Awesome Music / Peter Gabriel

• So is basically an entire Album of Awesome.
  • The album opener, "Red Rain", is incredibly epic.
  • "Sledgehammer", in addition to being an awesome song, has an equally awesome and innovative music video that is a serious contender with Michael Jackson's "Thriller" for the best music video of all time, complete with stop-motion animation by Nick Park! The music video was such a round-the-clock hit for MTV that Gabriel actually wrote them a letter requesting to give it a rest.
  • "In Your Eyes" is one of his best songs, and the lyrics are so good too. Go on... Raise a boombox over your head with this one.
• "Here Comes the Flood" (piano cover, alternate piano cover, both by Peter Gabriel). Gabriel was dissatisfied with the bombastic, overdone original on Car and reworked it into an absolutely beautiful song.
• "Walk Through The Fire", an awesome track from the otherwise forgettable Jeff Bridges movie Against All Odds (which also had Phil Collins on the soundtrack, whose eponymous song became a hit).
• His collaboration with electronica group Deep Forest on "While The Earth Sleeps" for the James Cameron/Kathryn Bigelow film Strange Days.
• His grand Apartheid-era dirge "Biko" is breathtaking as well. Credit where credit is due, Phil Collins does a fine job with the drums as well.
• "Out Out" from Gremlins, which was criminally underused in the movie itself.
• "When You're Falling", a collaboration with Afro-Celt Sound System.
• "Moribund The Burgermeister", the first track off Gabriel's debut album, bridges the theatrical style of Genesis with the more experimental sound he would come to develop on his solo works perfectly.
• "Signal to Noise". Especially the orchestra about 5 minutes, 30 seconds in that goes on until the end.
• "Sky Blue" is just awesome.
• The eerie, disorienting "The Tower That Ate People" from the 2000 sci-fi film Red Planet shows that Gabriel's creative prowess is as strong as ever in the new Millennium; the typically offbeat lyrics are just now married to a wider array of studio wizardry.
• "Shock the Monkey" is more than just a bizarre song title; the opening instrumental hook grabs the listener straight away, and the rest of the song never lets go.
• "Solsbury Hill" is one of the more popular songs of Gabriel's solo career for a reason; the vocals, guitars, and Gabriel-provided flute couple with the 7/4 metre to create four and a half minutes of awesome.
• "Games Without Frontiers" is a breath-taking and epic Peter Gabriel song.
• "The Rhythm of the Heat" opens his superb fourth album in suitably dramatic fashion.
• Melt is another candidate for an Album of Awesome. This is where Gabriel found his legs as a solo artist. The intro alone to the opening track, "Intruder," is astonishing, with the gated reverb on the drums that became ubiquitous throughout the '80s. Steve Lilywhite's production highlights the paranoid tone of the songs.
• "Four Kinds of Horses", the fifth single off of the album i/o, is a slow-burning, yet heavy-hitting piece of symphonic rock whose dense arrangements and poetic lyrics obliquely based on the psychology of terrorism are sure to captivate the listener. While the release model and showcased material for i/o were initially met with skepticism among a number of older Gabriel fans, "Four Kinds of Horses" was very well received even by them, with many regarding it as one of the best songs Gabriel put out since the '80s.

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