‘Blood of Eden’: the song Peter Gabriel hailed as a musical “breakthrough”
Sometimes a breakthrough has to come from an external source. After years of working and decades of songwriting, Peter Gabriel found that his own came from the voice of another.
Throughout his career, though, Gabriel has had many breakthroughs. Whether you like them or loathe them, Genesis were a breakthrough. After forming in school, that original lineup with Gabriel at the front helped push prog rock on, later giving way to another breakthrough in a roundabout way when Gabriel gave up his post to Phil Collins.
The launch of Gabriel’s own solo work was another one. Releasing timeless track after timeless track, he approached each with a unique angle and nuance. Take a song like ‘Solsbury Hill’ for example. It’s a strange song to become such a big hit, but somehow, Gabriel brought art rock to the masses with it and made himself an even bigger star in the process.
Many would say that his fifth album, So, in 1986, was another one as it became his best-selling work and elevated him once again. But Gabriel himself looks to another record, Us, released in 1992.
Focusing on more personal themes, this record felt like a change of approach to Gabriel, as if his songwriting was opening up even more. It was a push forward sonically, too, as he continued to abandon all sense of genre for something broader and newer.
For the artist, though, the breakthrough doesn’t lie in any of that. Instead, it lies with someone else: Sinéad O’Connor. On the track ‘Blood Of Eden’, the iconic Irish singer was brought in to provide a secondary vocal on a song about love, but told through the lens of religion for a truly grand view of the topic. The song is desperate and desiring, and so he felt like his voice alone wasn’t good enough for it.
He was struggling with it a lot. “We actually had quite a lot of trouble with the song. Initially, Daniel Lanois wasn’t keen on this at all, and it didn’t settle down,” he said. “I couldn’t get the groove to work, and it went through probably four or five different feels, and less became more in terms of the rhythm content because it verged on sounding trite”. Willing to admit that even with his wrestling, he just couldn’t make the song work.
That’s when he realised that what he needed was another voice. He needed it to feel more like a conversation or simply have strength in numbers. “Sinéad O’Connor’s voice means that musically there is something to set it off – two emotional, needy voices, in a way,” he said.
Once her voice was on the track, it suddenly made sense. He said that suddenly there was a moment “in the central part of the song, musically and lyrically, a point of union, a breakthrough.”
Aided by O’Connor’s voice, adding a different texture and dynamic to the track, it fell into place, becoming one of his own all-time favourites as he said, “Emotionally, I feel close to this song.”
