We’ve reached that time in the lunar cycle where Peter Gabriel shares his latest single. This time it’s the slow-building, jazzy I Belong To The Sky, which comes with artwork from Dutch visual artist Berndnaut Smilde.
As he did with 2023’s i/o album, Gabriel is releasing a new track every full moon. I Belong To The Sky is the seventh track he’s released ahead of his upcoming album, oi, which is due out later this year.
“It’s another song which has taken a while to grow,” says Gabriel of the new single. “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 favourites.
“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 and also 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 materialising. Visualising… how dreams leave their nest, is the main topic of the song.
“One of the things that the technological revolution is doing is accelerating the time for thoughts to become material things. The time it takes to transform an idea into something material is being radically cut. In the song, the verses have a more dreamlike ‘on your back and look up at the sky‘ feeling and then in the chorus it’s about the execution, the materialising.
“For many years now I let the ends run on every song because what often happens, which I found so frustrating, is you get to the end of a song and the band have just really locked in the groove, relaxed and it then all of a sudden, it stops… and the best feeling for a musician is when you’re in the pocket, in the groove, and it’s all happening around you. Consequently, I now let these endings loose and wonderful things happen.
One of the things I love about this track is that these amazing musicians let themselves loose and really take off – with Manu (Katché) driving. It’s just great.”
Speaking of Smilde’s Nimbus de Toekomst 1, 2019, which has been used for the single artwork and you can see below, Gabriel says, “I loved this image of the sky,” adds Gabriel. “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.”
Further details on the release plans for oi through Real World will follow.
(Image credit: Berndnaut Smilde,)
(LouderSound)
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