Peter Gabriel – “One By One”

At this point, Peter Gabriel is more than halfway through the long rollout of his new album o\i. Rather than releasing a few advance singles, he's sharing new songs all year, with another one arriving whenever there's a full moon. Today, he shares the sprawling and tender "One by One," which lasts for nearly 10 minutes and which presumably functions as the album centerpiece. It returns Gabriel to the character of Mozo, a mythical recurring figure in Gabriel's work who first appeared on Gabriel's worth with Genesis in the '70s. As always, Gabriel has a lot to say about the song:This is another song that comes out of the brain show that I am working on and the character has been effectively torn apart and is trying to reassemble himself one piece at a time. I needed a character for the story and I'd always wanted to do a little more with Mozo, who I had introduced many years back, and I thought, well, let's give him another blast here. He's been brought back from the dead.What was interesting for me about Mozo was that he was not fully of the world and not fully outside it. For the original second album narrative, he was found on this waste tip, and there was a reference to alchemy, ...