Peter Gabriel has released “I Belong To The Sky”, the sixth track from his forthcoming album oi.
“I Belong To The Sky” [Bright Side Mix] was released on the Strawberry Moon. Previous releases have been:
“Been Undone”, which was released on January’s Wolf Moon
“Put The Bucket Down” which was released on February’s Snow Moon
“What Lies Ahead” which was released on March’s Worm Moon
“Won’t Stand Down” which was released on May’s Flower Moon
“A Hard Lesson” which was released on June’s Blue Moon
New songs fromoiwill be released on subsequent full moons, revealing the whole album at the end of the year.
“It’s another song which has taken a while to grow,” says Gabriel. “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 materializing. 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 looseand really take off – with Manu (Katché) driving. It’s just great.”
The cover art for“I Belong To The Sky”is called ‘Nimbus de Toekomst 1, 2019’ by Berndnaut Smilde, with a photo by Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk. Smilde’s work consists of installations, sculptures and photography. He explores the physical deconstruction and reconstruction of materials; light, space, atmosphere and experience in relation to his architectural environment. His Nimbus works present a transitory moment of presence in a specific locationand Smilde is interested in that short-term, temporary aspect of the work. The clouds exist for a few seconds before they fall apart again.
“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.
“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.”
The Dark-Side Mix of “I Belong To The Sky” will be released on the next new moon.