“So” by Peter Gabriel

A Top 10 1980s album turns 40.

This album review delves into the legacy of Peter Gabriel’s most enduring solo hit record, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this week.

Genre: Rock, Art Pop, New Wave

Label: Warner Bros. Records

Release Date: May 19, 1986

Vibe: 💯

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The story goes that Daniel Lanois nailed the studio door shut.

Not metaphorically. He physically bolted Peter Gabriel into the barn that had been converted into a two-room creative space on the grounds of Ashcombe House and went off for lunch. The former Genesis frontman and art-pop legend wasn’t allowed to leave the room until the lyrics for his eventual Kate Bush collaboration, “Don’t Give Up,” were finished. Gabriel eventually smashed through the door frame and was, understandably, pretty steamed. Lanois later said he “almost got fired,” but at least he got his message across. That wasn’t the first incident between the pair, either. Earlier in the recording sessions, Lanois had grabbed Gabriel’s phone mid-call, smashed it to pieces, and simply continued working. These are the measures that produced So, Gabriel’s finest achievement as a solo artist, his most controlled and precise outing in a discography filled with delightful, masterfully made oddities.

In several ways, his career serves as a useful microcosm for understanding a broader shift in rock music that began around 1973. At the time, he was the lead singer for one of prog’s most respected (and self-serious) groups. As their star rose, Gabriel’s stage persona grew more out of step with Genesis’s distinctive brand of complex arrangements, famously donning his wife’s red dress and a fox’s head mask on stage during the tour supporting Foxtrot. Eventually, strained relationships within the band led him to quit in 1975, kicking off a decade in which he prioritized studio experimentation, especially with sounds outside the British canon. He made four self-titled albums in seven years, each one more visionary than the last. His 1980 release, commonly referred to as Melt, introduced gated reverb drums before they became a cliché. Security, from 1982, is an infomercial for the Fairlight CMI synthesizer. These records were critically respected and commercially marginal until they weren’t.

In the mid-80s, the script flipped, and the sounds pulsing through many alternative and avant-garde scenes seeped into the mainstream. Gabriel scored his biggest pre-So hit with “Shock the Monkey,” which peaked at No. 58 on the Hot 100. Unlike someone like Bryan Ferry, who met mainstream early-80s tastes where they were compared to the stranger corners of Roxy Music’s discography, I’d argue that the marketplace met him on his level, or at least most of the way there. Right place, right time, as it were. The same goes for Gabriel’s So collaborators, chiefly Lanois, who was fresh off producing U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, and engineer Kevin Killen, who’d also helped craft several of the Irish outfit’s early hits. Despite the pedigree (the long list of celebrity cameos includes Stewart Copeland, Laurie Anderson, and Nile Rodgers), everything on So sounds slightly alien in texture. Gabriel had a penchant for recording multiple instruments on a single track and then bending them to his will, turning them into intriguing hybrid elements.

Recognizable but not quite categorizable … maybe that’s the best way to describe the underlying quality that makes this tracklist so pristine and engaging, rising above so many artifacts of that period sonically. “Red Rain,” written from a recurring dream about glass bottles filling with blood, makes that surrealism audible, with Copeland’s cymbals and hi-hat cascading over this impenetrable (but gorgeous) wall of processed sound. Gabriel had actually banned cymbals and hi-hats from his previous two albums, finding them too metallic, which makes their reappearance here important. It signals that the sonic vocabulary is expanding, not contracting. “Mercy Street” makes the same argument from a completely different angle. Written as a tribute to the poet Anne Sexton, it moves at a fundamentally slower pace, more submerged and experimental than anything you’d classify as “pop” on this LP. It’s all atmosphere and daring, refusing to explain Sexton or contextualize her work for those who don’t know it. It’s the track that asks the least of you and arguably lands the hardest.

