuously absent from my library.

I don't hate Us. I bought it on CD when it came out, tho I must've sold it at some point. Production-wise it feels very heavy and adult – there is a slightly hermetically sealed vibe. At the same time, virtually all of the songs are drab therapy mumbo jumbo – as if he crossed the "Is he speaking to God or a person" rubicon of "In Your Eyes" and that was that. I mean, at least "Kiss That Frog" tries something else.

The only thing I unabashedly love on Us is "Blood of Eden" – which suffers from all of the above problems but just has a lovely melody and atmosphere. Incidentally Sinead toured w him at WOMAD when I saw him and got booed roundly. He went all "spiritual protector" with her – standing by her and glaring at the crowd disapprovingly.

i saw that tour as well, just a year or so after the US tour. it was great, and was the last time I saw him live until the So tour.

I like the orchestral covers record because the song choices are all pretty interesting, but the orchestral versions of his own songs are terrible, I just can't listen to it, it adds absolutely nothing. I assume there's a reason the new original album is like 15 years overdue at this point.

US is a recording of a man who's never had a conversation in his life, hence the marvel of therapy.

Did you come talk to him?

us is grebt, and not least because it was the soundtrack to my first oral sexing

not terribly into the 'fast' songs, but come talk to me, love to be loved, blood of eden and digging in the dirt are among his best

dude is 66 years old and has been musically active for 49 of them; y'all are pretty demanding about him breaking new ground in 2016 jeez

Love Us, and loved the tour, my first proper BIG concert

((Was Sting ever on a Disney soundtrack?))

He wrote and recorded a bunch of songs for The Emperor's New Groove, all of which except two were cut, and one that was kept didn't have Sting on it. From Wikipedia:

After Sting's songs for Kingdom of the Sun were dropped from the new storyline, Sting remained on the project, though he was told by the studio that "All we want is a beginning and an end song." The song, "Perfect World", was approached "to open the movie with a big, fun number that established the power of Kuzco and showed how he controlled the world", according to Feature Animation president Thomas Schumacher. The filmmakers had asked Sting to perform the song for the film, though Sting declined telling them that he was too old to sing it and that they should find someone younger and hipper. They instead went with Tom Jones, who was eleven years older than Sting.

there's a very interesting unreleased documentary made by sting's wife about the whole thing

dude is 66 years old and has been musically active for 49 of them; y'all are pretty demanding about him breaking new ground in 2016 jeez

Yes tho the point I'm making is that he slowed up considerably when it came to breaking new ground around 42. It seems like a combination of age, commercial pressure and the whole Real World endeavor probably sucked a lot of inspiration out of him.

For me, those first four records are really a different beast than everything that came after – the sound of Genesis's frontman finding his way in the pop marketplace. So is an interesting record for sure – but it's got that same experimental vibe as the self-titled records (impressionistic songs, narratives about psychological experiments, etc.). Us to me is where he begins to leave all that behind.

Think it's fair enough to wonder what's going on with some of these guys (see also Bryan Ferry to an extent) when their studio output dries up in early middle age...a curiosity, rather than entitlement (hopefully)

wonder why he's not on Spotify.

Bryan Ferry has actually been pretty prolific lately. I think he works like Gabriel does, starting sessions in fits and starts with various combinations of musicians, then spending a ton of time in the studio combing through the different takes and shaping the songs from them, which takes a lot of time. That's why they have such superstar credits. It's not like those cats are in the studio all at once, just dropping by for a day here and and a day there. I doubt they even know if they're on the record until the end, and even then, I wonder if they can always hear themselves.

Check out the credits of Ferry's latest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avonmore_(album)#Personnel

Then check out the credits on Gabriel's Up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(Peter_Gabriel_album)#Personnel

He's always worked like this, but this is clearly an epic conflation of several different sessions cobbled together into an admittedly cohesive but maybe sort of inert album.

There's some great, great stuff on Up so I wouldn't say he's lost it. To me it really does go back to the rhythm. His more recent stuff is often more loop-y and plodding, less naturally dynamic.

The orchestral stuff I think it some of the dullest music ever made. His arrangements of his own music are dull, his covers are daft - why rearrange familiar songs into such radically new forms by jettisoning the melodies and arrangements, but keeping the lyrics? If he had just written new words no one would have known they were covers. Makes it seem gimmicky.

Gabriel covering Elbow is like Will Smith covering Richard Blackwood's 'Who's Da Man'

"Think it's fair enough to wonder what's going on with some of these guys (see also Bryan Ferry to an extent) when their studio output dries up in early middle age...a curiosity, rather than entitlement (hopefully)"

I don't think it's that unusual, I think it's entirely natural that people's creativity slows down in middle age. People like McCartney are a real exception.

i guess I never paid attention to the credits on Up, I had no idea Tdchad blake or peter green were on it

His accent is weird, speaking voice that is. It's obviously a 'posh guy trying to lose his posh voice' accent but it's ended up coming out really odd. I'm trying to think what it's like but all I can come up with is a South African trying to impersonate Brian Eno.

I'll rep for his cover of "Listening Wind" on the orchestral album, the lone bright spot to me. It sounds like a Security-era experiment, and even the original could have come from PG 3.

The documentary SlimandSlam referenced is called The Sweatbox. Really terrific stuff! Buried for years, but a bootleg with a time odd was uploaded earlier this year.

Gabriel strikes me as being like Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout and Matt Johnson of The The in that I'm sure he has an enormous cache of unreleased material that had never been bootlegged

Really? I have honestly never thought I'd Gabriel that way at all. Does he usually release a lot of b-sides or anything that would suggest that?

I'm just glad he didn't release it as this:

https://www.stemplayer.com

wish it were a little weirder maybe, but this album is good! it's also poppier than I expected: I can remember many of the choruses after two listens

As fairly casual fan (I listened to So a lot when I was 8, and that’s about it) the songs here seem more interesting and accessible than anything else I’ve heard post-So

I’m not sure I get the “90s record” reference - it sounds more like a sheen-y 2010s album to me. It’s missing that “someone’s just heard NIN for the first time” vibe