Peter Gabriel's I/O: A Journey Through Time, Mortality, and the Human Experience

In a video interview conducted last week, Peter Gabriel said, "If I were a butterfly, 21 years would be an eternity." And it would be a tiny flash if I were a mountain. It's all relative, then.

Gabriel, the contemplative, eternally optimistic English songwriter, hasn't put out a new album in twenty-one years. Friday wrapped up his methodical release of I/O, a collection of twelve songs that honor rebirth and reconciliation while addressing time and mortality. The album, which Gabriel has been releasing tracks from over the past year, is a reflection of his love, compassion, and belonging in the face of an information-rich future. It's a declaration from a songwriter who embraces the lessons of aging, in contrast to certain rock musicians.

"There are certain advantages to growing older," he remarked. Developing self-awareness and the ability to refuse. and becoming more authentically yourself.”

The 73-year-old Gabriel considers himself a perfectionist. He acknowledged that the album's creation had been a lengthy process. He stated, "At this point in my life, I wanted to do a little bit of living instead of just be a professional musician." "I continued to compose music, but I never finished anything."

"I'm a doodler," he continued. Thus, there's always something to distract oneself from. Touch wood, I've never had any difficulty coming up with musical ideas. But it has been more difficult for me to reach the point where I believe I have a lyric that I like. For better or worse, I believe that my inner critic has become more ferocious. However, feeling good about occasionally letting your standards drop and just letting the energy flow is a necessary component of the creative process.

Both micro and macrocosms

Gabriel is a happy anomaly in today's pop. In a time of two-minute hits and TikTok snippets, he writes complex, seven-minute songs. Despite releasing I/O on a monthly basis, he values the album as a form. "I would love to give other people the experience of being taken on a ride," he remarked. "You know, there's always a riptide moving in the opposite direction when the tide shifts." Therefore, I believe that things will become more attractive, slower, and longer the more they shorten.

Speaking from his London home studio, Gabriel was surrounded by an Antony Micallef painting on the wall behind him, featuring strong brushstrokes and semiabstract yet biomorphic forms, and a vocal microphone resting next to it.

After So (1986), Us (1992), and Up (2002), Gabriel's most recent two-letter album title is I/O, which stands for "Input/Output." He applies that idea to both micro and macrocosms in the new songs, including data, life cycles, physical sensations, and ecospheres. The album's title track, "Stuff coming out, stuff going in/I'm just a part of everything," is a powerful declaration of interconnectedness, akin to what he said in the interview that "we aren't just these little isolated islands, but we belong to this greater mesh of life."

Gabriel has written about hypothetical situations since his time as frontman of Genesis, the groundbreaking progressive-rock group he founded in the 1970s before going solo. Additionally, he has always found the conflict and interaction between technology and humans to be fascinating. "They're starting to come together," Gabriel remarked. For my generation, the excitement in computer technology stemmed from the development of the internet. For my children, the future is more of a biotech one, combining technology and nature both inside and outside of our bodies.

Naturally, he has been considering artificial intelligence. "AI is going to do a really good job at my job, your job, and everyone else's jobs," he declared. "So what happens next? One of the sayings of the designer Gaetano Pesce is, "Beauty in the future will lie in the imperfection." It is crucial that we make an effort to understand who we are, where our humanity is, and what we want to be. As a kind of human-tech hybrid, we are going through this extremely awkward adolescence, which will be painful and challenging. However, I do think that an era of plenty is possible if we make it through it.

"There is never a right or wrong."

In honor of a natural cycle, Gabriel has been releasing a new song from I/O on the full moon date every month since January. He has chosen an image by a modern artist to go with each song. A painting by Micallef, who, according to Gabriel, "captures both the horror and hopefulness of humanity," was adapted into an animated video for the song "Love Can Heal," which features a gentle vocal performance by Gabriel and a shimmering, rippling electronic promise of forgiveness.

The music for the album wasn't finished when Gabriel revealed the full moon schedule in November 2022. The songs were composed over many years using parts from orchestral arrangements, Swedish and South African choirs, Brian Eno, Gabriel's longstanding band, and his collection of sample recordings and sessions.

The completed album purposefully provides options. Mark Spike Stent's Bright-Side mix and Tchad Blake's Dark-Side mix were the two unique renditions of each song that were released. Blake's mixes offer intimacy and close-up physical grain, while Stent's are glossier and more three-dimensional. (A Dolby Atmos version of the album featuring spatial-audio In-Side mixes by Hans-Martin Buff is available.)

"It's always a decision, isn't it? There are never right or wrong answers," Stent stated from his studio close to Salisbury, England. "I find Peter's decision to leave it up to the listener to make this quite interesting. We all have unique ways of understanding music.

Since 2002, Gabriel hasn't exactly been idle. He organized several arena tours, one of which he co-hosted in 2016 alongside Sting, emulating their Amnesty International tours from the 1980s and early 1990s. Among the soundtracks he composed for motion pictures are the Grammy-winning Down to Earth for Wall-E. He collaborated on cover versions of two albums, Scratch My Back (2010) and And I'll Scratch Yours (2013), with some of his favorite songwriters. As New Blood (2011), he went on tour with an orchestra conducted by John Metcalfe, who also wrote the arrangements for I/O, and performed and rerecorded his older songs with orchestral arrangements.

Gabriel has recently been advising scientists on brain imaging technology that claims to be able to read thoughts. He declared, "It's here, but it's in its infancy." "It will take seconds, not thirty years of research, to translate an idea into an external object and then to 3D printers, movies, or music." I adore the notion that in the future, all people would be able to speak the arts.

The songs on I/O, which has been in the works since the early 2000s, are a reflection of all those projects. Gabriel revealed the album's title and stated, "I'm trying to write principally about birth and death, with the sex in the middle," in a 2005 interview with Rolling Stone.

However, as the record developed over time, ideas about time and the mind also gained prominence. The songs that Gabriel believes will be included in The Brain Project, a show that tells a hypothetical story about the functioning of the brain, contain some of the album's most joyous moments. The obvious follow-up to Gabriel's funky 1986 hit Sledgehammer, Road to Joy, revels in the feelings that overtake a person as they awaken from a coma. Olive Tree imagines a helmet that would allow someone to experience from within what other living forms, such as a developing seed, feel; the excitement would be audible through trumpets.

Gabriel does not anticipate another twenty years between records. According to him, "there's a lot of stuff in the can" for his "brain project," which is taking shape. "They're obviously not done. However, I don't believe the next one will come out 21 years from now.

Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Press Time staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.