My Life with Peter Gabriel, Part One

I was inspired to write about Peter Gabriel’s music after seeing him perform at Madison Square Garden last fall. It was, as they say, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, one granted to me as a birthday present from my wife. She told me that she bought the tickets because she knew I wouldn’t have done so and would, further, have regretted it. She was right and I remain grateful. It was one of a handful of concerts I have attended that undeniably changed me in some essential ways. It’s worth noting that Gabriel is the only artist who has had this effect on me twice, once in November, 1986 and again in September, 2023. I won’t go into it any further than that at this point but it seems worth mentioning at the outset, in case you’re wondering why I’m writing this at all.

My life with Peter Gabriel began, as far as I can recall, with the “Shock the Monkey” video and then that of “Games without Frontiers.” It was 1983 and I had just moved back or was about to move back to Rochester, NY (from Annandale, VA) under somewhat troubled if not, though probably, traumatic circumstances. My mother worked a lot and MTV was an important part of latchkey life for my friends and me. In that context of being left to our own devices in modest suburban basements, of smoking cigarettes or pot, of getting to second base or whatever else was happening among unsupervised 13 year-olds, MTV was frequently just on, like regular tv or the radio.

Gabriel’s presence was jarring to my pre-/adolescent mind, and stood out from most of the videos that were in rotation at that time. In Gabriel’s music, there weren’t exactly monsters (were we the monsters?) and there definitely weren’t any parties or particularly festive events, no breakups or rain-soaked night-driven heartache, even if there was rain.

Some of his lyrics, even the hooks, were largely unintelligible to me 1 but their intention was clear as verses or choruses, for example, and I always knew, or thought I knew, where he was coming from. His music was made by machines, a fact that was enmeshed in several cultural conflicts at the time, but it wasn’t exactly electronic music as that was understood. And although he was well-known, the trio of “Solsbury Hill” (which I must have known from the radio), “Games without Frontiers,” and “Shock the Monkey” didn’t add up to the kind of fame I understood to be the goal of popular musicians and artists.

He was weird and I was into it but couldn’t say why. I picked up his first two records, known colloquially as Car and Scratch, and except for “Solsbury Hill” and “Here comes the Flood,” I was baffled. Looking back, those two records seem to be mostly a matter of getting the era out of his system. Much of it sounds like lesser or confused versions of his contemporaries.2 Peter Gabriel 3, also known as Melt, however, was a significant shift. I’m not sure all of the songs were better, exactly, but the focus was clear: each song described or narrated a certain kind of person or their action. So even if, for instance, ”Intruder“ wasn’t your thing, there was no denying that it was intruder music. There were flashes of the kind of complications that bogged down the first two records3 but any record that has ”Intruder,“ ”No Self Control,“ and ”Biko” was bound to hit me where I was living.

And then there was his fourth album, Security, which included “Shock the Monkey” and marked the end of his initial solo phase. To my young ears, this record was from a different planet, one eroded by blurred paranoia and abiding, persistent, and disenfranchised ritual. The message I received was that on a global scale, nothing was working out, and the forces we sought to annihilate or convert weren’t having it.

Our days were numbered. What I was hearing was music from the future, from after the end, from after the flood. Gabriel’s music seemed to offer some answers, to know something we didn’t. However bad things got, there was an after and what were we supposed to do then? This all made sense to a teenager whose recent years had been defined by myriad thwarted and fugitive desires, and seemingly few allies.


  1. I don’t think I ever believed the line from “Games without Frontiers” was “She’s so popular,” but learning that it was rather the name of a French game show failed to unmuddy the lyrical waters. ↩︎

  2. e.g. David Bowie, Brian Eno, ELO, Pink Floyd, and of course Genesis. The leap in sophistication and the extent to which he established his own voice between his second and third albums is remarkable, and telling with regards to his next two albums. ↩︎

  3. e.g. ”Family Snapshot,” which strains under P.G.’s efforts towards enactment or a theatrical mode that was better suited to his work in Genesis, which is not to say I don’t love it, but rather to say that I came to love it after I fell for So and needed to hear more Peter Gabriel of any kind. ↩︎

30 Years Ago Today

My wife reminded me that today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of For Your Own Special Sweetheart. 30 years! I can’t say it seems like yesterday, but I can say the kids who wrote and played and worked on it did the best they could. The photo above was taken in front of CBGB around the time we were writing and finishing those songs. I can’t seem to find the photographer’s name to credit her but she also took another, better known photo of us that day. In that one, my eyes are closed. Jawbox blinked often but never in unison.

Our first tour in support of the record was with Girls Against Boys. Last night I dreamt I was in a van with Scott McCloud and Johnny Temple. Coincidence is a simultaneity to which we retrospectively attribute meaning. I suspect that somewhere in the lyrics on FYOSS this point is made obliquely and aggressively.

“Friendship cannot exist without Forgiveness of Sins continually.” — William Blake

Happy birthday, Sweetheart.

