A song Peter Gabriel started nearly four decades ago has finally found its moment. To mark the May 31 blue moon, the art-rock visionary shared “A Hard Lesson,” the newest track from his forthcoming album ‘o\i’. Gabriel wrote the song and co-produced it with Mike Elizondo, and the first version out is the Bright-Side Mix by Mark “Spike” Stent.
The track’s roots run remarkably deep. “This is the oldest track of the project. It probably started in the late 80s or early 90s when I was in Senegal,” Gabriel says, recalling the polyrhythms that first captivated him there, the tension between threes and fours that sparked the song. He describes it as quirky, strange, and long, a journey about finding your place and how you fit in, threaded with old R&B and folk references.
The song spent years in the “almost” category before surfacing. “It’s had to wait 30 or 40 years before actually hitting the surface,” Gabriel says. “Some things will mature and evolve spontaneously, and some will just stay hidden-away in a box until their moment in the light appears.” That long gestation means it carries more fingerprints than anything else on the record, assembled like a jigsaw from contributions gathered across the decades.
Gabriel walked through the build piece by piece. Tony Berg, his A&R in the 90s, added guitar, David Rhodes layered in plenty over the years, and Richard Evans once cut a more industrial version that left traces behind. A harpsichord synth sample gave the chorus its folky character, augmented by Evans on mandolin and other organic instruments. Elizondo co-produced this version and added his fat bass, with Abe Rounds contributing fluid rhythms. The result is rich and patient, the rare song that earns its long runtime.
The artwork comes from still images of a film by Belgian-born, Mexico City-based artist Francis Alÿs, his ‘Cuentos Patrióticos’, made with Rafael Ortega, which references a 1968 protest where civil servants made sheep noises rather than show support for the government. “I saw this image of the pole, the man and the sheep and it leapt out at me,” Gabriel says, drawn to how it spoke to ideas of place. The Dark-Side Mix of the song arrives on the next new moon, with further album details to follow.