Peter Gabriel has released ‘Road to Joy’, the latest offering from his upcoming album i/o. The song was co-produced by Brian Eno and recorded at Real World Studios in Bath, the Beehive and British Grove in London, and High Seas Studios in Johannesburg, South Africa. It features the Soweto Gospel Choir, a string arrangement from John Metcalfe, and members of Gabriel’s touring band: bassist Tony Levin, guitarist David Rhodes, and drummer Manu Katché. Listen to ‘Road to Joy [Bright-Side Mix]’ below.
Speaking about the track ,Gabriel said in a 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.
Previously, Gabriel previewed i/o with the singles ‘Panopticom’, ‘The Court’, ‘Playing for Time’, ‘Four Kinds of Horses’, and the title track.
