It seems a contradiction if I say I listened to an old album by one of my favourite artists recently. The truth is, I'm not a very good music fan.
I did think of talking about music that I liked, and then I realised I'd reinvented radio. I could do a reaction video on YouTube, "old man listens to old music", but I'm really a text person at the moment so I'm going to write about it.
Here's an aside: a young adult asked me what my favourite music was. I reeled off a list of old artists: Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush. Then I mentioned a modern one, expecting that he'd heard of them: Elbow. He hadn't. Then I realised that they'd won the Mercury music prize when he was probably two. Not so modern really.
So here's the start of a new series:
Listening to Us by Peter Gabriel for the first time
I listened to Peter Gabriel 2 (aka Scratch), a while back. 1 and 3 (known as Car and Melt) even though that's not written on them) were ingrained in my brain as I'd listened to them so many times. They were familiar and comforting. This second album sounded strange and dated, even though it wasn't so different musically to the ones that preceded and followed it. I wondered how it would be listening to Us, the follow up to So. Like the earlier ones, So, is associated with a place and time - my final year of university in York.
Apple Music's description says that it's less commercially minded than So, but no less sophisticated.
"Come talk to me" sounded like it was about divorce, but I've subsequently found that it was about a break in the relationship with his daughter.
"Blood of Eden" is a beautiful duet with Sinéad O'Conner, possibly inspired by the duet he did earlier with Kate Bush on "Don't give up" on So.
"Steam" has echoes of Sledgehammer
"Digging in the dirt" is familiar as a single.
"Fourteen black paintings" is probably where, "less commercially minded" comes from. It's quiet, and contemplative, but begins to build at two-thirds of the way through.
Sweet princess has the great lyric, "let me introduce his frogness". It's a funny little story.
"Secret world" is a wistful closer.
If you got on board with So and you're wanting a followup then Us is to be recommended.
It seems funny to be recommending music when it could cost you nothing but your time, but even then, all our time is finite, so it's a good way of spending forty minutes.
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