From the official Peter Gabriel Newsletter:
Hello everyone,
Wait, what, already? Yes, that’s right, your second full moon update of August has landed, neatly coinciding with the arrival of a blue supermoon. As the saying goes, a blue moon is a rare thing but this one is also known as a supermoon as it will appear larger and brighter than usual, being near the closest point in its orbit around Earth. The next time these two moons coincide won’t be until 2037, apparently.
Hope you manage to catch it and if you do you can soundtrack it with the next song to be released from “i/o,” and it’s a special one called, Love Can Heal.
Written and produced by Peter, Love Can Heal is “a dreamy, experiential piece with some abstract imagery,” he says, “a carpet of sound, a tapestry where things are woven together, but not necessarily supposed to stick out, but just form part of a whole.“
First-up is the Bright-Side mix by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent.
“Listen to “Love Can Heal” here: https://lnk.to/PG21
* “Love Can Heal (Bright-Side Mix)” will be available to stream from Thursday 31 August, local time.
“Love Can Heal” is a song that has been performed during the recent “i/o Tour,” but actually had its live premiere during Peter Gabriel and Sting’s Rock, Paper, Scissors tour of North America of 2016.
“Love Can Heal was written around 2016 and I did start playing it midway through the tour and dedicated it to Jo Cox, who was the British MP brutally murdered by an extremist and someone that I had met at a leadership conference. I think the song fits right in to the themes of the album in the sense that i/o is about feeling and being connected to everything and in a way, the next evolution of being connected to things is a feeling of love for everything…
… it sounds trite just to say ‘love can heal’, but I really believe that it is a key element and that when people feel interaction, warmth, giving, part of something alive and not isolated, that they’re much more likely to do well and be able to offer more themselves. The music began with this meditative, repeated sequence and the essence of all these sounds was trying to create a sensual palette.
With the work that Hans-Martin Buff’s been doing on the immersive mix too, you’re getting this sense of being touched in many places and it should be a place just to drift off into. That was my aim.“
Love Can Heal comes with artwork from the artist Antony Micallef and his painting ‘a small painting of what I think love looks like.’
“Antony Micallef is a stunning painter. I’d seen some of his portraits and they are with thick layers of paint, so there were references to Auerbach and Bacon for me, just very physical, very powerful and I just fell in love. Those paintings, in some ways, are more brutal, but this one is so tender and I think Antony manages to capture a lot of that intimate tenderness around love that is very hard to put into pictures. I was delighted when he was happy to be part of this.“
Antony Micallef adds:
“I was listening to a few of the songs and it’s interesting because it’s like putting on clothes and going ‘oh, this suits me’ or ‘that doesn’t suit me.’ With Love Can Heal I could see my images coming up when I was hearing it so you begin to home-in and that’s how it starts. I love artists who take risks and Peter’s always chopped and changed and I like to do that too with my work and you know it doesn’t just rest on this one thing.“
Micallef also collaborated with Aardman on the video that accompanies the song, “working with Aardman was amazing,” he says “I love processes, especially in other mediums and so I found the mechanics of how this stuff comes together really interesting.“
“Obviously I worked quite a lot with Aardman in the past,” says Peter, “and Antony loved their work, so we talked to them, not sure if this was something that they might want to do or not, and they did a beautiful job. Very simple, but very strong and I’m very pleased with it.“
That’s your lot for this time. Everyone is gearing up to head to Quebec for the start of the North American tour so, as Peter says in his update, hopefully we’ll see some of you out there.
Until then, may all your moons be super!
