Peter Gabriel - Scratch my Back

extracted from Where Sensuality and The Spirit Meet: A Review Of Peter Gabriel’s “Scratch My Back”

by Jason Gray on March 15, 2010

In the book of Hebrews is the passage that says “the word of God is living and active… dividing soul and spirit”, and though this may not be the application that the writer intended, I’m reminded of the verse today as I think of the difference between the spiritual and the sensual. While they are different, sometimes they intersect, and the places where they meet are often a beautiful occasion for joy and delight. They complement each other, the sensual introducing another layer of enjoyment of the spiritual, and the spiritual providing boundaries and context for a right enjoyment of the sensual.

It’s obvious that the sensual instinct is a strong one and easily exploited. At its worst it’s like the person at the party who wants everyone’s attention, talking too loud, flirting with everyone, and cutting in on every conversation. It’s allure can be seen on every magazine cover in the grocery check out line that brazenly tugs on the sleeve of our sensual self, asking us to give our money, attention, and worship to empty promises of gratification that it can’t deliver.

More troubling though are the subtler deceits of misguided sensuality that distort even our spiritual enthusiasms. The worship of worship music is an example of this, where we judge whether church was “good” or if God “showed up” in our gatherings based on whether or not we felt something (reducing the work of the spirit to a mere sensual encounter).

If we let it, sensuality can be a tyrant that demands we worship ourselves and our own pleasures. It asks to be an end in and of itself.

It can’t be all bad, though. Our sensual instinct may be an easy target, but we do well to remember that God created us with a capacity for sensual experience, so rather than demonizing it as many Christians do, maybe we do better to seek Him for the wisdom and strength to enjoy it as he intended. Like anything else, sensuality is a gift best enjoyed in moderation, in submission to the spirit, kept in check from overpowering and blinding us to the spiritual.

What does this have to do with a record review? Well, these are the thoughts my mind turned to when listening to Peter Gabriel’s new record Scratch My Back, a collection of covers conceived as a song exchange where the artists he covers here will, in turn, cover one of his songs for a future collection called …And I’ll Scratch Yours.

Gabriel, I think, has always understood that music is both spiritual and sensual and his catalog is full of successive, ambitious experiments in connecting the dots between the two. Scratch My Back is a worthy addition to his ongoing conversation with his audience.

If you only know Gabriel by his hits – “Sledgehammer,” “Big Time,” and even “In Your Eyes” – you don’t really know him, and if you want a good primer on the work of one of popular music’s most reverent, ambitious, and artful practitioners, check out “Secret World Live”. I’m confident you’ll enjoy it.

Gabriel’s soulful voice, wide-eyed curiousity, humble intelligence, and spiritual enthusiasms combine for a musical playground where high minded concept comes to us with a serious bass groove. In the past Gabriel’s art could be described as an intersection where the technologies and sensibilities of contemporary pop/rock collide with traditional African, Asian, and other cultural music and nobody gets hurt. And Gabriel’s songwriting is just as adventurous as the music he wraps it up in, producing songs about marriage, death, and God.

This time out, though, he puts down his writer’s pen to give his attention to songs he loves by other artists. He also gives the band a day off, eschewing drums, bass, and guitars in favor of classical orchestration. After a long tradition of pushing and playing with the limits of popular musicality, Peter Gabriel puts away his toys and comes back home to what brought him to the party in the first place: the song.

To make sure the song itself is heard, he strips it bare of the sensual trappings of pop/rock instrumentation, collaborating with orchestral arranger James Metcalf to reinvent songs by Arcade Fire, Davie Bowie, Bon Iver, The Talking Heads, Paul Simon, Regina Spektor, Radiohead and others, setting them against a sparse back-drop of harrowingly beautiful orchestration.

The result is, to my ears, a place where the spiritual and the sensual intersect, a place of beauty, delight, and generous surprises.

Gabriel lovingly holds these songs out to us, and invites us to listen – to really listen. Even if they are songs we think we know, he offers them to us in a way where we can hear them again for the first time. I think his greatest gift to the writers is not only that he reverently chose to sing their songs, but that he does so in a way that rescues these beautiful relics of popular culture from the confines of their own milieu, and transforms them into something timeless, sometimes even transcendent. I love songs from the 80’s and 90’s, but they always sound like they’re from the 80’s and 90’s because of mixing conventions at the time of their production, etc. So I hear the song, but I also hear the era the song comes from, the market the song was recorded for, and so on. In other words, I hear a sensual signature...............

I love popular music and it’s conventions – especially the ways you can bend and play with those conventions the way Sufjan Stevens does, or Tom Waits, or Imogen Heap, or of course Peter Gabriel – but the sensual adventure of grooves, bass lines, and shimmering guitar tones can obscure a song by dressing it up in a sexy black dress. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – music by its nature is a sensual gift that we get to enjoy. But music is also spiritual, and beneath the black dress there is sometimes a song that might also like to have a conversation with us, and should be loved for it’s wisdom and strength as much as the fact that you can dance to it.

I LOVE Paul Simon’s Cajun-esque “Boy In The Bubble”, but I heard the beauty and soul of the lyric anew when Gabriel set it against a melancholy piano playing simple triads against minimalist strings… it took my breath away. “Yeah, right! I loved this song not just because of Simon’s cool accordion part and Afro-Cajun shuffle, but because it’s a great song!”

Don’t get me wrong, Scratch My Back is still a record that you feel. In fact, it brought tears to my eyes several times when I first listened to it. It is emotional and a delight to the senses, but to my ear the arrangements allow a chance for the spirit of these songs to rise to the surface and be loved.

The album opens with David Bowie’s “Heroes” – a bombastic rock song that here begins as a vulnerable prayer before growing into a powerful and textured anthem. Throughout, the tracks reveal inventive arrangements that accomplish more than I would have imagined possible with an orchestra, like the necessary groove that a song like the Talking Heads’ “Listening Wind” needs. Bon Iver’s “Flume”, Simon’s “Boy In The Bubble”, and Lou Reed’s “the Power Of The Heart” are early favorites. (The Special Edition of this album includes The Kink’s “Waterloo” – a lovely extra track that I can’t understand why it didn’t make the final cut for the regular album. The few extra bucks is worth the Special Edition.)

Worth noting too is Gabriel’s compelling vocal performances. I’ve never heard him sound more vulnerable and believable than he does on this record, whispering, proclaiming, pleading, and confessing his way through these songs.

I think my favorite track is the Magnetic Fields’ “Book Of Love” – one of the most beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard and that I would have missed if not for Gabriel. After hearing it, I sought out the original version and am pretty sure that I still would have missed it… Gabriel’s tender and unpretentious version sets the lyric center stage:

The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing
But I, I love it when you read to me
And you, you can read me anything

The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb
But I, I love it when you sing to me
And you, you can sing me anything

The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It’s full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes
And things we’re all too young to know
But I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings