Up (Peter Gabriel Album) - Songs

Songs

The album's lyrics deal mostly with birth and especially death. The opening track, "Darkness", is a song about overcoming fears. "Growing Up" is a summation of life put to a pulsating beat. "Sky Blue" is a track Gabriel claimed to have been working on for 10 years before finishing it. The track "No Way Out" is the first track to deal with death solely, though death is a common theme across the entire album. "I Grieve" was conceived after Gabriel looked over his catalogue of music as if it were a catalogue of emotional tools. He found one major missing tool to be one to cope with death and therefore "I Grieve" was born. Gabriel performed the song live on the television show "Larry King Weekend" on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, during which Gabriel said that his two daughters were living in New York City on 9/11 and he could not contact them for a while, and that this song was for people who didn't hear anything from their relatives then. It was not, however, written specifically for 9/11, having appeared on the City of Angels soundtrack in 1998 (in an earlier version) and performed live prior to 9/11.

The first single from Up, "The Barry Williams Show" is a down-beat, jazzy song dealing with reality talk shows such as Jerry Springer (in fact, The Brady Bunch star Barry Williams appeared as an audience member in the Sean Penn-directed music video for the song).

The second single, "More Than This" is one of the more upbeat songs from the album. The song wonders over there being something more to life. The song "Signal to Noise" was a challenge for Gabriel because the guest vocalist for the track, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, died. All that was left to work with were recordings from a live performance of an early version of the song at the VH1 Witness show on April 28, 1996. Finally, "The Drop" consists of only Gabriel and a Bösendorfer grand piano.