«It's another song that took a while to mature. It had to make it into the album in some form at some point Ibut we didn't get to finish it, but it's always been one of my favorites.”
Full moon, new song. Peter Gabriel published another piece from o\ithe album he will release later in 2026. It's called I Belong to the Sky and from a sound point of view it starts from a tom-tom pattern played with timpani sticks, the ones with felt heads, inspired by the 1960 documentary Jazz on a summer day which chronicled the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and in particular the performance of drummer Chico Hamilton.
“I think he pioneered the use of timpani sticks on toms,” Gabriel says of Hamilton. «I've always loved that sound: calm and hypnotic. It created a very intense atmosphere and the song grew around that feeling.”
“I belong in the sky,” goes the chorus, “you can go anywhere, you can be anyone, free your mind and learn to fly.” Gabriel says he is «firmly convinced that reality is much more malleable than we think and that if you create vivid images of something in your head, you really influence the chances of that thing materializing. Visualizing… the way dreams leave their nest is the main theme of the song.”
“One of the things that the technological revolution is doing is accelerating the time it takes for thoughts to become concrete objects,” Gabriel says in a statement. «The time it takes to materialize an idea is drastically reducing. In the song, the verses have a dreamier feel, like when you're lying on your back looking up at the sky; then, in the chorus, we move on to action, to materialization.”
The song has so far been published on Bright-Side Mix by Mark “Spike” Stent, will also be released in a couple of weeks Dark-Side Mix.
The song has an instrumental ending. «Often» says Gabriel «something happens that I find frustrating: you arrive at the end of the song just at the moment in which the band has finally found the perfect groove, has relaxed, is in tune… and suddenly the piece stops. And yet for a musician the best feeling is to be completely immersed in the groove, when everything flows and the music comes to life around you. So today I let these endings open and develop freely, and wonderful things happen. One of the things I love about this song is that these extraordinary musicians let go and take off, with Manu Katché as the engine. It's fantastic.”
As always, the piece is accompanied by a cover that reproduces a work of art. That of I Belong to the Sky And Nimbus de Toekomst 1, 2019 by Berndnaut Smilde, in a photograph by Cassander Eeftinck Schattennkerk. «The cloud in an interior: that mixture between the world outside and inside you. I think this is exactly the point of the song. This intertwining of the inside and the outside and the passage from one to the other.”
«Berndnaut said that clouds can represent different things, even positive ones, they can talk about dreams and convey a sense of the future. I didn't know it when I saw the image, but he was obviously thinking in images in a similar way to how I was working on the lyrics and sound. Part of the pleasure of the process of collaborating with visual artists is that they also spend a great deal of time and energy reflecting on their work, to get to the essence of an image. And when, sometimes intuitively, you sense that there is a correspondence, the result is greater than the simple sum of the parts.”
