If you’re getting sick of the constant Peter Gabriel posts, I understand, and I apologize. Blame him. First he produces a fantastic covers album, then he solicits other people to cover him one by one (most recently, Elbow doing “Mercy Street”) and now we’re back to him again. Funny how the humble act of paying tribute to others can turn into a good bit of self-promotion if it’s done right.
Gabriel returns with another cover, recorded for the Voice Project. The Voice Project has produced a series of covers that, in addition to being excellent, aim to raise awareness of an underreported tragedy in Uganda: Mothers losing all contact with their sons when the boys join the militia. The women have learned to contact the boys through music, passing songs with encoded messages from mouth to mouth or over the radio. The Voice Project aims to reunite separated families through such music.
The covers thing seems to mostly be a smart promotional tool to draw attention to the cause (nothing wrong with that). Peter Gabriel contributes the latest tune, avoiding the easy route of performing a cut from Scratch My Back, the aforementioned covers album. Instead he debuts a new tune, a piano-only performance of Tom Waits’ “In the Neighborhood” (also recently covered by Fanfarlo). Hopefully it gets a studio recording one day, cause one can only imagine how it would sound give the full orchestral treatment.
Learn more at VoiceProject.org.
