The singers Peter Gabriel credits with elevating his ‘Up’ album: “My favourite emotional bits”
“I think that [collaboration] brings air into music and takes it into places that you wouldn’t normally go,” Peter Gabriel told journalist Nigel Williamson following the release of his seventh studio album, 2002’s Up. In a roundabout way, Gabriel was partially explaining why it had taken him a full decade to put together a new album of original songs, following 1992’s Us.
He hadn’t been on any sort of real hiatus, he claimed, but was giving his songs more of a chance to breathe and evolve as he worked with different musicians in various far-flung reaches of the planet.
One of the standout tracks from Up, and a great example of that lengthy gestation process, was ‘Sky Blue’, a song that Gabriel credited with providing some of his “favourite emotional bits” on the record, and which boasted some of its most interesting guest performers.
“’Sky Blue’ is the oldest track on the record,” Gabriel said. “In fact, we had one go at it on the last record — it may have even been before then. The original riff is probably fifteen years old, but it was something I’d always liked and felt had some good emotion in it.”
While an early, completed version failed to make the cut on 1992’s Us, ‘Sky Blue’ took on new life during the Up sessions, particularly once Gabriel made the decision to “empty out the mix” and remove much of its band-driven structure. Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green—a hero of Gabriel’s—was brought in to play guitar on the track, but declined Gabriel’s request to record an early Fleetwood-style guitar solo, preferring to keep a lower profile with his contributions.
In the end, that open space left more room for something more emotionally impactful and transformative for the song — the voices of the Blind Boys of Alabama.
Founded in the 1930s, the Blind Boys had already been gospel legends for generations by the time they appeared on Up, and the addition of their rich, layered harmonies added an immediate spiritual backbone to ‘Sky Blue’ that hadn’t been there in any of Gabriel’s earlier demos.
“I had the wonderful chance to work with the Blind Boys of Alabama,” Gabriel later told Williamson. “They’ve got extraordinary voices and they’re extraordinary people, too, but the voices are lived-in and they have a different type of quality to them than young voices.”
Much like Green, the key contribution of the Blind Boys doesn’t come in the form of any flashy vocal runs — rather, it’s a slow, meditative chant: “wo oh oh oh oh.” The repetition becomes a kind of mantra, a balm over the song’s longing and tension.
“As a teenager I was very influenced by soul and blues,” Gabriel said, “and that was my starting point to a lot of music. I think that this was definitely an influence on that track.”
The impact of the Blind Boys’ performance on ‘Sky Blue’ wasn’t limited to the studio either. During Gabriel’s subsequent ‘Growing Up’ tour, he invited the Blind Boys to be his opening act, and welcomed them back on stage each night to capture the gospel force that ‘Sky Blue’ now required. It quickly became one of the most talked-about aspects of that tour and helped introduce the Blind Boys of Alabama to a wider audience in the early 2000s.
