Peter Gabriel releases “I Belong To The Sky”. “It's one of my all-time favourite songs”

Peter Gabriel has released a new song. It's called "I Belong To The Sky" and it's the latest preview of "o/i", the album expected by the end of the year. The track was originally conceived during the sessions for "i/o", released in 2023, but has only now been completed. The British musician himself considers it special: "It's one of my favourite songs ever".

Recounting how the track came together, Gabriel explained that it all started from a rhythmic idea: "The starting point for the song was the timpani rhythm, inspired by an old film called 'Jazz On A Summer's Day', which featured an extraordinary drummer named Chico Hamilton. I believe he was a pioneer in using timpani mallets on toms, and I've always loved that sound: calm and hypnotic. It created a really particular atmosphere, and the song grew out of that".

The single's artwork also reflects the meaning of the track. The chosen image is "Nimbus De Toekomst 1, 2019", a work by artist Berndnaut Smilde, photographed by Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk. Smilde's work spans installation, sculpture and photography, and focuses on the deconstruction and reconstruction of materials, light, space, atmosphere and experience in relation to architectural spaces. The "Nimbus" series in particular captures a fleeting instant: artificial clouds created inside buildings that exist for only a few seconds before dissolving. The image struck a deep chord with Peter Gabriel too, who explained its connection to the meaning of the song: "I loved this image of the sky. The cloud brought inside, this meeting between the outer and inner world. I think that's really what the song is about: the passage between inside and outside, and the transition between the two. I was very happy that we were allowed to use this image. Smilde has talked about clouds as elements capable of representing different things, even positive ones, and of evoking dreams and a sense of the future. I didn't know that when I saw the image, but he was evidently thinking in a very similar way to how I was working on the lyrics and sound. One of the most interesting things about collaborating with visual artists is that they put so much energy into building the meaning of their works right up to the point of the final image. When you get an intuitive correspondence like that, you end up with something that's more than the sum of its parts".
Gabriel has also announced that the "Dark-Side" remix of "I Belong To The Sky" will be released to coincide with the next new moon.

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