At this point, Peter Gabriel is more than halfway through the long rollout of his new album o\i. Rather than releasing a few advance singles, he's sharing new songs all year, with another one arriving whenever there's a full moon. Today, he shares the sprawling and tender "One by One," which lasts for nearly 10 minutes and which presumably functions as the album centerpiece. It returns Gabriel to the character of Mozo, a mythical recurring figure in Gabriel's work who first appeared on Gabriel's worth with Genesis in the '70s. As always, Gabriel has a lot to say about the song:
This is another song that comes out of the brain show that I am working on and the character has been effectively torn apart and is trying to reassemble himself one piece at a time. I needed a character for the story and I'd always wanted to do a little more with Mozo, who I had introduced many years back, and I thought, well, let's give him another blast here. He's been brought back from the dead.
What was interesting for me about Mozo was that he was not fully of the world and not fully outside it. For the original second album narrative, he was found on this waste tip, and there was a reference to alchemy, and how you only really get the opportunity to create gold out of the lowest material; shit. In Japanese culture, they also have kintsugi (kin: gold, tsugi: repair), where a broken cup is repaired with gold or precious metals and the repaired cup with its faults showing ends up more valuable than the original. It's a beautiful symbol for humanity, because we're remarkably easy to break and trying to reassemble self, psyche, and sanity, is really the journey of the song.
There are two or three story songs on the record, and I actually like the length of time they occupy, and I like the fact that you have to stay in it for the ride to understand the story. It's like when you arrive in some hut in the woods and it takes a while just to settle in and get yourself tuned-in to the pace of that place. I wanted a bit of that in the song. If people are on for the full ride, they're going to take it through to the end. It's a long journey, but I think its place in the show, which is percolating in my head, it'll be towards the end, if not the end.
As with all the new songs "One By One" has its own unique cover art. In this case, it's Pieces, from the Canadian sculptor David Altmejd. Here's what Gabriel says about it:
One of the things I loved about what David does is that he seems to get these images and ideas and then cuts them up and reassembles them. Almost like moments of time, or maybe like an old-fashioned flick book where you get just an incremental movement from one image to the other. It looked like David had a similar direction in that he's taking the same thing and cutting it up and reassembling it. That worked perfectly for this song, and I was excited that David was happy to be part of this project.
Altmejd says:
"One By One" evokes a kind of spiritual evolution by piecing together the broken parts of oneself. This resonates deeply with me because I understand my sculptures as being made the same way. They start by forming themselves in matter, then they are destroyed, and finally reassembled in a way that makes them transcend materiality.
Gabriel wrote and produced "One By One" himself, and it's got some serious old-school orchestral action. Below, check out Mark "Spike" Stent's Bright-Side Mix of the song and Gabriel's behind-the-scenes video; the Dark Side mix comes out on the next new moon.
