2020GQ mix: Peter Gabriel- Here Comes the Flood

I’m going to leave the melancholy behind soon, and in truth, the chorus on this track bursts out of it some already. I definitely had an obsessive phase with Peter Gabriel, listening to his double-sided live album almost every night for months on end, driving home from my minimum wage mall job in the early nineties. One of the earlier bands I got into was sort of mid-career Genesis (Duke, Abacab, Genesis), and that led me to Gabriel, even though he had left the band years before those albums. I suppose Say Anything also factored in- Your Eyes is an iconic 80s song that survived the decade and people still reference to this day. But he made made so many fantastic tracks, and his voice seemed to come from some kind of ethereal realm of a disembodied future. Both organic and technological, raspy and pure, a seamless blend of falsetto and lower register, his voice always seemed to soar during his songs. Here Comes the Flood is so good: it is sad and even ominous but not defeated. To my ear, it laments what used to be, trembles at the uncertainty of what is coming within the certainty that it must come, but also looks toward the light of some indefinite time after the disaster recedes. It’s also such a beautiful song. The original with the big chorus is fantastic, and a later, softer version that is mostly piano is absolutely heart-breaking.  “It’ll be those who gave their islands to survive…”