With the advent of another full-moon, Peter Gabriel has shared his latest single, Till Your Mind Is Shining.
"The song began around a chord sequence which I liked and which felt quite poppy and playful, so I just kept on playing around with it till I had something," Gabriel explains of the new song, which you can listen to below. "Of all the songs that I’ve written for i/o and o\i this is probably the poppiest for me.
"It takes me back to my schooldays, in some ways, because before there was Genesis we were effectively trying to be songwriters more than musicians - pop songs or soul / R&B songs. I think this song connects me back to some of those roots and the sort of thing that I was working on then and trying to master.
"Some elements of this are a few years old, I mean pretty much most things I work on take a while to mature. I leave songs for a while and go and do something else and when I come back to them and they smell alive, I will want to complete them. I really enjoyed singing this one, particularly the end, and I think the band had a good time playing it too. You can hear some wonderful performances from all the band. It was really a fun thing to create.
"I’ve always been fascinated by explorations of consciousness and attempts to understand from where it originated, along with all the recent investigations into animal and plant sentience. In some ways it’s about opening up the mind and stepping inside to understand a little more of ourselves and the world we live in with the hope that we respond a little more responsibly and compassionately."
As he did with 2023's i/o album, Gabriel is releasing a new single with every full moon, building up to a full album release later in the year. Once kore there are also Dark-Side and Bright-Side mixes, handled once again by Tchad Blake and Mark ‘Spike’ Stent, respectively.
Gabrielis also highlighting the work of an artist he adires with each release. For Till Your Mind Is Shining, it's contemporary Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima and his work Warp Time With Warp Self, No.2.
"I went to Hiroshima a few years back and talked to some of the survivors of the bomb, extraordinary women who have dedicated their lives to keeping alive their experience of the awful reality and total horror of a nuclear bomb," Gabriel says.
"I really wanted an image that felt like a mixture of something cold and structured and informative as well as being soft and self-reflective. Tatsuo calls this piece Warp Time Wth Warp Self, No.2 and I love that it feels quite futuristic in one sense, with numbers and data and yet you’ve got this ‘warp self’ in the background. There’s an interaction between the human and the mechanical AI world that we’re creating, or at least that’s what it says to me. I like that, particularly in the context of where the ‘Shining Mind’ could lead you and what that is there to counter, in terms of what we’re creating in this outside world."
Gabriel has previously released singles for What Lies Ahead, Been Undone and Put The Bucket Down. Further details on the release plans for o\i through Real World will follow.
