Peter Gabriel has released a new song. It's called “I Belong To The Sky” and is the new taste of “o/i”, the album expected by the end of the year. The song was initially conceived during the “i/o” sessions, released in 2023, but has only now been completed. The British musician himself considers it special: “It's one of my favorite songs ever.”
Recounting the birth of the piece, Gabriel explained that it all started from a rhythmic intuition: “The starting point of the song was the timpani rhythm, inspired by an old film called 'Jazz On A Summer's Day', which featured an extraordinary drummer called Chico Hamilton. I think he was the pioneer in the use of timpani sticks on toms and I've always loved that sound: calm and hypnotic. It created a really particular atmosphere and the song developed around to it.”
The single cover also reflects the meaning of the song. The chosen image is “Nimbus De Toekomst 1, 2019”, a work by the artist Berndnaut Smilde, photographed by Cassander Eeftinck Schattennkerk. Smilde's work ranges between installations, sculpture and photography and focuses on the deconstruction and reconstruction of materials, light, space, atmosphere and experience in relation to architectural spaces. The “Nimbus” series, in particular, captures an ephemeral moment: artificial clouds created inside buildings that exist for only a few seconds before dissolving. The image also deeply affected Peter Gabriel, who explained its link with the meaning of the song: “I loved this image of the sky. The cloud brought inside, this meeting between the external and internal world. I believe that the song speaks precisely of this: the passage between internal and external and the transition between the two. I was very happy that we were allowed to use this image. Smilde spoke of clouds as elements capable of representing different things, even positive ones, and of evoking dreams and a sense of the future. I didn't know it when I saw it the image, but evidently he was thinking in a very similar way to how I was working on text and sound. One of the most interesting things about collaborating with visual artists is that they devote great energy to building the meaning of their works up to the point of the final image. When you create an intuitive correspondence, you get something that is more than the sum of the parts.”
Gabriel also announced that the “Dark-Side” remix of “I Belong To The Sky” will be released on the occasion of the next new moon.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
