Trivia / So

• Based on a Dream: "Red Rain" was inspired by two dreams Gabriel had (one where he swam in his backyard pool and drank cold red wine, and another where he saw a red sea parting, followed by person shaped bottles falling off of a cliff and spilling red liquid when they hit the ground, with red liquid raining down from the sky afterwards).
• Colbert Bump:
  • Kate Bush's duet with Gabriel on "Don't Give Up" gave her greater stateside exposure on the heels of her American breakthrough the previous year with "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)" and its parent album, Hounds of Love.
  • Senegalse singer Youssou N'Dour's backing vocal on "In Your Eyes" also brought him to wider Western awareness.
• Creator Backlash: Even Gabriel was annoyed with how much MTV played "Sledgehammer", to the point where he wrote to the network specifically to get them to quit it.
• Cut Song: "Courage" was recorded during the sessions for the album, but ultimately went uncompleted. The incomplete version would first surface on the 25th anniversary deluxe edition in 2012 (misdated to 2013 on Gabriel's website), and in 2014, Gabriel would put out both a finished version and the Hexadecimal Mix as a non-album single to support the Back to Front tour.
• Enforced Method Acting: Gabriel's herky-jerky movements at the end of the "Sledgehammer" video were because he was really being shocked by the wiring in the lights he was wearing as it was designed for American voltages but on British power.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: For a few years after the album's release, a common rumor claimed that the album title was a Line-of-Sight Name derived from an argument Gabriel had with executives at Charisma Records. According to the rumor, the executives told him "But Peter, you can't keep naming all your albums after yourself! You've done it four times running, at this point!" and he answered "So?" Gabriel would eventually debunk the rumor in a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, stating that he picked the name as an "anti-title" that could work as a graphical element rather than a verbal statement.
• Refitted for Sequel: "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)" was originally written and recorded during the sessions for Melt, explaining its darker tone and lyrical allusions to psychological manipulation and authoritarianism. It ended up being left off of that album, but made its way to So six years later.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Originally, Gabriel wanted "In Your Eyes" to be the last song on the album. However, he found that the song sounded better at the beginning of side two, since the needle had more room to vibrate, improving the sound of the song's bass line. In the 2002 remastering, "In Your Eyes" was moved to the end of the album, as per Gabriel's original intentions. The change in running order ends up radically changing the tone of things - the original LP version ended on "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)", which would qualify as a Downer Ending, whereas closing the album with "In Your Eyes" (along with the addition of "This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)", previously a cassette/CD-exclusive track, in between) ends things on a more hopeful note.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Along with Us, So was chosen by famed audiophile label Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab to receive an in-house remaster and reissue as part of the label's "Ultradisc II" line of 24-karat gold CD releases, under the catalog number UDCD 689. However, for reasons unknown, the plan fell through, and neither So nor Us were touched by the label.
  • Gabriel intended for the female vocal in "Don't Give Up" to be sung by Dolly Parton, but she declined, so Kate Bush sang the part instead.
• Working Title: Gabriel initially intended to title the album Good (after Charisma Records told him that he couldn't name it Peter Gabriel a fifth time around) before settling on So. According to Peter Saville, who designed the album cover, Gabriel and Saville's assistant, Brett Wicker, decided against Good thanks to their displeasure with how it looked on the art proofs.
• Writer Revolt: After releasing four self-titled albums, Gabriel was pushed by Executive Meddling to finally start giving his albums actual names (his fourth album was already forcibly given the title Security in the US, but it wasn't until his fifth that he was goaded into titling his albums in all territories). Gabriel agreed, but decided to mess with them by picking the deliberately blunt and idiosyncratic title of "So".

---