Casual fans of 80s pop who may not be familiar with Gabriel’s oeuvre will almost certainly know or remember “Sledgehammer.” That level of recognition is due in large part to the music video, directed by Stephen R. Johnson and featuring stop-motion by Aardman and the Brothers Quay. It won 9 (!) MTV Video Music Awards in 1987 and remained the most-played video on MTV into the early 2010s. It’s a celebration of Black American music (Gabriel got Otis Redding collaborator Wayne Jackson to help him get the horns sound just right) with an art-rock edge to it, and it was also a throw-in at the very last minute. Gabriel’s session band had already wrapped and dispersed to other projects when he urged them to return to try something he had cooking on short notice. Drummer Manu Katché, who absolutely crushes it on the track, played his part in a single take. If you enjoy that rock-n-B energy, you’ll also dig “Big Time,” the artist’s takedown of yuppie consumer culture that, by that point, had already begun to poison Western culture’s well. Michael Douglas would proclaim “greed is good” a little over a year later and receive a (well-deserved) Oscar for his efforts.

Stacked up against all those highlights, the two most affecting cuts off So are case studies in emotional stoicism in the face of uncertainty. The first is the haunting duet “Don’t Give Up,” one that was originally offered (here’s a sliding doors moment for you) to Dolly Parton, who turned Gabriel down. The lyrics are written from the point of view of a man who has lost his job to Margaret Thatcher’s austerity measures, and who is staring down a path where he can envision his life unraveling quickly and painfully. Then, like a shard of light slicing between two clouds, Bush’s soft, soothing vocals emerge in the mix, giving him the courage to keep going. “Don’t give up ‘cause you have friends,” she tells him. “Don’t give up, you’re not beaten yet.” Around the duo, the arrangement is unassuming to a degree that it almost goes unnoticed. The synth chords and piano vamps hit your soul in the gentlest of ways, and the percussion somehow seems to move in time with your own heartbeat, regardless of when you press play. Landing somewhere between ASMR and a virtual therapy session, it’s utterly hypnotizing from beginning to end.

The same can be said for “In Your Eyes,” the song that Gabriel had always intended to be the closing track. It’s a deft blend of his infatuation with international, polyrhythmic shapes and cutting-edge studio technique, building on his fascination with African music in particular. 1982’s “The Rhythm of the Heat” is an early example of how he worked through this muse, though it’s not nearly as light on its feet or earnest as “In Your Eyes.” I’d go so far as to say the latter gets my vote for Gabriel’s best song. I’ve always adored Katché drumming, patterns I foolishly spent hours trying to emulate as an amateur player back in the day, as well as Youssou N’Dour’s vocal in the final section, rooted in Senegalese griot tradition and built around communal call-and-response. Both imbue the track with a spiritual quality that Gabriel has since described as intentional, calling it a “religious love song.” It doesn’t resolve so much as open outward, and at some point, you stop listening to it and start living inside it. Three years after release, Cameron Crowe captured its essence perfectly when he used it to augment the image of Lloyd Dobler holding a boombox outside Diane Court’s window in 1989’s Say Anything. That pairing of visual and sound is now permanent cultural shorthand for a specific kind of romantic vulnerability—making yourself completely visible to someone who may not want to (or know they need to) see you.

So is undoubtedly the record that defined Gabriel’s reputation, at once an achievement and an ongoing complication, since everything that came after it was measured against it, fairly or not. Us, which dropped six years later, sold a fraction of what So had despite being more personal on the songwriting front. The albums that followed into the 21st century have arrived to diminishing commercial returns. The question I’ve seen in several fan threads about this review is whether Gabriel traded something substantial to reach this commercial peak. By eschewing his previous experimentalism (though that’s not to say this LP has none to offer), it seems like he was more willing to lose listeners in service of a specific vision. The song-forward approach Lanois pushed him toward was more open, molding the ambition into a more digestible form that more people could enter. Gabriel was 36 when So came out, the four self-titled albums had built a real critical reputation but not a commercially sustainable one, and had it landed like its predecessors, the reasonable expectation was a long and respected career at the margins. Instead, he went mainstream, more or less kept his reputation, and spent the next 40 years standing in this album’s shadow.

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What’s your favorite Peter Gabriel track? Add it to the comments.