Peter Gabriel has shared his latest single, What Lies Ahead, which will feature on his upcoming album, o\i. The song was originally one of the work-in-progress songs Gabriel performed during 2014’s Back To Front tour.
Gabriel is releasing tracks on every full moon ahead of the new album’s release in a similar manner to how he shared music for 2023’s i/o album. Again, there are also Dark-Side and Bright-Side mixes, handled once again by Tchad Blake and Mark ‘Spike’ Stent, respectively.
“On the Back to Front tour, along with Playing For Time, it was one of the songs that was played without words, as a work in progress,” Gabriel explains. “The song actually began with a melody that my son Isaac was playing with and I thought, oh, that’s really nice – I could build that into something.
“On that tour, we had our wonderful Scandinavian contingent of Jennie Abrahamson and Linnea Olsson who was also playing cello. I’d always liked Linnea’s cello line so it ended up on this final recording. John Metcalfe added some other elements for the orchestral sessions in 2022.
“There is also more of the magnificent Orphei Drängar choir, another Scandinavian element, who also featured on This Is Home on the i/o record. It’s a very strange mood that they create, powerful and emotional and it’s a great way to start a song – which was Brian Eno’s suggestion. I’ve always liked spiritual, inspirational music because sometimes people get to a different place when they remove themselves and are just present with this feeling of something else out there. Although I’m not religious myself, I definitely have the feeling for it and that’s what I was hoping we would have with the choir at the front, that you go straight away into this other world…
“It’s a song about inventors and invention. My dad was an electrical engineer, inventor and I saw him go through the frustrations of not only trying to realise an idea, which has to normally go through so many iterations, but then to sell it, both to the people who’ve got the money and then to the outside world. So, I’ve always been curious about the creative process and how that applies to inventors.”
What Lies Ahead is the third single Gabriel has released for the new album. It’s been preceded by both Been Undone and Put The Bucket Down, and again the single is accompanied by a new piece of art, which you can see below the video, this time Judy Chicago’s 1982 work Birth Tear / Tear.
“Birth Tear / Tear shows the pain of birth and, clearly, no man will ever have an understanding of what that really is, but giving birth to an idea has many (less painful) parallels. I’m delighted that she was happy to let us use it,” Gabriel says.
“There’s a wonderful quote where she said that ‘truth can be found in the ignored, the forgotten, and the left out,’ and it reminds me a little bit of a Gaetano Pesce quote, ‘that beauty in the future will lie in the imperfection,’ particularly in this robotic AI world in which we are now entering. It seems our society is backing away from open-minded thinking. The creative arts and universities too, have been preserves for exploring ideas and debate and I hate the moves toward shutting all that down.”
Further details on the release plans for o\i through Real World will follow.
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