So - Peter Gabriel (1986)

ideated from: My birthday looms, so I’m just serving up some comfort food this week. All stuff that lives rent-controlled in my head.

One of those confluences of a whole lot of stuff I’m interested in.

Gabriel himself had grown from his Genesis days of proggy art rock into his own unique creature with his own very bold ideas

Producer Daniel Lanois, who also worked with Eno, U2, and Dylan.

Bassist Tony Levin, King Crimson mainstay and straddler of the lines between prog, funk, and pop

A naive but sincere interpolation of African rhythms, which might be seen as exploitation but managed to be more (There was a lot of that going around at the time…)

But also this album just smacks. It’s an end-to-end classic that I’m not even going to bother listing tracks from.

bonus content: REM use Red Rain as a segue between two of their songs from a 1987 live show that became a b-side treasure