Peter Gabriel Shoots for the Moon – Literally

Even though he’s a proper Englishman, Peter Gabriel takes a global view of music.  With his current project o/i, he’s going even further, tying new music to the lunar cycle and releasing a single track on every full moon of 2026. Each one comes with two special mixes – “Light” and “Dark.”  The full album will be released by the end of the year.

Like the cycles of the moon, Gabriel has always followed his own unique rhythm. For most of the 00’s, he didn’t release any new music, opting instead for covers and other projects. o/i follows 2023’s i/o, which was his first studio album in twenty years.

While he co-founded prog-rock giant Genesis in 1967, by 1975 he was ready to move on. The group dynamic felt constricting. On top of that, the difficult birth of his daughter re-focused his priorities: making records was not one of them.

“As an artist, I need to absorb a wide variety of experiences. It is difficult to respond to intuition and impulse within the long-term planning that the band needed. I felt I should look at/learn about/develop myself. My creative bits and pieces and pick up on a lot of work going on outside music.”

Gabriel’s departure from Genesis let him step away from his ornate stage persona, where he’d perform dressed as a flower, a priest, or a fox (and which had begun to grate on his bandmates). When touring for his first solo albums, he often wore a simple boiler suit so as not to distract from the music.

Those early albums yielded hits like “Solsbury Hill” and “Shock the Monkey.” Then came 1986 and the quadruple platinum So, which catapulted Gabriel out of the realms of prog rock and right into the mainstream. The video for the single “Sledgehammer” became the most played on MTV and earned multiple awards. “In Your Eyes” became iconic when Jon Cusack held a boombox over his head in the movie Say Anything.

So put Gabriel’s passion for World Music in the spotlight. It featured complex rhythms (Genesis bandmate Mike Rutherford says Gabriel is a “frustrated drummer”), much of which came from French drummer Manu Katché. “In Your Eyes” introduced us to the vocals of Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour.

And then, there’s that voice. A gravelly baritone with an impressive range of over two octaves, Gabriel can easily swoop from playful (“Big Time”) to soul-deep agony (“Don’t Give Up”) to passionate yearning (“That Voice Again”).

How did his unique vocal style evolve? During his childhood, “Hymns played quite a large part. They were the closest I came to soul music before I discovered soul music. There are certain hymns that you can scream your lungs out on, and I used to love that. It was great when you used to get the old shivers down the back.”

Like that old-time religion, Gabriel is unflinching in addressing the challenges of being human. “Digging In the Dirt” (from 1992’s Us) is a brutally honest look at the deep inner wounds revealed by relationships.

Inspired by an estrangement from his daughter, “Come Talk to Me” incorporates bagpipes, an Armenian wind instrument called a “duduk”, Sinead O’Connor, and a Russian choir in his plea for reconciliation.

Between co-founding the annual WOMAD festival that celebrates global cultures and his current project reaching for the heavens (literally), Peter Gabriel’s musical journey is redefining what World Music can be.

-Cindy Grogan

Photo: Peter Gabriel-2011-Skoll World Forum via Wikiwiki