Peter Gabriel has shared “Road to Joy (Bright-Side Mix),” the latest single from his forthcoming LP, I/O. The song was recorded at Real World Studios in Bath, the Beehive and British Grove in London, and High Seas Studios in Johannesburg, South Africa. Check out the “Bright-Side Mix”—helmed by Mark “Spike” Stent—of the track below.
Gabriel co-produced the new song with Brian Eno, inviting contributions from the Soweto Gospel Choir and members of Gabriel’s touring band: Tony Levin (bass), David Rhodes (guitar), Manu Katché (drums), Don E (bass keys), and Josh Shpak (trumpet). It also includes a string arrangement by John Metcalfe.
Gabriel detailed the album’s scope and the new song in a press statement:
I’m working on a project which is partly a story focused around the brain and how we perceive things and this song connects to that. It deals with near-death experience and locked-in syndrome situations where people are unable to communicate or to move. It’s an amazingly frustrating condition. There have been some great books and films about this subject, but at this point in our story the people looking after our hero manage to find a way to wake him up. So, it’s a lyric about coming back into your senses, back to life, back into the world.
The song is one of the last tracks to emerge for the I/O record, but it has some DNA from an earlier project; it was actually very late in the record that we got to this. There had been a song that musically I’d started, I think, around the OVO project called “Pukka.” It was very different to this, but it was actually the starting point for coming back to this song. I just felt there was a good groove there, and I wanted something else with rhythm and so we tried a few things when I was working with Brian Eno. The excitement and energy in the song was something that I was getting off on. I felt we didn’t have enough of that for this record.
