On Monday (June 29), we had a beautiful Strawberry Moon and Peter Gabriel had to celebrate with a new song called "I Belong To The Sky," as part of his ongoing o\i project, whose releases are aligned with lunar cycles.
"It's another song which has taken a while to grow," the legendary musician says, expounding:
It was a candidate, in some form, for the i/o record, but didn't get finished off, but it was always one of my favorites.
The starting point of the song was the timpani tom-tom pattern which was inspired by an old film called Jazz On A Summer's Day which featured a wonderful drummer called Chico Hamilton. I think he was the pioneer of the use of timpani sticks on the toms and I always loved that sound; calm and hypnotic. It set a really strong mood for me and the song grew up around it.
I'm a strong believer that reality is more malleable than we imagine and that if you really make strong pictures of something happening, you really affect the chances of it materializing. Visualising… how dreams leave their nest, is the main topic of the song.
The accompanying artwork is called Nimbus de Toekomst 1, 2019 by Berndnaut Smilde, with a photo by Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk. About it, Gabriel says:
I loved this image of the sky. The cloud brought inside — that mixture of outside and interior worlds. I think that's what the song is all about. This mix between the interior and the exterior and the transition between them. So, I was very happy that we were allowed to use this image.
Berndnaut has talked about the clouds being able to represent different things, even happy things and that they could also be about dreams and provide a sense of the future. I didn't know that when I saw the image but, obviously, he was thinking visually in very similar ways to how I was working with the lyric and the sound. Part of the pleasure of this whole process of trying to work with visual artists is that they also spend a lot of time and energy thinking through their work to get to the point of the image and when it sometimes intuitively feels like a match, you get more than the sum of the parts.
Check it out below.
