Peter Gabriel's spiraling obsession: 21 years for 12 songs

It has been one of the most relevant record news, without discussion, of the end of 2023. New album by Peter Gabriel, which has a title as brief and strange as is customary, (i/o). No one doubts that this is superb work. However, behind the urgent headlines lies a question, or rather a reason for perplexity for the millions of followers of the man who was the leader of the exceptional Genesis until 1975 and a signatory during the eighties of great hits such as Shock The Monkey, Don't Give Up either Sledgehammer. There is no human way to explain why it has taken this man 21 years to complete his new album, a process so obsessive and meticulous that it surely has no parallel in the entire history of popular music.

The count could be higher, in reality: the credits confirm that the album includes “sketches” that already began to materialize as far back as 1995. The truth is that Gabriel resumes his discourse as a soloist (calmed, lyrical, detailed, polyrhythmic and complicit in spirit with ethnic music) where he had left off, in his previous album of original compositions, Upin 2002. And, apart from tacit reproaches for its lateness, at least there is broad consensus on the excellence of these dozen compositions.

The Metacritic website, which compiles and evaluates reviews from the main Anglo-Saxon media, gives it a very high average grade (87 points out of 100)with glowing reviews in British newspaper cases The Telegraph, The Observer and TheIndependent. i/o (apparently an abbreviation of the terms in and out, “in and out”; or of input and output) has reached first place on the sales charts in the United Kingdom, Canada and Belgium; number 2 in Germany, number 7 in the United States and a more modest 19 in the Spanish market. But the million-dollar question still does not find a logical answer: why invest an eternity in a work that follows in the wake of previous works. Because it retains, in fact, the same sonic backbone of the last thirty-odd years, with David Rhodes' guitar and that rhythmic base in which Tony Levin (bass) and drummer Manu Katché interact.

At 73 years old, the also founder of the Real World record label or the Womad world music festival, outlined something similar to an apology in the presentation of i/o, where he boasts that each of the 12 themes has inspired different pictorial works, and adds, in a modest majestic plural: “Visual artists have the same obsessive commitment to detail that we have developed with our musical work.” In reality, Gabriel's picky nature has become more acute over the years, but it comes from afar. At the end of 1980, in an interview for the magazine Melody Maker, was honest about it: “The details absorb me and that slows everything down. Inspiration can strike at any moment and I have a lot of fun with it, but turning ideas into songs is hard work that requires great discipline and takes a disproportionate amount of time. My review process is very long (…). I can have 40 or 50 ideas when I start working on an album, and that has to be reduced to 10 or 12 songs.”

Be careful: that interview goes back to the time when Gabriel appeared in stores every two years. This is what happened in the case of his first four solo albums, for which he alone did not invest time in finding titles: all of them featured his brief name on the cover, with identical typography. Those statements from 43 winters ago are collected by the historian and music critic Javier de Diego Romero (Madrid, 46 years old) in his exhaustive volume Peter Gabriel: A musical explorer and his time, the first biography in Spanish about this paradigm of perfectionism, which will be released in March in Ediciones Sílex. After consulting hundreds of sources and articles, De Diego confirms that this obsession with detail has gotten worse over the years. When in 2002 he published Up and journalists bombarded him with questions about the decade that had passed since his previous work (Us, 1992), he explained in the following terms: “I enjoy generating more and more new ideas so much that I don't want to finish anything. When creating, I start from the periphery and try to find the center by making spirals. I remember talking to George Martin about this. [productor de los Beatles] and it seemed like a horrible waste of time…”

They were accredited statements, but pragmatism does not seem to be the greatest of our character's virtues. His Spanish biographer remembers that the recordings for i/o They began “intensely” in 2005, as soon as their concert tour ended. Still Growing Up. By then, she had already confirmed in interviews with mojo and Rolling Stone what would be the short and strange title of the album. At the height of 2008 she revealed in La Presse that he already had “about 60 songs”, but he began to show signs that he was driving without lifting the handbrake. “I'm not in a hurry, it will come out when it's ready. Also, music is not everything in life. I just became a father to a child, I want to spend time with him.” The alarm signals among his followers became more acute starting in 2010, again from the British magazine mojo: “When I was young I used to work about 100 hours a week, but now I leave the weekends free. And during the week I'm busy from 9 or 11 to 5, and I distribute that time between music, charity activities and technological projects. Inevitably, my musical output will be less.”

They were disturbing signs, yes, but since those statements 13 years have passed without Peter Brian Gabriel bothering to step on the accelerator. In fact, the only one who apparently has not been worried has been him, who even had the nerve to address an LP of versions by other authors (Scratch My Back2010), an album with orchestral arrangements for its most emblematic titles (New Blood, 2011) or an unusual tour in 2016 with Sting in which both alternated and exchanged their reference songs. Many digressions, alternative projects and derivatives, but not a word about the completion of an album that ended up looking like a chimera.

The parsimony that has been exhibited throughout the entire process is even more surprising if we consider the biological issue, the pressures inherent to age. In Spain, a singer-songwriter as renowned as Javier Ruibal from Cádiz (68 years old, five years younger than the Englishman), who released his albums every five or six years, has stepped on the accelerator without dissimulation in recent seasons: he published Ruibal in 2020, the collection of poems mud breastplate in 2021, a half album with the Galician Uxía (From your house to mine) in 2022 and, a few weeks ago, an ambitious thematic album titled Saturn cabaret. He, who always boasted of “claiming the right to live lazily,” justifies his current hyperactivity without circumlocution: “You look at your hourglass and there is more sand below than above. And, luckily, experience and maturity, I am having more experience when it comes to composing and things come out to me less and less often.”

These almost existential urgencies, these rushes to gain time on the calendar, undoubtedly explain the frenetic activity that sacred cows such as the Northern Irishman Van Morrison or the Canadian Neil Young, both 78 years old, have been carrying out during the last decade, famous in these last years of their lives. races to deliver two, three and up to four new works per season. Bob Dylan (82 years old), the greatest guru of the old guard, is not as prolific with his release material, but he remains immersed in his endless tour right down to the title (The Neverending Tour) and authorizes dozens of publications drawn from its colossal archives.

In the face of so much frenzy, Gabriel's only thought was to slow down the final materialization of i/o with the unusual decision to commission two different final mixes… to end up publishing both. Because this new LP can be enjoyed in two different versions: Mark Spike Tent initials the call Bright-side mix (“light mixture”), while Chad Blake is responsible for the “dark mixture” or Dark-side mix. The differences are very subtle, but the fan can entertain himself by comparing the sound of the respective final materializations. “Tchad is like a sculptor who builds from drama and Spike works more like a painter, he loves to collect images,” clarifies good old Gabriel.

Would it have been worth so much effort to end up delivering an outstanding LP, but not very different from SW (1986), Us (1992) and Up (2002)? Surely only Peter Brian Gabriel understands the need for such a “labyrinthine and tortuous” process, but the same succession of titles on this new album, from Love Can Heal (“Love can heal”) to Road to Joy (“Path of Joy”), This Is Home (“This is home”) or Live and Let Live (“Live and let live”), reveals him as a conscientious, critical and analytical creator of the world around him, but inevitably optimistic. And he can always look around and claim that in 2023 the Rolling Stones themselves put an end to Hackney Diamonds to 18 years of drought.

Oh, and there are even more lazy ones. When Paul Rodgers, leader of the bands Free and Bad Company in the 1970s, appeared earlier this fall with his Midnight Rosewe realized that his predecessor, electric, still dated from the last century (1999). So, strictly speaking, Peter Gabriel and his i/o They cannot claim the title of the most lazy in the history of pop.

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