Tinkering, Learning

My interest in software and app development falls somewhere between that of a professional and an amateur in almost all areas of my activity. So I still read, say, Macstories or Daring Fireball or Six Colors to keep an ear to the ground for Apple-related stuff. There used to be more blogs that drew my attention in this way, most of which seem to have fallen by the wayside or my interest dwindled: Patrick Rhone’s Minimal Mac, Shawn Blanc moved into more personal-motivation than Apple stuff (his Sweet Setup site, however, remains a kind of bridge between the two), MacSparky is still going, The Brooks Review. There were several more of these blogs I can’t remember the names of, sort of shopping guides, lots of productivity tips. Lots of stuff about Apple. Growl was a modifiable notifications app and something else before that, a system extension, maybe? There was a whole scene dedicated to a kind of system info display, lots of graphic stuff embedded in the desktop that evolved into present-day widgets. Tinkering in WordPress, setting up a self-hosted rss reader with Fever, grabbing images and graphics (app icons, drive icons, wallpapers,etc.) from DeviantArt — these were all sort of harmless ways to learn how operating systems and graphics systems work without having to learn too much about them. Or mostly harmless — my professional developer and programmer friends have always had to bail me out once in a while.

Something similar recently took hold when I established a small recording and then mixing setup for myself. It has been as much a necessity as a desire to simply understand better how the equipment and software work. Recording as much of myself as possible keeps costs down considerably; likewise mixing my recordings. I should add, however, that although my work is adequate so far, it is not up to the level of professionals, on whom I still rely for technical and aesthetic help.

I’m not sure everyone has this kind of curiosity. I find a great deal of it in the blogging communities I lurk and take part in. Most of us with our own sites tinker with them, change colors or themes, experiment with galleries and audio posts and other platforms. I find that the artists and writers and musicians and poets I know and admire and support all have something of this curiosity, which to be clear, is a kind of wonder at things, not just an attraction to gear. It’s very much a kind of consuming interest in things outside one’s own work, like poets who play pickup basketball or other sports, painters who are amateur musicians, musicians who fuss over blogs, all of whom find a way to distract themselves just enough to clean the slate for a new round of work.

As far as I can tell, there is less and less of this as time goes on. Social platforms suck up time and expression in equal measure and although we might see more photos, even good ones, or dances, or therapy tips, or elephant rescues, kittens, unlikely animal friendships, and people’s homes, it’s not clear to me how much we benefit from these exposures. By now, we’ve all made some valued connection or discovery via Facebook, X, the Fediverse, Instagram, or Tik Tok. But there isn’t really much to do with these platforms but express oneself in support of something or not. There’s not much room to create stuff or learn how to distinguish between large and small feelings. Everything on social platforms is the same size as everything else. Whether or not you agree with me on this, I’m certain you know what I’m talking about.

Here’s a solo flute piece by Claude Debussy. I believe it’s called “Syrinx” and I’m not quite sure how I found it. It pops up in Apple Classical’s The Story of Classical, which is a pretty good series if you’re new to the genre or want some leads to music you might not have heard before.

One great consequence of this homogeneity of size, this compression of ideas and feelings into feeds most of now look at on our phones, is that we start, have started, to assume that the feeds are our venue, our forum, our gallery, our channel. And, of course, they are those things, have become those things. But I think it’s still important for amateurs, people who have interests and commitments outside their professional lives, to make room for those activities. We were mostly drawn to them because we could muck around a bit, try to make things fit how we wanted them to fit.

So if you don’t have a blog or poetry or music site or gallery site anymore because you got caught up in Facebook or your personal brand, or just don’t have (make) time for it anymore, I’m probably not the only one who would like to see from you now some more of what you used to be up to.

Favorite Albums of 2023

My favorite albums of 2023 list is up at BrooklynVegan. It’s my third such list for them and the third time I’ve immediately had other thoughts about my selections. I failed to include Bex Burch’s There Is Only Love and Fear, for example, not because I don’t think it one of my favorites from 2023, but because, embarrassingly, I forgot about it. Also Jeremy Chiu or New Future City Radio, the latter of which was most powerful and inspiring when I saw them here in New York. But that’s just one record label and so seems narrow for the purpose of a favorites list. I suppose this is the difference between a favorites list and a best of, that the favorites is simply preferences while the best of is a more direct and public critical view. All of which is to say that my favorite label of the year was once again International Anthem. Their ongoing effort to sustain a consistent release schedule, an expanding roster, and a holistic listening culture is, to me, currently unrivaled.

Another aspect of this process that comes to mind is the common sight of Andre 3000’s New Blue Sun on many end-of-year lists, including mine. I wonder how we’ll all feel about this record in the near or distant future. I imagine it won’t hold up as well as, say, Shabaka Hutchings’s Afrikan Culture, another recent release inspired by flute experiments. Hutchings is a woodwinds and improvisation virtuoso. Andre 3000, on the other hand, is more of a lightning rod for certain kinds of taste and atmosphere, always hip, always demonstrating a unique flair for contemporary preferences. It’s a different kind of innovation, I think, a sort of placeholder to remind us what we’re into, even if we haven’t heard it yet.

All of which is to say that the 2023 list reflects an honest, if not altogether thorough, appraisal of what I enjoyed this past year. I hope you find something there to enjoy yourself.

A Record A Day 2023: April

I’m falling further and further behind as the year goes on but am still posting what gets played. My hope is that I’ll catch up during holidays or something. I’m currently 26 plays short for the year, approximately 5 plays per month. Such calculations don’t help much, though. In any case, you can find the available April plays here on Apple Music. Enjoy!