Last week I finally really tried my hand at laying down a couple good chord changes on guitar and singing something over them. I did three short two minutes songs. One was said to sound like The Dandy Warhols. Another was my attempt at a Skinny Puppy song though it came out sounding more like ... this band whose name I cannot think of right now, but let's just go with 'industrial dance'. My last one was just guitar and vocals, shades of everything. It was cool when the first one was called out as sounding like the Dandy's, because I thought: well, that's one of my influences, and I would love to make music that sound like them.

I'm trying to pay better attention in music to what influences me, what bits and pieces of music I'd like to take with me on the path to making my own music, finding my own style. Peter Gabriel has been a big influence on how I look at music since I 'discovered' him when I was 17. Sometimes I get sad when I think of all the young people out there who might have preconceived notions about Peter Gabriel as the crusty old world music humping enviro-hippie. I mean, sure he's that now, and sure that covers album he recently released was sincerely awful, but Gabriel has a back catalog of several albums that don't fit in any mold that I know of.

This one, his third self-titled album also known as "Melt", opens with a fierce pounding drumbeat and snidely whispered lyrics from the perspective of an expert at home invasion. "Intruders happy in the daaaaaaaaaaaark" he howls in a small voice that sounds almost unlike his own. After the second track, we're greeted by a jazzy interlude that segues into processed drum beats and what would eventually become Gabriel's distinctive wailing/scatting hybrid. A driven song leads into a tranquil one, but even that is misleading, because the song is about an assassination from the perspective of the would-be assassin. This album is, simply, all over the place, and every song is fantastic. The last track, "Biko", one of Gabriel's most famous tracks, his him finally dipping his toes in world music and the outcome is, I think, better than any of his other forays into it.

What I'd like to take from my love of Peter Gabriel is the sense of spontaneity in his vocal. He's never scared to drench the song in his voice. In this song, "And Through The Wire", the entire hook revolves around his elongation of that one letter in the word wire. The second hook is his way of singing "I want you" to sound like a tape playing backward slowly. They're both incredibly simple hooks but I can't really imagine a voice that isn't his pulling them off properly. Maybe I'm biased. The guy sounds like it's nothing to toss off an album of excellent material... I wish he'd do a tour where he just plays stuff off his first three albums, authentically, not rearranged or fucked with, but I know it'll never happen. He's too busy humping that dead world music horse. Some sort of innocence was lost with Gabriel when "Biko" hit it big and he realized he could make it big with 'world music'. His output has never been quite as good since.

Peter Gabriel used to be a man of big ideas. Not that he isn't now (I guess), it's just that his ideas are benign and more of the "let's feed rice to starving children" variety than the "let's write a prog-rock concept album about New York street punks" variety, and that's sad. There's nothing wrong with "Down to Earth", his song from WALL-E that is nominated for a Golden Globe, I mean aside from the fact that it sounds like something Phil Collins would have aborted from his sandy vagina about 10 years ago, but that neutered world music shit (which dominates Gabriel's work even when he's not writing songs for plucky CG kids movies--that is, plucky CG kids movies which manage to make me tear up and watch them over and over again) pales when compared to something like, say, Down the Dolce Vita.

According to Songfacts:

This introduced the characters Aeron and Gorham, who set out on a journey across the sea. They would become part of Gabriel's story of Mozo, a mercurial stranger who would come and go, changing people's lives. Mozo would appear in "On The Air," "Exposure", "Red Rain," "Down The Dolce Vita," and "That Voice Again," but the Mozo story as a stage production or movie never developed.

I never knew that. I never cared, either. (Still don't.) What I do care about however is how ridiculously over-the-top this song is. It's got guitar that sounds about an octave shift away from being 1970's porn music, with the The London Symphony Orchestra doing grandiose sweeps and builds. It's almost got a disco feel to it, I can imagine Gabriel in spandex bell-bottoms dancing across the stage while singing this.

But this song was a "big idea". Peter Gabriel's first solo album is full of them. Every song is a big idea. Maybe Gabriel just used up all his big ideas on his early solo work. I guess it's unfair to expect a 58 year old guy to be as creative as he was at 26, but damn, why? Gabriel, give us another self-titled album. When you started titling them properly it all went to shit. (I mean, aside from Scratch which just sucks and continues to be the only Peter Gabriel album I do not physically own.)

* I am a big Peter Gabriel fan and nothing in this post is meant to be insulting to the man. I like So a lot, of course, and I enjoy songs like Steam and Big Town despite myself and the strange looks people give me when I play them.